Also note that those “charities” are just slush funds for their friends and is just a tool to reduce their tax liability. They need to remove remove the tax write off for charitable donations and just give more money to social programs.
This post is about Mackenzie Scott. No, that’s not at all what the charities she’s donating to are.
How can you tell? Genuinely curious. Aren’t those numbers fairly opaque? Or is there a way to tell what a specific person donated to?
I think in general most people have a more favourable view of her giving because she’s pledged to give away the bulk of her wealth during her lifetime and a lot of her pledges are unrestricted donations: https://yieldgiving.com/gifts?essay=20200728 … I don’t think she’s one of those that’s using her wealth to consolidate more wealth and make things worse for others.
Not to you, but I want to be clear about this before I get flamed. I’m not saying that is a replacement for a proper tax system or an equitable system in general. This should not exist at all. However, I do find that if you’re rich that you should be doing philanthropy.
Yes very unusual because normally they come with explicit instructions on how the money can be used
She has already donated more than Bezos has in his whole entire miserable scrooge life
Google her. She’s awesome and worth reading about.
What are you even going to do with a billion dollars? I can’t even think of what I will do with a million dollars other than buying a comfy home for my family instead of living in a small congested apartment.
A million is buy a house or feel comfortable that you get to retire money. But yeah by 10 million I’m living off dividends, own a house, and am comfortable spending money incredibly frivolously because I’m making well into 6 figures in interest. At thst point I might be inviting friends on foreign vacations, my treat.
That’s an amount of money that I’d have to come into because I’d rest on my laurels before I hit it. The only reason I can see going past it aside from gold sickness is control of a company you founded.
It’s still 1% of a billion. It’s under half a thousandth of how much she got in the divorce.
Private island with a mansion full of shiny electronics, huge library, nice boat, jet skis, and tons of drugs. Tons. So many drugs.
I know someone who “lucked” into a million dollars on a stock deal. It does not go as far as as you’d expect these days. Still a lot of money, but not even close to “fuck you” money like it was 15 years ago.
A million is easy to think about and honestly disappears pretty quickly compared to a billion. Between student debt, medical bills, private debt of various types, I’d eat up 100K in an afternoon alone. Then buying house somewhere else I’d like to live would take a huge chunk out of that. I’d have a much better setup than I do now but it’d be gone within a few years.
One million is more money than most people earn in a lifetime of work.
It demonstrably is not. The average over a lifetime was 1.7M in 2023.
Mean average maybe, what about median?
Where does your average come from?
Median income in California is around 95k yearly, which means you get your million after 10 years of work
World average income is 10,000$ per year.
If we’re talking other countries we need to adjust to prices in other countries, ones that don’t have student debts and medical bills to worry about. If I get analogue of a million bucks in my currency, I wouldn’t have to sweat how much of that I will have to give up because I had bad cold 10 years ago. It’s a different world, so it’s a different million
If we’re talking other countries we need to adjust to prices in other countries,
Yes, economists do that, we all are aware
Well, in this conversation we aren’t. We compare a million dollars in context of the US, and a salary on the other side of the world.
Most people don’t live in California.
Most people don’t have medical bills or student debts to worry about, so potato potato
What does that have to do with income?
What does spending your money has to do with getting your money? Oh, I don’t know how to answer this conundrum.
I heard that when I was a kid, and it may have been true then. There’s no way this is true anymore. It would mean you make an average of under 30k per year for your working life. True for some I’m sure, but no way it’s most. A billion tho…
30k a year is a good salary in most European countries. In most other parts of the world that’s being rich. My statement stands true: one million is more than a lifetime of work for most people in the world.
Median salary in EU is 39k. 30k will be a bad salary for most people in most European countries.
That is before taxation.
Fair enough. 30k netto seems to be closer to a median then.
Start a space program.
What are you even going to do with a billion dollars?
Compensate for your insecurities
Actually a billion is very hard to spend if the rule is for personal use. You can do it by buying super yacht or private jet but other than that, there’s nothing much you can do with that amount of money if you’re a decent person.
