I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…
Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he’s been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He’s basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That’s what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him
Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it’s success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone’s life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.
Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude’s entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force
Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…
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When did you grow up that Gates has not been evil yet? All of the 90s was marked by Microsoft making home computing worse to create a monopoly. Fucking emails formatted in a way that’s unreadable outside Windows, closed .doc format that became a de facto standard in offices and likely many other things I don’t remember
FUD wars on Free and Open Source Software, shady deals with companies and governments to make them dependent on MS software and solutions, holding the web hostage to IE “standards”, …
As the old Microsoft saying went, “it ain’t done til Notes don’t run”
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yes
Gates was always a dirtbag.
He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.
Maybe a hot take or I’m not education on him enough. Seems like Gates is a great guy personally with his fundraisers and charitable programs. But as a business man he is awful because of the reasons you mentioned.
Gates has good PR.
Donations and fundraisers are tax deductible, it doesn’t actually cost the rich anything to donate to them
That’s not how tax deductions work.
Gates is a dirtbag though.
He was instrument in keeping the covid vaccine he promoted private. He wants to solve the world’s problems, but he also wants to own the solution and profit from it. Problem is, that model will always favor the rich.
Yep, also basically stole from the UK taxpayer by convincing Oxford University to not open source their publicly funded vaccine and instead sell the rights to AstraZenica.
All sorts of countries could have produced this vaccine themselves until Bill Gates got involved.
Dude was friends with Epstein after his first conviction for pedophilia. Had sleepovers at his mansions and shit.
Fundraisers and charities, when you have a lot money, are rarely acts of charity. They tend to be PR campaigns and power plays.
Honestly, even when the acts have good intentions, they are often quite damaging. The involvement of the wealthy in charity is very similar to their involvement in politics. Their wealth buys influence and gives them a disproportionate say that allows them to ignore and overrule the will of the people and sometimes even reality.
For example, look into the impact of Bill Gates’s “acts of charity” in the education space. He poured money into charter programs that negatively impacted public education. Later studies showed that his programs were not particularly effective.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that a very rich person is convinced by some charlatan that they found the a means to produce free energy. The wealthy person throws tons of money at the idea. How many talented people will be taken from other legit programs because the paycheck at Bullshit Energy Nonprofit is better? These rich people are successful and think they know bestr. Their money ensures they get treated like experts because money makes things happen whether or not those things are helpful.
Philanthropy is PR for billionaires. If we taxed them, we would have a social safety net and no need for their pet projects.
But but… trickle down…
fundraisers and charitable programs
I’m pretty sure most of that is tax-deductible.
Tom from MySpace really is the nicest guy on this list…he was my first friend on there! 😎
Resources and influence will always drunkard’s-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.
They’re going to be drawn to it, they’ll fight dirtier for it, and they’ll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.
Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren’t massive piles of shit.
This is okay but my post about AI is not? Same as reddit 😔.
It’s not just tech, but leadership positions in general.
Short answer is that the traits you need to climb the ladder have significant overlap with the traits of legit psychopathy.
To add to this, there’s been evidence that as an individual accrues more wealth, their empathy response lessens over time.
My arm chair psychologist hypothesis is that: as the individual sees their quality of life increase, they look at other human beings in deplorable conditions, and their empathy response atrophies in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.
There’s a concept in the study of wealthy individuals which goes over their desire to hide impoverishment from their view.
Any good books or other articles on this? I’d be legitimately interested.
The more money I make or the better off I am, I actually just end up feeling more guilty and giving more away. Frankly, one only needs so much, after that if you can improve the quality of life of those around you it makes everything better.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton
And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.
There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.
It’s better to assume good humans don’t exist, they just haven’t shown (to you) their bad side yet
when I was growing up
This is really the key. We’re all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we’re kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn’t realize the extent of what was happening.
Yeah we’re baffled about how kids get sucked into worshipping Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I remember a brief time in my life when I thought Steve Jobs was the greatest and that he singlehandedly invented the iPhone with a rusty pair of pliers and gumption.
One word - capitalism. It favours master-slave model
Businesses succeed by profiting. The most successful businesses of any time period are ones who maximise profits at all costs, including ethics.
There are a lot of arguments about more ethical businesses being the most viable longterm, but that sort of variable isn’t considered when the big businesses calculate their next move.
Almost none of the Tech Company leaders actually finished college, if somebody you know is calling them a genius then that person measures intelligence by profits. A very stupid person.
The good ones retire or have important, but not the most profitable/public facing jobs.
The other Apple Steve, Steve Wozniak founded the EFF and was the tech guy at early Apple. Jobs was the business guy.
John Carmack is a controversial figure, but he’s actually the tech wiz kid the techbros dream they are. He seems to just be interested in pushing technology and had some choice words for Meta when he left. They should have let him have his axe to carry around.
*helped found. He provided some initial funding and served on the board, but he wasn’t a founder.
In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his early business partner Steve Jobs.
-Wikipedia
Woz was the (head) tech brains behind Apple. Jobs was just the asshole that made unreasonable demands of the techs, overpriced it & marketed it.
If you think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were good for the world then I don’t know what to tell you.
Bill Gates during the early years, yes. But now, I thought he’s turned 180°.
Bill Gates pressured the group at Oxford University not to open source their Covid vaccine, as it would undermine his investments in pharma companies.
(The team had originally secured funding from the UK gov with the intention of making it open source so that it would be more accessible to poorer countries.)
Imagine lobbying against that. Imagine knowingly making life saving medicine more expensive and less accessible, particularly to the poor.
The guy is a dick. He just spends money on good PR so people can remember him as a good guy.
Yeah, he “mostly” was successful at following the Carnegie and Rockefeller plan of convincing people you’re a philanthropist in your later years so you’re remembered fondly.
Do you mean when he started to chip the population through the covid vaccines? jkjk
He’s always been a ruthless capitalist scumbag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/72o8qh/the_sordid_history_of_microsoft_or_alternatively/
He is now slowly trying to buy what rich people normally can’t buy; acceptance and recognition. Don’t fall for it. He keeps doing the same criminal things in parallel. The world would be better without him and people like him.
Shareholders want the CEO that gets them more money. If that person doesn’t deliver, they don’t ask why, they ask when. If they don’t like the answer, they get a new CEO. Rinse repeat, here we are.
Except Zuckerberg, of course. He’s just evil.
