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Comment by DiNovi | Hacker News Reader

Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire. when you’ve lost your own, maybe it’s time to acknowledge you don’t know what you’re doing

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> Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire

My theory is that humans are just not evolved for billionaire levels of wealth disparity. It's not a criticism, it just appears to be a fact.

Honest question: are there any "in touch" billionaires? Maybe Mark Cuban in some ways for example?

Gates or Warren Buffet. Both of them seem pretty grounded for the amount of wealth they possess.

You - urgently - need to read up on Gates then.

Any suggested readings/links? I am merely going by his current public persona and whatever the Gates Foundation is doing.

Ah ok. Well, after he quit MS as day to day leader there was that bit around his divorce, the Epstein link and more sordidness.

Gates didn't really change, he just used his fortune to whitewash his reputation. He's still smart and I would be happy read what he has to say but a nice person he isn't and never was.

You have to start reading about Gates before he spent millions to wash his reputation and adopted a disguise of philanthropist to buy a stairway to heaven. Anything before he left Microsoft, with the corruption scandals, the insults, the patent trolling, and so on.

It's getting harder and harder to find though. I should have saved offline compiled files.

I think there’s a legitimate line to draw between “bastard does capitalism” and “philanthropist post capitalism”. Bill Gates could have laundered his reputation just fine without committing to give away the majority of his wealth.

The foundation is not meant to give away Gates money while he is alive.

It's a way to be able to keep investing his money without paying taxes.

It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.

Since he directs the charity, he can therefore move the capital where he needs it to, including founding Monsanto and weapon makers, which he had to withdraw from after people noticed that it was quite the opposite of the claimed foundation mission.

That's why most billionaires have some kind of charity: they keep all the power of their money, get good PR (which given that the wealth gap makes people grumpy, is a great shield) and they optimize their finance while people defend them.

The PR operations worked well: most people on the internet now believe that Gates is a good person. A statement that would have made anybody smile in the 90'.

> It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.

To clarify, 5% of what? Of capital in the non-profit? Of revenue generated by the non-profit? Something else?

It's not a short summary, but if you are into podcasts then Behind the Bastards have a two parter on him.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/part-one-the-ballad-of...

They are just out of touch in different ways. Gates' banana comment became the quintessential example of how out of touch rich people are even though it was ultimately inconsequential.

Mark Cuban is not the example that I would reach for. He's been an asshole since before Yahoo! threw too much money at him.

I know a few, but they're modest people and that's why I will not name them here, I will name one that is deceased, René Sommer, if you want to know more about him, I wrote about him here:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/in-memoriam-rene-sommer/

I've taken to skimming through the Elon/twitter threads curious to see if there's anything actually new. I'm glad I saw your post and clicked the link, that was a very pleasant story to read.

I still miss the man, in spite of our infrequent contact.

MacKenzie Scott.

I think she never intended to be a billionaire. She doesn’t fall under the usual bucket of billionaires.

Laurene Powell Jobs

Joan Kroc

no one who hoards wealth that could save the lives of thousands is in a healthy mental space

I really wish I could see Twitter's internal dashboards. One thing I have a hard time estimating is, outside of my bubble, how is Twitter doing? Are these things hurting Twitter? Is the controversy helping it?

I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.

Wasn’t the only mastodon account banned the one that was posting links to the doxer account?

No, all links to a variety of Mastodon servers, plus official Mastodon account, plus hashtags mentioning Mastodon... were banned.

No idea if they still are. I don't hang out on Twitter. But sheesh.

It was any server that shared links with the server which hosted that. So mathstodon.xyz, for example, which is where a bunch of math Twitter ran to, and not particularly political, was also hit. Even if you endorse banning links to someone sharing public information, it was an extremely broad brush.

in the short term controversy and events drive traffic up. world cup going on, holidays and seasonal traffic, elon chaos. all probably makes twitter looks like a success at the moment. it would be to hard to separate out the traffic i think.

They have lost many of their previous highend brand advertising. I now see almost exclusively advertisting from right wing alt brands like 'black rifle coffee'. One can safely assume that their advertising revenue has taken a huge hit. A few thousand people tossing elon $8 a month isnt going to make up for that.

You think coffee is “alt” right?

wait till you know about MyPillow

Anecdotally the content in my feed seems to be drying up, with less and less fresh new tweets every time I open the app. Either people are posting less, leaving or there's technical issues around serving content.

Great, now we’re fighting who is the dumber billionaire.

We’re doomed.

> Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire.

Elon Musk is billionaire reactionary distilled into its purest form. I mean the guy is literally spending 100% of his time reacting to things he doesn't personally like.

i know the brain poison social media gives us all… it’s wild to see

Yep. Along with Musk and Kanye. Those are cases where the poison has fully penetrated. How many of our elites are less noticeably but still significantly impaired though? It's a frightening thought.

Well I mean Trump was the scariest.

Ehh, I mean Kanye has been on this journey for a long time. Talking about how "George Bush doesnt care about black people" in 2005 and grabbing mics to announce that "Beyonce had the best video of all time" in 2009. I was a fan and apologist of his for sometime after these incidents, but he lost me somewhere around his 2011 album with Jayz.

I find quite amazing that expressing such mild opinion as Paul Graham does can yield reactions so strong and labels so intense as "out of touch reactionary x".

I have at least half of my friends that express weirder, more dangerous opinions that are in total opposite to mine. Is that what internet is all about now? Taking every people we disagree with and dress them as Hitler so we can shit on them? It used to be were I went to actually meet people with different point of views and new things.

On hacker news, I expect people that disagree with Graham to prove him wrong with an argument.

Name calling feels more like being with my mom on facebook.

You finding his opinions “mild” doesn’t make them so, and half of your friends are probably not billionaires with a lot of power and influence in the tech industry.

If you want to defend Paul then do so, but most of this comment is just hyperbolically complaining about how he is criticized.

Are you confusing Paul Graham with Peter Thiel?

PS: You're posting this on pg's site.

no i’m not confused, and yes i’m aware where i am

In a meritocracy, this would be dang's site.

To all extents and purposes that are relevant it is, or you can treat it as such. I'm not aware of pg overruling dang on anything, though obviously it is property of YC and there are limits to what dang can do when it comes to risking the site (legal risk, for instance).

This isn't pg's site, and hasn't been for a long time.

PG used to post here but he left because of the negative comments as I remember. A couple of users got banned as well. Twitter allows you to just post and forget without much blow back except for the weird subtweets where people take you out of context. As such successful tweets tend to overgeneralize to avoid nuance or imply that there is nuance but not discuss it. A lot of YC tweeters do this. The problem is we have to take them at their word.

What would be more interesting would be to discuss specific things as evidence for a more general truth.

For example there is a huge criticism of the social sciences in this website (and in general) but none of it is specific criticism of specific hypotheses. (Yes, yes I know people will argue that there are no hypotheses in the social science literature and it is not testable etc... but that is a weak argument and not always true).

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