But for altruism purpose, i can think of many, many stuff.
come on, you can think of something .
you could create a whole humanitarian organisation. have well funded teams dedicated to improving the communities of your choice
a million just gets you a cozy home in a decent neighbourhood. Now you pooped out all your funds and need more to cover maintenance
I have always wanted to get a bunch of land that used to be thriving forest and restore it, then donate it to the native tribes that used to live there, with all legal rights and protections. Can’t do that on my current income.
Well, it’s not money, it’s assets.
If you have a house, car, etc, that collectively cost 1mil, you’re worth 1mil.
What you could do with the extra money you have is putting it into assets that generate cash flow. Stocks, bonds, indexes, businesses. If you can manage it well enough, it could secure you a lifestyle where you can ditch your job without being strapped for cash.
That’s basically what the rich do, except on a MUCH larger scale, where the cash flow generated is enough literally throw money around.
And Jeff has given away $0. That guy is truly the scum of the earth.
he married a reptile queen to, he married a plastic doll that likely wont challenge or sue him like mackenzie woud. and his networth is like 300bn right now. up from 70bn before the pandemic.
she also refused to be named on any buildings after her, its only way to know you are genuine. unlike zuckerberg who donated to SFGH, TO name it after himself.
TBH so long as they are donating I don’t particularly mind if they want shit named after them, though I’d prefer if that money just came from being taxed so we don’t have to rely on billionaire largesse. Plenty of Carnegie libraries out there to this day.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Financial obesity, love that term
May I ask why? To me it’s just a more fatphobic way of saying “absurdly rich people”.
Yes im fatphobic, im scared of being so fat i get sick and die. That’s perfectly healthy just like being scared of smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol.
In the way that “xenophobia” means rather hatred than fear of outsiders, the same applies to the word “fatphobia”. It is desirable to look for better health outcomes for yourself, it is not good to judge and discriminate other people based on their weight.
Obesity is a perfectly valid technical term.
While medical obesity is typically outside the control of those affected, perpetuating financial obesity is absolutely within the control and responsibility of the morbidly wealthy.
It’s not that “obesity” itself is fat-phobic, is the need to refer to weight when talking about something completely unrelated to make it sound more evil. I could think of the word “gluttony” to better refer to this, for example
Evil no, but undesirable like a medical condition. I do think there are a lot of parallels. Shouldn’t use it as a scare
This comment thread made want to eat myself to death.
I’m so tired of this. Why are we acting like some people are just born Obese? The Obese are not a protected class. Mentioning obesity in a negative context is not hate speech.
In fact I say normalize fat shaming. Fuck it. Obesity costs the US healthcare system $150B/yr as a conservative estimate. Donate that, you *** ****.
There is more to it than personal moral failing, though. There’s a reason obesity is more prevalent in some countries than in others. It’s not fair to fully blame people who become obese. You can’t shame people into a healthy diet. It just makes you a dick
Not going to continue this conversation. This is not a debate. Nobody is promoting obesity, just basic decency towards people who are obese. Don’t be a dick.
MacKenzie Scott actually helped found Amazon, she married Bezos before Amazon even existed and literally worked on it with him from the very beginning. The whole idea that she married into wealth or “got it from the divorce” reeks of sexism.
She’s also rapidly giving away her money with no strings attached, and she’s supporting underserved communities all over the US. The HBCU in my city got a massive grant from her that’s totally transformed what it will be capable of, for example. I just don’t get why you’re choosing this person to rag on out of all the truly vile billionaires out there
It’s just not ragging on her at all, it’s holding her up as a great example of a billionaire doing good things and still making a profit because they can’t help it due to the sheer size of her fortune.
I don’t see it as ragging on her. I think she is being used as an example as she has given away more in proportion to her total wealth than most other billionaires yet is now worth more than ever. The point I believe this meme is making is billionaires will still continue to be obscenely rich even if they are heavily taxed.
I see it as pointing out that even after giving away around 2/3rds of her wealth, the remaining third managed to generate more than what was given away.
In other words, an example of the axiom that you need money in order to make money, and if you have an obscene amount like $10 billion , it can double itself easily without any real effort on your part required
I respect her contributions and philanthropy. I just don’t think essential social support should depend on the generosity of billionaires instead of stable public systems.
