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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Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today, and Jobs was an abusive narcissist shitcunt on a surface level.
Tom and Zuckerberg both came from the same time. Zuck was shit since day 1, today has nothing to do with it.
I think you just have some very rose tinted glasses.
Going back even further is assholes like Edison and Ford.
I think it’s easier to name the people who have been decent in tech. Woz seems like a decent guy.
Ted Waite all in all was decent. Not perfect but decent.
Stallman was right about everything
Stallman is a notable figure in the industry but he was never the leader of a large tech company. That’s probably why he’s a decent guy
He was a big defender of paedophilia, necrophilia, incest, and bestiality. He thinks people should have the right to fuck their pets and their children. Not to mention the reports on his creepy behaviour with women.
Stallman is an incredible steward of FOSS, and he’s been very prescient in predicting the absolute nightmare of proprietary software, but he is not a decent guy overall IMO.
It hurt me to find that out, because I looked up to him. But I guess it’s another sobering reminder of why celebrity worship is bad. I see way too many people try to bury or deny his scummy side, just because they worship him as a FOSS celebrity figure.
Let’s note that necrophilia with mutual agreement (pre-mortem, and same with cannibalism) and incest with mutual agreement (between adults) are fucked up, but should be defended. Animals can’t consent, children can’t consent, so not that.
That - yeah.
Believing in discourses and narratives without understanding that they are never real is bad.
You can believe only in what you see with your own eyes since inception and till death.
Why are you saying between adults, as if that’s what he said? He was talking about children. I even provided multiple examples of him saying so.
He’s saying all of those. Those concerning children obviously can’t.
I had never heard that about him. That’s disappointing.
Yeah, for me too. Because I love practically everything he says when it comes to software.
RMS on June 28th, 2003
RMS on June 5th, 2006
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
In the interest of fairness, he did claim to have changed his mind on some of this, although that only happened 2 days after his job became on the line after making strange comments about Epstein/Epstein clients/Epstein victims, particularly in presenting Epstein’s underage sex workers as being willing.
For me, suddenly having a change of heart on a decades-held (and publicly-championed) opinion, only to suddenly change your mind the second it threatens your job seems a bit too convenient, so I’m unwilling to believe it.
Holy shit…
Well, the opinion that a child can consent is technically acceptable, because the line at 12,13,14,16,18,21 years is arbitrarily drawn which is why it differs in various countries.
But in practice he should have used common sense and at least drawn his own line.
That’s scary, but I’m not sure how really wrong he is. The issue is again with child’s consent being less certain, affected more easily by various distractions.
So am I, the question is whether he has internal consistency or not in his views. If yes, it’s still better than, well, just being a jerk and proud of it.
I would say it’s not a sincere change. It’s groupthink.
Well the skit keeps getting smaller and smaller
The FSF isn’t exactly what you think of when you hear the words “large tech company”… but you could argue that in some ways it is one couldn’t you… 😁😛
You could, but the OP is talking about the people who became filthy rich or at least notable. I don’t know if Tom ever made any real money. Almost all of the people listed used their corporate power to smash competition and dominate the market.
If anything, Stallman is the antithesis of most of these people.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tom-myspace-sold-social-media-153011703.html?guccounter=1
Don’t know how he invested it but the guy certainly wouldn’t have had to work another day in his life
What he did is important, but he’s definitely an asshole as well
Old captain crunch is another one that turned out to be a weirdo
I think you have that backwards.
While at the sametime being a gross person.
Gabe too.
There are no good billionaires
You don’t even know whether Gabe is or isn’t a billionaire.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/gabe-newell/
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
If he wasn’t a billionaire it would be very simple, there are no good multi millionaires either!
Ok, I was wrong, I didn’t know about all the boats and the second company/charity.
The Forbes thing is just an educated guess though. And are you saying anyone with 2 million dollars or anyone with 2m in assets is automatically a bad person?
People around you are starving and barely able to afford to pay rent and you’re worth 2m? Sorry my man, you’re one of those who is taking advantage of the system.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/28/americans-median-net-worth-by-age.html
Overall the median is under 200k, you’re talking about someone worth ten times that.
