Gates should hire a hit man to take out Musk.
Shit pot, meet turd kettle.
Not just the poorest and not just children.
Not just Musk. https://bdsmovement.net/microsoft
Bill gates is always spending his money eradicating diseases. Maybe he can eradicate this musk disease too
Elon is a Nazi
I cannot be the only one here who sees tiny hands.
They look like team america world police puppet hands
Fuck, I can’t unsee it now.
[narrator]: bill gates did not GET ReST.
I got downvoted on Lemmy the other day because I said that I prefer Bill Gates to Musk.
Maybe there are things about Gates I don’t know. Maybe he is actually quite an evil person; I don’t know. But he does at least spend billions of dollars helping vulnerable people, right? And Bill’s stances on global politics are far more sensible than those of Musk.
I would like to recommend listening to the Behind the Bastards episodes on Bill Gates. He’s a piece of shit. Not as bad as Elon, but that’s not really the point.
Yeah maybe there’s stuff I’m not aware of. I’ve seen some people on Lemmy point out that Bill Gates lobbied for the University of Oxford to not open source their Covid vaccine. I suppose that seems shitty on the face of it.
Yeah, he’s a bit of a shit. That would not surprise me in the least.
Well yes, but no. If you see capitalism, which includes billionaires having a right to exist, as a set standard, I would 100% agree with you. But billionaires shouldn’t even exist in the first place. You only become a billionaire, by either massively exploiting your workerforce, capitalising every single aspect of your product/customer and not redirecting your profits back to society. We shouldn’t live in a world, where we are cheering for people giving away their money, that they shouldn’t own in the first place. There is no ethic way to be a billionaire.
To prevent misunderstandings: I 100% agree, that this is actually a good thing, but we still have to raise awareness about the societal and political problems of billionaires existing in the first place.
I agree it should be illegal and it is immoral, but these are the current rules of the game. It’s not that Bill Gates is necessarily evil, the problem is how modern states and societies distribute wealth, which is based on a credit system where small incomes are dominated by large incomes (owners get most of the credit). The guise is that they also assume the risk but we know that very rich people eventually gain political power to mitigate that risk on the many not rich people. The problem then is that there is no easy way for not rich people to self organize and distribute credit more fairly, which also needs to distribute risk as well. Cause at the end of the day, it is about two things: people wanting to avoid risk and yielding credit and people accumulating wealth and gaining political power, over many generations. That said, Musk is a very twisted and malicious personality while Bill Gates is more of a typical rich entitled person with a savior complex.
Down to the wire, though, if Elon is responsible for killing the world’s poorest children of today then that logic should translate to Bill Gate’s being responsible for killing the world’s poorest children of yesterday.
It’s pot and kettle. Gate’s might have used his position of great wealth for some good things but there are also some… questionable things. According to him his conversations with Epstein were ‘huge mistakes’… this is, of course, referring to Gate’s relationship with Epstein - something that took place after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.
Idk, something for your brain to chew on.
People on lemmy know that “A is better than B” means “A is good.” You have to learn to speak the language.
There are no good billionaires. But I must agree that Bill Gates cannot be compared to Elon Musk. Bill has done evil, but his evil doesn’t compare to what Elon Musk is doing right now
I think it’s a silly to waste one’s time struggling over deciding which one is worse. They’re both billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars undermining the public interest. Gates just cares more about his PR than Musk.
I get what you’re saying 100%, but it’s really not a struggle to decide which one is worse.
He absolutely can be compared to Musk – he’s better than musk.
Yep well said
The massive cock slobbering that Warren Buffet got at his Woodstock of Capitalism last week was nauseating. All the media were fawning over how he’s still a small-town Nebraska bumpkin. I have to hand it to him he crafted his image perfectly as a “good billionaire” too.
Oh but I heard he lives in a humble little house in Omaha!
“Humble Little House in Omaha”----->
They’re tone deaf. Comparatively that property IS humble in the world of billionaires. But that ain’t no roach infested bachelor.
That is his house? It is far from a simple house. It looks quite fancy.
For the wealthiest man in the world, this is a pretty modest house.
It’s a ship of Theseus situation. Apparently it’s the “same” house he bought in 1953… at this point though it’s just the same property.
Gates was born in 1955 though… Spooky music
Nuance is lost on a lot of people on here. All billionaires bad therefore no billionaire is preferred. While I agree there’s no good billionaire there’s a spectrum of bad. Like would I rather break my pelvis or break my legs? Both are bad but one is preferable.
None are preferrable. Nobody should have that much wealth, power, and influence.
Thanks for proving my point.
That nuance is not important - it’s not worth wasting your breath on. If people focused on root causes of the dysfunction and the change needed to solve the issues plaguing our societies - we’d be much better off.