No argument here
No human needs a billion dollars. It’s an utterly obscene amount of money and just because you give away $26 billion does not mean that the remaining 10 billion is an acceptable amount to keep.
A million seconds is 11 days or so. A billion seconds is 31 YEARS.
just to put it in perspective of how big a billion truly is
I don’t disagree, but my points still stand
To counter your actual point, they might have picked her because there isn’t another billionaire who gave away such a big part of their wealth at once. Bill Gates could have given away more over time, i don’t know really, but her giving away so much proves even with just a few billion you can multiple your wealth in a few years. I guess that has to do with the fact any one that rich only needs like >0,01% of their wealth to fund their extremely comfortable life.
Such a small fraction of their net worth would change my life that it’s equivalent to pennies you might find in your sofa. Like not even millions or hundreds of thousands, but a thousand. A thousand would be life changing to me right now, and that’s .0001 of their worth.
Nobody should have that kind of money. Slay the dragons.
Nice link, that part where your scrolling while seeing the billions going up takes like forever.
I clicked the url because you read your comment saying if they gave you $1,000 that would be 0,0001% of their wealth but that would be only true if their wealth was exactly one million. But we’re talking about billionaire, and if a billionaire would give you $1000 he’d give you 0,0000001% of their wealth. If they have 10 billion it would be 0,00000001% and if they have 100 billion it would be 0,000000001%. According to Forbes there are over 20 individuals with that kind of money. (https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/)
Every fact I scrolled past and read on that made me more depressed while slowly raising my blood pressure.
Throw the rich in a ditch.
It gets annoying and boring to scroll. But that’s the whole point. Keep scrolling and it gets so much worse.
People have a hard time conceptualizing really big numbers, and a billion is a really big number. If you put $1B into a fixed rate investment earning 5% annually, you’d be getting $50M a year just from that. Most investments in the market do much better than that. So if she kept just (just!) $10B of what she got, she could easily be getting back well over $500M without doing anything at all. Every year, forever. If she doesn’t spend or give away that much, then what she gets back grows.
If you put that $50 million in that same fixed rate investment you’d be getting $2.5 million a year. But wait, we want to keep up with inflation! Let’s assume 3% inflation year over year. Your leftover 2% to live on is a measly salary of the equivalent of a million dollars a year growing with (historically standard) inflation.
To the ultra wealthy that’s not much, and you certainly aren’t living like a greater member of the House of Saud or buying everything you could possibly want off of it, but you can live a life of great comfort, travel every year, have a nice home, have plenty of comfort and hobbies, and never work.
And to get back to this, this is an amount of money a billionaire can give someone every year without touching the principal. If the billionaire wants to continue growing with inflation it reduces to them getting 20 million a year which translates to 400 thousand a year both matching 3% inflation. That’s still a comfortable life in even very high cost of living cities.
If the billionaire wants to continue growing with inflation it reduces to them getting 20 million a year which translates to 400 thousand a year both matching 3% inflation.
I didn’t follow this part
5% investment returns keeping up with 3% inflation leaves 2% to do with as you please. 2% of 1 billion is 20 million, and 2% of 20 million is 400 thousand. In this scenario each of those dollar numbers increases by 3% each year to match the expected inflation of normal times
I must have lost the thread; why are we doing 2% of what a billion dollars’ earnings earn?
If I was a billionaire I’d like to think I’d be able to invest a few bn, and divvy up the income among a bunch of people. 150 people every year getting a gift of £1m would do more for society than all the current crop of billionaires combined.
And yes, I know it’s not that simple, but a boy can dream.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
$1M in $100 bills weighs 10 kilos. $1B in $100 bills weighs 10,000 kilos.
Yes, one thousand times one million is one billion.
Er…hmmm… freedom units plz!!
Like, 2 elephants, one asteroid, and 16 1998 cloth top convertible Miatas
To imagine the huge difference between a billion and a million I always liked the example - a million seconds is roughly 11.7 days, a billion seconds is around 31.7 YEARS.