Why are we using his first name
Because people think he’s their friend because he offers a good product when the truth is he’s just another one of those leeches at the top of a big company taking money from people’s pockets and accumulating it while their clients can barely afford to pay rent.
Why not?
Daniel Stenberg seems like a nice guy.
It’s hard to beat ignoring doctors and not treating your very treatable form of cancer, then using your wealth to get a liver transplant and then dying anyway. Dude committed manslaughter because of his own arrogance.
Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman destroying competition but as far as I know he didn’t support fascists or facilitate pogroms.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter has done far more harm to our societies than whatever shady tactics Bill Gates used.
Not to take away from Zuckerberg, Musk, and the less-known people in tech like Thiel, but Bill Gates was and is a huge piece of shit who harmed more than just his competitors. Among other things he convinced the world that we need IP and patents for covid vaccines instead of sharing them freely, which alone cost countless lives around the world. I don’t even want to know what other ills his “philanthropy” has and will cause. https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
Gates and Jobs both are responsible for consumer based computing. Proprietary software lynched what should have been a global birth of inventive software engineers.
The crap that Zuck shills had its groundwork laid by those two.
That actually happened. Just wasn’t perpetuated after 1995 or something.
Before Microsoft, programmers were treated like factory workers by HP and IBM and setup in large open floor rooms like a secretary pool from the 1960’s. Gates thought programmers were important and gave every programmer a private office.
Gates did dirty tricks to competitors even to tiny ones they could have bought out (stacker). But he was never Musk’s level of evil.
Adding to that, Bill Gates put quite some effort into image building and mostly succeeded.
Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:
Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.
Steve Jobs decided to kill himself by being an idiot.
So…there was a redemption arc there.
I’m not a fan of
HitlerSteve Jobs, but I am a big fan of the guy who killedHitlerSteve Jobs.Yes but Steve Jobs also bought himself a pointless liver transplant that someone else didn’t get. One he would have never needed if he had listened to doctors instead of trying to treat a very treatable kind of cancer with a diet. So while he did the world a favor, he also took someone with him on the way out.
That man’s killer’s name?
Steve Jobs, the friend of Steve Jobs’ biggest enemy, Steve Jobs🔔
Larry Ellisons Oracle gobbled up many great companies and open source projects and sucked the life out of them, such as Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice, MySQL to name just a few
That was a single blow, Sun owned OpenOffice and MySQL when bought.
See the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation.
Also Java.
It’s well known that ORACLE is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
I don’t ever remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs being good people. Or Jeff Bezos, trying to kill bookstores.
The guys behind Google seemed okay at first and I think they really wanted to do good. But the way the company culture was built was toxic.
But in the end it’s all about the greed. As soon as a company becomes public and whose stocks become available on the market, it turns to shit.
Look at how Steam is going well and actually helping personal computing progress. Gabe Newell is doing a great job because he loves that he does and ensures the people who work for him do too.
Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).
There are no saints at this level.
I mean their unwillingness to do anything about the market abuse and rampant child-gambling aside, the lootboxes for purely cosmetic items are one of the least predatory ways to do microtransactions. It’s not like EA where the only way to unlock entire characters in some games is to grind for hundreds of hours or pay, or like COD where they took the lootbox idea and made it actually affect (multiplayer) gameplay
Damning with faint praise.
I mean, in some ways, yeah. In other ways, CS2 is entirely free to play, and the microtransactions fund that, like LoL.
You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.
And in politics, too!
Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC
TBF to Valve, their lootboxes were limited to cosmetic items in a free to play multiplayer games. You can ignore those and it wouldn’t change the gameplay at all.
Capitalism rewards psychopathy
Complete explanation in three words. Well done.
Concision!
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.
Edit: The evolution of social media also adds a lot to this. We are both more connected to each other and society, and therefore more aware of BS think it’s pulled by corporations. Then, of course, you have folks like Elon Musk who seem to make a point of making sure everyone knows how big of a piece of shit they are, and how proud of it they are.
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.
