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.

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

Threre is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. An ethical billionaire doesn’t remain a billionaire. If a suddenly recieved a billion dollars I’d be looking into the best way to donate most of it.

I’m sure I could survive for the rest of my life just fine on $500 million dollars, and whatever causes I’m donating my money to know what they need and how to spend it better than I would by offering them a couple of rooms on my third yacht.

ethical billionaire

A close example is Warren Buffett. He’s about as ethical as they come IMO. He still lives in the same house he bought over 60 years ago, and he has given away a ton of money:

As of June 2025, Buffett had donated over $60 billion to charitable causes.

Hearing him talk about it, it’s apparently really hard to give away that amount of money. He wants to give away something like 99% of his money, but he seems to really like his job and that takes priority for him. He has claimed his children are tasked w/ giving the rest away within 10 years of his passing, outside of the little he has marked for inheritance.