To imagine the huge difference between a billion and a million I always liked the example - a million seconds is roughly 11.7 days, a billion seconds is around 31.7 YEARS.
You are not 30 yet or you would know that there is almost no difference.
You are not 30 yet or you would know that there is almost no difference
I’m 35 but this aged me another 20. But not as bad as when I realized that the 70s are closer to my date of birth than the present day is.
I prefer the “having 10,000$ is one step on the stairs” image.
Most people will never be on the first step, apart from people in industrialized countries and even then, not everyone.
A millionaire will be about 100 steps up, or about 4 floors. Ah ha! Look at you all small down there from my 4th floor vantage point!
Then a billionaire, in that same analogy, is 100,000 steps up, or 11 miles, somewhere in the fucking stratosphere. Think they can see the difference between you and the millionaire from up there?
Musk, at 680,000,000,000$? He’s passed the fucking ISS, 750 miles from the Earth, basically wealth stops having any kind of meaning or human scale.
“You need to “earn” 1300 dollar per hour from the moment of birth to almost be a billionaire at 30 years old” - another way to perceive it.
You need to “earn” 317.10 dollar per second ($1.14 million per hour) around the clock to become a trillionaire at 100 years old.
Okay, it’s early where I am, but 1300*24(hours)*365,25(days/year)*30(years) is not a billion. It’s 341.874.000, so barely a third of the way. You need to ‘earn’ roughly 3803$ per hour to be over a billion in 30 years.
Yeah, that’s a good one.
If you had $500k, you could buy an average house in my area. If you had $1M, you could buy two. If you had $1B, you could buy 2000 i.e. the entire neighborhood.
Now do $1B
What about having $1bil and giving away $1mil is like having $1k and giving away a $1.
Also a good one
Except that the 1$ i give. I can imagine using it, just like i can imagine using the other 999$.
Billionaires have more money than they can imagine using, it’s completely insane
What if you wanted to buy yourself something pretty, like Microsoft?
Then they’d have even MORE money they couldn’t imagine using, and then they’ll buy more companies, IPs and other shit that will give them even more money they couldn’t imagine using and then they’d ha-DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM HERE?!
Musk literally did that when he bought Twitter though, and is still in n trajectory to being the first trillionaire. At the level of billionaires, it no longer matters what you do, everything generates money and doesn’t actually use your assets anymore
Yeah, I was being sarcastic
I always say to people “how long is one million seconds?”
The answer is 11.5 days.
Then i say “how long is a billion seconds?”
The answer is 31.7 YEARS.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire.
i see this lame poem parroted all over the internet for the last few years and i am still baffled with why it should convey the message better than “it is 1000 times more”. people are really not good at counting in 365-base number system. if anything, it obfuscates the situation.
I always phrase it like this:
A thousand seconds is a coffee break, a million is a vacation, a billion is a career and a trillion is over three hundred centuries.
really. well i am not really having casual conversations with people involving conversion of multiples of ten to random units. but i guess americans will really do anything to avoid metric system 😂 🤷♂️
really. well i am not really having casual conversations with people involving conversion of multiples of ten to random units
Except you do so, twice
You should try talking about wealth inequality with strangers more. Maybe we’ll get somewhere.
you missed the point by thiiii … … … … … … … … … … … … … iiis much.
Nah, I was ignoring you being rude and staying focused on my point. We all need to do that if we want to get anything done about wealth inequality.
If you asked me on the spot how many years 1000 times 11 days was, I could not tell you.
Also, how many times in my life have I needed to count in a 365 base? What the fuck else uses a 365 base? Not every year is 365 days anyways.
Your comment is stupid and you should feel ashamed.
If you asked me on the spot how many years 1000 times 11 days was, I could not tell you. Also, how many times in my life have I needed to count in a 365 base? What the fuck else uses a 365 base?
right? which is exactly my point. you are arguing in my favor and don’t even know it, which is hilarious.
just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it stupid. maybe the stupidity is on the side of the recipient. i will leave up to you whether you want to feel ashamed 😂.
Holy shit, I knew it was a crazy scale, but that flabbergasted me…
50 million the first year. Each succesive year would be more because of compounding interest.