They were all evil shit back then… You were just innocent and information didn’t travel as fast
Also, Jobs “pretty decent”? That asshole was Narciso reborn
Might I ride your coat tails, and recommend Behind the Bastards episodes on Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? Who for the record are both absolute monsters. Not like…Hitler bad, but still pretty shockingly bad…
Behind the Bastards Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates
Behind the Bastards Part Two: The Ballad of Bill Gates
Behind the Bastards Part One: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Behind the Bastards Part Two: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Behind the Bastards Part Three: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Behind the Bastards Part Four: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs
Please note: Steve Jobs was bad enough to earn a 4 part series.
By all means kind person… thanks for all the links
Oh man, I LOVE introducing folks to Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards. The guy is an internet legend.
I still remember the first time I recognized his voice on an old pre-shit era Cracked video feature about how cops won’t help you when you’re being stabbed. I submitted it to Reddit a while back and it ended up making the front page.
Can’t recommend his stuff enough.
<3
Steve Jobs was bad enough that his daughter wrote a whole book about how bad of a person he was several years after he died…
Gates was always a dirtbag.
He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.
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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.
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.
Gates has good PR.
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…
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.
I’m pretty sure most of that is tax-deductible.
bill gates was like, one of the worst of the worst. Dude literally broke the law, and then settled to avoid paying for acquiring fees.
They have never been good.
That sounds really tame compared to nowadays.
it’s tame, except we’re talking like, literally stealing a piece of software or it’s design blatantly, settling, and then acquiring the rights in the settlement for much cheaper than they would at market rates.
It’s not his problem that they settled for so little though.
he shouldn’t have broken the law in the first place, but that’s not the problem of the small business.
I mean there are literally three options here, purchase it from the business legally. Which costs shit tons of money, or steal it. And then deal with it after the fact, which is what they did, and it saved MS lots of money, while probably fucking yeeting the small business.
Well duh. I’m just saying it’s really tame compared to nowadays.
Also I personally don’t really care too much about copyright.
copyright isn’t generally a huge deal, until you’re a company trying to sell things for money, although even there copyright probably isn’t super relevant. It depends on what specifically it is, because you can’t exactly implement a copyrighted “mechanism” however you can patent them.
It’s probably pretty similar to a lot of modern day shenanigans, the difference being that it’s mostly VC funding pushing for the market share rather than stealing shit.
Pretty sure that is a chapter in a Donald Trump book
Was going to say this.
sociopaths have a pretty big advantage in capitalist leadership positions over non-sociopaths. they are more likely to get there in the first place, and they will perform better.
In all leadership positions, period. Capitalist or communist. Democratic or autocratic. Does not matter, those that are not held back by their morals have an advantage.
In communist societies, many people who rise to power are evil, because theyre seeking their own power primarily. In capitalism, anybody who is not actively evil enough gets thrown under the bus because theyre getting in the way of profits. Communism allows it, capitalism requires it.
It is the opposite. In capitalism, there is at least a chance a good person has some power because power is distributed, not only held by governments. There are multiple examples in the main post. Even better examples are European countries where the government and businesses hold each other in check instead of govt being bought off legally like in the US.
In communism, the way power is distributed ensures corrupt people raise to the top. See an amazing video “rule for rulers” by CGP gray for a simplified explanation how that corruption works and why a good person can’t hold power.
CGP Grey refers to dictatorships in that video, not communism exclusively. Marx predicted a revolution of labor that would get rid of scarcity which was never realized by the Soviet system. If you read a bit about it you’ll see that the so-called marxists never reached communism, as they kept pumping resources into the government, police and bureaucracy.
Communism. A utopian society without classes, divisions of wealth, exploitation or suffering. Members would provide what they could and receive what they need. The instruments of state, like government bureaucracies, police and military, would become unnecessary and would “wither away”.
Rules for rulers is explicitly about human behavior in heirarchy, not specifically anti communist. He mentions fascist dictatorships and monarchial systems as well. The solution for it is not necessarily capitalism in the video but commerce and democratic systems of voting.