The nuance isn’t lost to me, I just don’t care to quantify it and then shout it out to the heavens. It makes no difference to me whether Elon Musk is worse than Bill Gates. They can duke that battle out themselves if they care to.
None are preferable.
Yes, that is accepted.
But, given the reality that billionaires do exist, one that spends his money curing diseases is less bad than one who is closing hospitals serving war round populations or actively starving people.
I think making value judgements on individuals is a counterproductive use of our time, energy, and voice. That’s what I’m trying to point out.
If we focused on root causes and the change we’d like to see to solve those problems, we’d be smooth sailing as a world already.
Didn’t some nations in Africa ask Gates to stop helping?
I will wager that some people from some nations asked him to stop helping based solely on the fact that we can’t get millions of people to reliably agree on anything.
I mean Gates donated his own money to help the poorest people in the world. Elon spent his money to become president so he could steal money from the poor at people in the world.
Gates donated his money to avoid taxes and start a big pharma company.
Also Bill Gates comment is about USAID an imperialistic tool which has killed many millions of children. The irony of this statement is palpable.
so this is what he meant by eliminated world hunger, by killing them directly or indirectly.
The only way to get rid of poverty is to get rid of the poor.
It’s logical: no people -> no hunger.
and that’s how you know it didn’t even occur to him. he just did it for the sake of cruelty.
How many children died because Bill Gates lobbied for the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine to be patented?
Given that the Gates Foundation backpedaled that stance shortly after:
0
Sorry? Exactly when did Oxford open source it’s vaccine and allow manufacturing by companies other than Astrazeneca?
The WTO adopted the proposed partial waiver of vaccines in 2022. Several nations adopted a complete patent waiver for all vaccines. The Gates Foundation endorsed it after Bill’s initial objections.
Reversing opinions after the damage has been done is nothing but a PR stunt. My question again.
Which other companies produced the Oxford Vaccine?
I just explained to you that the patent waivers were a thing after the Gates Foundation endorsed them. WTF do you mean “after damage was done”?
patent waivers were a thing after the Gates Foundation endorsed them.
Too late to damage the share price of their Pharma holdings.
Gates flew to Oxford and forced (as a provder of funding) the University into an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca.
There has been no Oxford vaccine production by any other company.
Late patent wavers are shutting the door after the horse has bolted. The mRNA technology already had its population scale field test.
Idk how many people have died from Covid 19 vax? I keep taking it and my cock is huge, no other side effects
Your claim seems a bit BS. It was apparently to have a better distribution and quality.
AstraZeneca claimed not to get profits from the vaccine sales. This seems kind of fair knowing that doses were sold at about $4 USD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford–AstraZeneca_COVID-19_vaccine#Early_development - https://reliefweb.int/report/world/uk-donates-20-million-more-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccines-countries-need)
Unless you’re talking about the side effects?
It was apparently to have a better distribution and quality.
This is bullshit. The Oxford vaccine was specifically designed to be manufactured using existing processes and distribution channels.
AstraZeneca claimed not to get profits from the vaccine sales.
If the whole world got effective covid vaccines at cost of production then no-one would pay Pfizer for their novel (and expensive) technology. Gates Foundation secured a return of over 15 times more than its initial investment in BioNTech.
If the whole world got effective covid vaccines at cost of production then no-one would pay Pfizer for their novel (and expensive) technology. Gates Foundation secured a return of over 15 times more than its initial investment in BioNTech.
Sadly, that’s the world we live in. The investment is shady, but hey, everyone invests soo… however, changing sides every few days sucks, but at least they don’t stuck with a set idea. Not sure what to think of it.
The oxford vaccine was discontinued because it had some side effects that newer and better vaccines didn’t have I believe.
Research is done because there’s profit to be made. A non-for-profit lab would be great though
This is bullshit. The Oxford vaccine was specifically designed to be manufactured using existing processes and distribution channels.
Source? Found nothing of the sort
4$ per dose is quite a lot of money for African countries. Not patenting it would allow them to create their own, which he blocked based on bullshit reasoning.
I did try to find unit costs for Cuba’s vaccine but failed. While doing that I found a paper analysing distribution costs in Vietnam and long story short it can easily cost four bucks just to get the stuff from the plant into people’s arms.
Not patenting it would allow them to create their own
Patenting it and licensing it also allows them to create their own, but now they need a plant to do that, which requires things like reliable electricity, infrastructure to enable supply of raw materials, whatnot. It’s not like you can brew that kind of thing in a bathtub. What patenting also does is stop random Indian pharma producers from cooking it up and selling it to Botswana without giving you a cut, that is, the wrong private enterprise profiting off it. One that didn’t incur costs doing studies so that regulators would greenlight it.