Another way to think about this, if she invested the $10B as you said, she could spend $1M every DAY forever and still have about $130 left over each year.
How much would you need to spend in a day to have a very comfy life? I could maybe think of a way to spend 10k, I would struggle to spend 100k in a day. I have no idea how to spend 10x that much EVERY DAY.
Every year, forever.
every year, forever, and if she is lucky, it might even be slightly more than inflation… 😂
Right, what’s up with Jeff Bozos’s eyes?
He’s got ptosis, iirc he said he didn’t like the risk/reward of surgery in the area.
Today I learned what ptosis is. Thank you.
And she’s actively trying to give it all away and she’s doing it faster than other “philanthropists.” She didn’t start a foundation which will hoard most of it and give a tiny (legal minimum) away each year but is instead makimg direct gifts. She also isn’t giving small gifts to small organizations to help them grow, she’s making big gifts to big orgs that can handle the money.
And despite all of this is continues to grow too rapidly.
most of them use it to launder money/hiding thier taxes anyways. GATES is a likely example, he was only doing ti to deflect attention away from being involved with epstein. I knew there was wierd vibes coming from him. he did an AMA a while back about his charity, they dint allow money launder/tax avoidance to be discussed.
Can she give me a small gift? Really anything more than what I have now would be nice but $1mil would be really cool?
I agree. I could do a lot of good in my community with just $1 million.
There are no ethical billionaires.
Can’t remember his name (which was his point), but there was one who donated all but 1 million to causes, and left in his will that everything should be donated. All anonymously. He said nobody needs more than a million, and didn’t want to be named in things.
He was the only one who seemed to get it, and I can’t remember his name, which seemed to be what he wanted. All the rest are snakes.
Chuck Feeney. An actual role-model to follow if you become uber-wealthy.
Though he was never uber wealthy (because he chose not to be) but the woz donates his meagre wealth to schools and museums. He could have been Elon musk wealthy but he chose not to.
But if we taxed her more she might lose her motivation to make shitloads of money in divorces.
Seize their fucking money. She isn’t trying hard enough. Give it to me I make it all gone in a week. Fuck anyone trying to apologize for her our make excuses. We have children straving and homeless that she could end in a day. Fuck that cunt no better then her ex.
I mean this money isn’t literal money; it’s assets and shit. As shown by Elon Musk’s Twitter fiasco, that kind of “money” can’t be converted into liquidity on a moment’s notice. The assumption that giving away all one’s wealth immediately leads to maximum good is also not true, because the whole point of capital is that it grows. In Mackenzie’s example she could donate six billion right now and end up right where she started (ignoring inflation, which we probably shouldn’t). That means that, hypothetically, she could donate 36 billion dollars every seven years, or about 5 billion dollars per year, forever. That’s 50 billion per decade, and there are many decades in a human lifetime. You count how many homeless children that is. Capitalism is an unethical system, but there’s merit to participating in an unethical system where one is given power if they can do more good with their presence than with their absence. It’s basically the same logic as a regional bureaucrat with a conscience in a dictatorship. For fun I tried to calculate how much money adjusted for inflation you could give out starting from 36 billion dollars over a human lifetime, assuming all remainder gets given away on death and that the giver is going to die exactly forty years later. Here’s the result: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/ysyzv7ur1m (x axis in years, y axis in billions of dollars). Here you have four donation schemes, in order from the top, with growth rate 11% and inflation 4.5%:
- Give away 5.14 billion (approx. 36/6) at the end of each year, give away remaining principal after 40 years.
- Give away all 36 billion immediately.
- Give away exactly what one gains, adjusted for inflation, without touching the principal (in this case 2.25 billion in 2026 dollars), give away principal after 40 years.
- Let principal grow, give away all at once after 40 years (you’ll have to zoom out for this one).
Of course saving a starving kid now is better than saving a starving kid later so these numbers shouldn’t be taken at face value, but you get the idea. Money is power, and there are better things to do with power than immediately give it away.
Edit: Made a mistake in the math. #1 should be 11% of 36, or roughly 4, per year.