Commerce is not inherently capitalist.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/marxism/
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/05/1012733811/capitalism-neoliberalism-america-ideology
CGP gray very specifically refers to democracies as well and explains how things like farm subsidies are used to buy votes. Maybe re-watch the videos.
And yes, CGP gray also indirectly explains why Marxists kept pumping resources into the government, police and bureaucracy. (Clarification: CGP Gray never mentions Marxists specifically, he just explains why leaders have to funnel resources to areas that help them stay in power.) It is inevitable in a system where you concentrate power in a limited group of people.
That is why distributing power between large number of independent capitalists and voters is the system that so far worked best, although still very far from perfect.
As long as humans behave like humans and are in charge, the utopian communism is as realistic as wizards in flying castles.
The book he references in that video does not make the capitalist argument you are making and by my interpretation neither does CGP.Capitalism is not inherently democratic as the market is unregulated by government. If you vote with your dollar, those with more money have more votes.I’ve edited my previous comment with more context and sources, and now I see so have you.
Sorry if it is unclear, I am saying CGB Gray explains how corruption happens in leadership structures and why it is so difficult to prevent.
The opinion that this is why capitalism can work better than communism is entirely my own logical conclusion. I am not trying to claim CGP Gray said so.
Again sorry for the confusion.
In communism, power is typically distributed somewhat democratically; eg every level above the lowest in the party must be democratically elected by the previous level. Capitalism doesn’t even require that.
You can’t look at capitalist government and assume that government under communism behaves the same way.
Please name which country in Europe has a government thats hasn’t been bought and paid off.
Of course, no one can. Unfortunately, that’s because capitalism is incompatible with actual democracy. Theres isn’t a country in the world whos democratic process and systems of governance hasn’t been utterly corrupted by capitalism and all that it brings with it.
If there’s a top that someone could rise to, it isn’t communism.
Netherlands? Switzerland? Norway?
Like sure, there always is some corruption but relatively insignificant amount.
Honestly, I can’t think of an EU country that is anywhere near the US levels of “corrupted by capitalism”.
What? Top? What do you mean?
Nope, come on man are you kidding me (?) and disagree again.
I agree that maybe you can’t but that doesn’t make it true or not. The last Conservative government of great Britain showed themselves to be utterly corrupted by greed and capitalism. They didn’t even have to pretend not to rip the entire country off during the covid pandemic.
Even then, its not “more” or less than the US. My point is just that capitalism corrupts all governments, to one extent or another, because its incompatible with democracy.
If there is a top, in terms of money or having things etc., then it isn’t communism.
Nothing happened to the world. You just grew up.
yes
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.
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.
Do you mean when he started to chip the population through the covid vaccines? jkjk
No, that was 5G!
/s (<- somehow this is needed)
Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft’s software empire.
It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.
That said I think because tech was such a young industry and innovating so quickly. Many geeks got a chance to run companies that took off. Nowadays it’s Like every other industry with sociopaths in charge.
It wasn’t hidden. Everybody knew back in the day what an evil piece of shit he was.
It has just been forgotten about and many current adults weren’t old enough, or even around, in the heyday of his evil empire, so he has been able to whitewash his image. My 50 year old ass remembers though. Fuck Bill Gates.
Yup. And his wife left him because of his association with Epstein.
Melinda Gates Says Bill Gates’s Work with “Abhorrent” Jeffrey Epstein Led to Divorce
Nah, she knew about his husband and Epstein ( and his at least strange occupation ) far lower than she’s wiling to admit.
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You remember propaganda (when corporations do it, it’s called “Public Relations”).
That’s what you remember. Now, thanks to the internet democratizign information somewhat, they don’t just get to feed us their “public relations” anymore. Now people can counter that shit, and people see them for what they really are - parasites.
It’s capitalism, baby. Welcome to the real world.
Social media would be drowning in negative posts about Bill Gates if they were a thing in the 90s. The only difference, perhaps, is back then the industry was still at its early years, it was quickly evolving, so many brilliant people had a chance to achieve something too. Today, it’s huge corporations where each individual has virtually no impact.
Normal well adjusted people get a few million dollars and call it a day. Only people with a mental problem get billions and keep trying to get more.