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Comment by Digit-Al | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else wonder if Page and Brin feel any pangs of guilt over how their company went from "Don't be evil" to such corrupt practises? It really is a classic case study in the journey from apparent idealism to a complete moral vacuum.

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With about $100b net worth each, I’m going to guess they feel just fine.

That's the thing though. They don't need more money. So why not try to make the world a better place for once? I know they donate to charity but they're uniquely well positioned to influence one of the biggest, and most dangerous, tech company on the planet.

I wonder. Do they care? Do they have personal problems that makes the rest seem insignificant? Or do they believe they're truly making the world better?

No, they don’t care. If they did, their relatively paltry donations to charity would be closer to 95% of their net worth at any given moment. They are wholly incapable of spending their current ~$100b, growing at insane rates YoY, in their lifetimes.

That's not how rich people think. Very high levels of wealth and influence literally rewires the brain. They are simply bad people and always will be.

I've always considered "don't be evil" to be a huge difference from "be good."

They think they'd decide what the money should be spent on better than you. So being corrupt and taking huge amounts of money in and then spending it on their chosen causes is a net good. It's narcissism

This seems to be common once a company goes public and finds success. New execs inside the company and investors outside the company are all incentivized to have the company make as much as possible. Probably hard to fight the inertia even if they wanted to.

Based on my experiences with sociopaths, they are more than happy to Lie. "Don't be evil" is the sort of motto you'd expect a batman villan to have for their front organization.

I'll second this. "Evil" is a subjective judgment, so using it clouds people's emotions.

The non-villain org I want to start is dedicated to "Meeting all needs while denying none." I'd love for people to parse it for hidden villainy.

Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN or glibly call names like sociopath. That's already one circle of internet hell and it points deeper in. We want the opposite vector here.

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