[ctoth]

This is the second throwaway comment I've noticed you make in this thread, your first being to call someone privileged for deciding to limit their news intake.

I hate to be this guy, but the only "modern rich guys" I know of who have gone to space recently were Jeff Bezos, who donated ten billion dollars in 2020, the largest amount ever, towards mitigating climate change[0] and Sir Richard Branson, who donated half his money, two billion dollars in 2013[1].

But what have the Romans done for us?

It took me about 30 seconds to find these articles, and so I'm not sure what to conclude from your comment other than you were looking to score some cheap Internet points by hating the rich. Can you explain what your thought process went like, what motivations triggered your reaction here? I fundamentally would like to understand what happens to trigger this, "somebody else did something cool so we have to say bad stuff about them!" mode that so many folks seem to adopt.

[0]: Jeff Bezos made the single-largest charitable donation of 2020, toward climate change https://fortune.com/2021/01/04/jeff-bezos-largest-charitable...

[1]: Why Sir Richard Branson donated half his fortune ($2 billion) to charity: https://www.chatelaine.com/living/budgeting/why-sir-richard-...

[minikites]

It's not a cheap reaction to them "doing something cool", people this wealthy have not earned the right to be celebrated, because wealth is not a virtue. Multibillionaires actively make the world a worse place and their wealth comes at the expense of thousands below them. One individual should not have that much economic sway, they're like unelected nobility, unaccountable to anyone. They represent a staggering policy failure to build a humane society and their donations to charity, if any, are not a good substitute for what they have taken from society. Andrew Carnegie gave back substantially (76 billion, adjusted to GDP) to the society from which he derived his wealth. Billionaires these days are far less charitable.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/ceo-says-billionaires-...

>Based on these figures, MarketWatch reported Bezos donated just .5 percent of his net worth last year - a quarter of the 2 percent the average American donates each year.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/12/americ...

>And why should we believe that Gates or any other billionaire’s “boldness” necessarily reflects society’s values and needs? Oligarchies aren’t the same as democracies.