Democrats want us to believe that there is some cohort of “good billionaires” who can be relied upon to fight for political progress. But as the right-wing turn of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk suggests, this is nonsense.
I’d argue they’re “less worse” but the fact remains that no one becomes a billionaire without exploitation. Bill Gates owned a monopoly and I’m honestly not sure what Mark Cuban did. At some point and time you must exploit a system and it’s people to amass that much wealth.
Cuban is what would have happened to Musk if he basically just took his money and walked away after Paypal. Cuban sold a website to Yahoo and the deal is arguably the worst deal (for Yahoo) of the dot-com bubble.
I’ll say Bill Gates monopoly sucked, but didn’t represent anything like Amazon warehouse conditions or generally other terribly exploitative behaviors. He basically won the lottery of being in the right spot in a tech industry to be the benefeciary of a lot of money being freely thrown at him without him having to resort to typical billionaire measures. Sounds similar for Mark Cuban.
I’d argue they’re “less worse” but the fact remains that no one becomes a billionaire without exploitation. Bill Gates owned a monopoly and I’m honestly not sure what Mark Cuban did. At some point and time you must exploit a system and it’s people to amass that much wealth.
Cuban is what would have happened to Musk if he basically just took his money and walked away after Paypal. Cuban sold a website to Yahoo and the deal is arguably the worst deal (for Yahoo) of the dot-com bubble.
I’ll say Bill Gates monopoly sucked, but didn’t represent anything like Amazon warehouse conditions or generally other terribly exploitative behaviors. He basically won the lottery of being in the right spot in a tech industry to be the benefeciary of a lot of money being freely thrown at him without him having to resort to typical billionaire measures. Sounds similar for Mark Cuban.
No, he didn’t “win the lottery”. He was a monopolist who engaged in anti-competitive behavior for years. Went to court and everything, case closed.
He can’t donate more than the total he stole and destroyed by deadweight loss.
Monopolistic tactics.