From what I gather most of the doses used overall in the world were AstraZeneca, and much of it was given to countries for free, with western countries stemming the bill, not AstraZeneca. The EU apparently (it’s in your wiki link) brought the price down to €1.78 because the EU was supplying the production capacity, and €12 for Pfizer/Biontech, which was never in the race for distribution to poor countries in the first place because it requires a tight, and very cool, cooling chain. Forget about the four bucks per dose for distribution in that case.
Would this all have been better in a socialist world? Yes. But that’s not what the situation on the ground was during the pandemic so stop making the perfect the enemy of the good, western countries (excluding the US) were up to the task not getting fucked over by big pharma, and passed that on to other countries.
Or NOT patenting it and open sourcing the vaccine so it doesn’t cost any money for them to license and we’re not gatekeeping life saving medicine. Just a thought.
See the point about random companies selling it for profit. A patent license does not have to cost anything. Don’t know if AstraZeneca did give it away for free to poor countries which do happen to have the right kind of production capability under a “produce for yourself but don’t sell it” kind of deal, but it’s definitely a thing that you can do.
The patent itself isn’t evil, it’s all about how it’s used. And btw open source licenses rely on copyright law, especially anything GPL-like would not work without it.
Congrats, you’ve done research and thus got downvoted.<_>
Sadly we don’t have the specifics about what increases the price, but I think it’s fair to say that they probably have an automated process of creating those vaccines, and as such, idk if other labs could create a dose for less than this amount, especially if they don’t have many funds. I’d argue not, but what do I know
Gates is always whitewashing his own future or past actions when he does something philanthropic tbh
i heard about that, he advocated for expensive equipment, medicaiton only produced by the us.
This. Thank you.
That was a villain level move from Gates. The behaviour of the rich nations towards the LICs over covid vaccines was absolutely shameful and destroyed the illusion of Gates’ benevolence.
No need for envy. He owns enough farmland that he can easily top Musk by rising prices to let many more children starve to death.
Gates does own 80 percent of US farmland, for anyone interested
He’s right
In the sense that it’s two Spider-Men pointing at each other
So are you Bill. You utter piece of shit.
Fuck all Billionaires
I’m out of the loop.
I’m not down with hoarding of wealth or the shit software he’s made, but what are the allegations against Gates? (The legit ones, not the “he’s putting microchips in Covid vaccines” shit)
I must have missed those, thanks for reminding me. Btw can u recommed podcast similiar to behind the bastards.
Well, if you like BtB, you’ll probably enjoy any and all Cool Zone Media pods.
But if I take similar here to mean: Episodic true history that is partly educational, partly comedic, with an air of “How the fuck did this ever happen?”
There are a few that fit:
- Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine
- Darknet Diaries
- Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
- If Books Could Kill
- You’re Wrong About
- Build For Tomorrow
Some other ones that I always recommend:
- You Are Not So Smart
- Team Human
- Cory Doctorow’s Craphound
- Molly White’s Citation Needed
- Very Bad Wizards
- Knifepoint Horror
Thanks for the list! I have started to “You Are Not So Smart” and I already like it.
Cory Doctorow’s Craphound
Oh, I didn’t know he had a podcast! Added, thanks
Motherfucker met with Epstein multiple times. That should be enough to say he is just as bad as Elon.
He is also buying up farm land for pennies on the dollar for himself. His education reform was such a painful failure we continue to pay for it. The gates foundation thought they knew mkre than educators and spent a shit ton of money to run an experiment.“aimed at making teachers more effective” my ass. How do you make people more effective when you don’t listen to their needs? Time and time again bill turned educators away or straight up didn’t listen to them when they expressed concerns. Kinda reminds me of doge raiding the department of education now that I think about it. Bill just fucked shit up in a more clean non obvious manner.
He continues to hoard his wealth and placate everyone with his “i am going to donate a lot, don’t worry fellas” statements. Bill why are you waiting til 2045 to donate $200 billion? Why not fight elon now if you are so worried? Because he isn’t.
He is evil just like the rest of them. He has just done a better job at reorganizing the skeletons in the closet over the years to stop people questioning.
Yeah this just seems like a troll or argument for the sake of argument. It’s just too preposterous an argument
Did Melon discover Lemmy?
Gates has history of lawsuits against open source projects. And he actively donates against any real systemic change. For example he has invested heavily in carbon capture technology which is useless to making impact to climate change.
Just imagine a World where ALL governments, ALL schools of all countries did not have to pay a fee to the then world richest man.
