[adventured]

> Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees?

Because you have to dedicate immense resources in a concentrated approach for an extremely long period of time, to conquer some major problems like Malaria or to develop an HIV vaccine or to drive down vaccine production & distribution costs (& difficulties) for the third world. Private philanthropy can often maneuver at speeds that government money can't, take risks governments don't like to, and go places that government money takes far longer to go (there are typically few stakeholders, decision makers - Bill Gates can just decide tomorrow to put a billion dollars behind a thing, whereas the same action might take many months or years by a government body).

If you have 100,000 people and give them each $100,000, their actions will be wildly disparate and will make essentially no impact on major problems. They may make small dents in very local problems, at best (and or improve the well-being of their unit: their family, neighborhood, community and similar). There's nothing wrong with that mind you. However standard local problems already have heavily proven systems that work on them, particularly local government + taxation (this is obviously dependent on the effectiveness of the local government in question and the taxation; regardless it has been repeatedly shown to be highly effective all around the world).

[TheOtherHobbes]

But billionaires can also decide to spend their money on projects that work against the public good. Including those that subvert the value of government spending.

Philanthropy is - at best - one side of the coin.

The other side is the anti-democratic identity between >$1bn net worth and political leverage. (Actually that leverage probably starts at around $100m - although the more you can put on the table the harder you can push to tilt it.)