Those who are very greedy should read that.
Dishonest people with an insatiable need to be loved and accepted should read this. Unfortunately, they're generally told that their instincts are virtuous enough to compensate for the harm they cause, just as greedy people are told that they are so evil it negates the wealth they create.
His wealth is invested either in growing businesses (a good thing) or through his foundation to improve the world (a very good thing.) It's not clear that he could grow the foundation much faster than he has -- they're trying to do something novel and you can't just grow that from nothing overnight.
Gates has the wisdom and guts to tackle such unsexy causes as malaria in the third world. Because Bill Gates exists, there is substantially less suffering in the world. That's not something you can say about many individuals with any confidence.
We could take away his money and spread it among the masses, but I guarantee you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful ways. We could take away his money and spend it through the government, but the government already has much larger aid programs that do much less good.
I understand criticizing Gates for his business practices. But attacking him for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.
Do you have any EVIDENCE that Gates is being anything less than sincere in his charitable projects?
You are mistaken.
> and are personally offended by income inequality
No, just excessive income inequality. There's something wrong with a system that allows one individual to amass more wealth than the bottom 40% of the population combined. That's a broken system that's far too tilted to favor the individual over the society as a whole. I don't have anything against rich people, I have something against the system that allows it to such excess.
Stating my opinion is not attacking, all I said was they could give more, which is a fact. The foundation is required to give 5% a year to avoid most taxes, which seems to be all they give, investing the other 95% to grow the endowment without taking into consideration of the harm that 95% could be bringing to the world...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx0...
That strikes me as them being more worried about making money than actually helping people.
> but I guarantee you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful ways
No you can't, you can only guess.
> But attacking him for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.
You have a strange definition of attacking. I didn't attack them, and I'm not dissing the good they do but it's being blind to not see that they don't do as much as they can, they do as much as the law requires them too. That says something whether you want to see it or not.
Hehe ... I don't think the windows vista users will agree with you !! [:D] ( sorry ! I couldn't resist it )
The guy charged zero fees on his money management business. He could have charged 2 and 20, and had an income of $1-$2 billion by this point.
If you look at how he spent the money he did have, it wasn't on whores and blow. He gave money away to charities, he got onto boards -- he made himself part of the establishment, because he wanted people to love him. If he'd stayed a market-maker and never given money away, people wouldn't have looked up to him for decades, but they wouldn't loathe him now, either. He'd just be another successful guy who created a lot of wealth and didn't particularly need approval.