that moment when the One Good Billionaire™ casually orders a boat that costs several times more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes 🙃

i get that there’s worse out there but i’m tired of people acting like newell is a saint… he’s just another billionaire.

A billionaire whose hobby is Marine conservation. That yacht is a floating lab.

Inkfish, founded by Gabe Newell, aims to advance marine science by providing tools and access for deep-ocean exploration, focusing on serving the scientific community rather than personal interests. The organization’s mission is to integrate marine science, engineering, and technology to map uncharted seafloor, study biodiversity, discover new species, and protect ocean ecosystems, while also providing open-source data and technical support to scientists

While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.

Whether the concept of billionaires is bad is irrelevant when deciding whether one specific billionaire is bad.

It seems really really relevant though…

How? All you’re really doing here is stereotyping rich people.

For example, Americans are generally fat (higher obesity rate than much of the world), but that doesn’t mean all Americans are fat. To determine whether a random American is fat, we need to actually look at them, not just know their nationality.

What do you mean how? The concept of a billionaire existing being bad has a massive relevance as to whether one individual a billionaire is bad. If the mere fact of being a billionaire is bad, which it obviously is, then it doesn’t matter who this individual billionaire is he’s already tainted by being a billionaire. That’s just one plus one equals two. It’s inescapable logic. Of course it’s relevant.

If the mere fact of being a billionaire is bad, which it obviously is,

I don’t think that’s obvious at all. Becoming a billionaire just means you have a billion dollars worth of assets, and it doesn’t say anything about how you got that money.

There’s a high correlation between billionaire’s and being a bad person, but it’s not 1:1.

I’m not going to get sidetracked into that conversation. Especially when there is absolutely zero chance of us agreeing on it. The topic was whether or not that determination is relevant. Which again obviously it has to be.