Imagine if a fraction of those governments invested instead on infrastructure, both physical (imagine literal bridges going to schools) and software (as some are doing now) or better paid teachers. Imagine that some of that money would be invested in Linux, gcompris, etc.
That’s the genuine cost of Gates wealth.
Think I’m a “communist” for thinking that? Well I guess then the American DoJ is on that boat too because the 2001 antitrust law case was a landmark, not a matter of my opinion.
So… yes, he’s a billionaire who did donate a lot of money, but how did he get that money in the first place? It wasn’t his to donate to.
If he stole tens of billions from the Americans then donated it to starving children in the poorest region, isn’t that still a net possitive? It’s like the tech dystopian Robin Hood.
In your analogy that’d still be Robin Hood coming from a very rich family, accumulating more wealth that anybody he knows around him, fighting with his best friends to keep more, getting indicted by the most powerful government on Earth because he abused his power… then giving only a very small fraction of his wealth to some starving children while still sitting in his mansions, accumulating still more money without working.
That’s not the Robin Hood of my childhood to say the least. To me that’s clearly not a net positive.
I do recommend listening to the episode of Behind the Bastards to get a clearer view of the entire process, not “just” imagining a “net positive” outcome regardless of the path that lead to it.
Edit : sorry but while re-reading what I wrote, somehow confabulating the richest man on Earth for years to Robin Hood shows how excellent his PR work was. Like… what the fuck?!
Edit2: oh yeah and Robin Hood would fight for Big Pharma during a worldwide pandemic, … no, absolutely NOT Robin Hood.
Small Fraction?! It’s been over 90% of income for decades, recently he’s vowed to distribute 99% of not just income but total wealth.
“Forbes magazine ranked him as the world’s wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, his net worth stood at US$113 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world.”
Wake up. Not Robin Hood.
That doesn’t argue any of the things that I said.
Bonus : as others also highlighted Gates isn’t sadly just about software, he’s also, unfortunately, about intellectual property more broadly (because that is how he made his fortune) in health business (not health care) cf e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/
During the pandemic, he crippled COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the global south by pressuring Oxford not to open source their vaccine.
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/
The Gates Foundation backpedaled that stance shortly after. Their initial objection was over quality assurance.
The Gates Foundation backpedaled that stance shortly after
can you provide a source for this?
Their initial objection was over quality assurance
Who is he to decide this? He is not an epidemiologist or a public health expert or a leader of a low-resource nation or even a health professional. He’s a tech billionaire. This is exactly the problem.
Many large US companies, including pharmaceutical drug retailers, directly invest in the Gates Foundation Trust, creating a massive conflict of interest which is rarely talked about.
The Gates Foundation backpedaled that stance shortly after
can you provide a source for this?
Literally the first search result LINK
Who is he to decide this?
He was cohosting the multinational committee event for Gavi, a vaccine alliance which includes the WHO ans UNICEFF. He is widely respected there because he runs an organization which spent decades of providing medicines and vaccines across the globe.
Literally the first search result LINK
This appears to be just a statement of support for “narrow” patent waviers during the pandemic. This is not the same as open licensing the Oxford vaccine and calling this “backpedaling” is misleading at best.
Goalpost successfully shifted, gj team
Question is, how many vaccines would those countries have got if it wasn’t patented?
AstraZeneca sold the vaccines without making a profit
“I haven’t killed as many kids in so short a timeframe,” is the implication here.
Bill Gates might hold the record for number of starving babies saved and illnesses cured, though.
Even if you think his wealth is stolen, can you prove the average american would have done more good with it?
But plenty of Americans are still dying of malnutrition, dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia, and many other preventable diseases. You think we’d be worse off if the average American had more money?
And nothing against helping starving children in foreign countries or whatnot, but if we’re so bad off that people think more police and prisons are the answer we’re clearly underinvesting in our own well-being.
Dehydration is a major cause of pediatric illness and death worldwide, some number between 14% and 30% of fatalities in infants and toddlers.
In the USA it does not even make the top 10, with some number lower than 1.6% according to the CDC.
You’re actually required by law to provide drinkable water to people who ask in some states, though there is no federal recognition. There are also many programs to assist with heating and cooling for those who cannot afford it.
You don’t deserve an extra side of fries more than a starving child in Afghanistan. Get over yourself.
Side of fries? How about a side of affordable housing, affordable health care, and free quality education?
Assume Bill Gates is worth 102,200,000,000 according to Forbes
That could be split evenly among 340 Million americans as $300 each.
Can you afford housing and education with an extra $300?
Not all of us need $300. I don’t and I’m not asking for it. I’m asking for more help for the people that will die or turn to crime because their needs aren’t met.
He’s the lesser of two weevils, though.
Let him out his money where his mouth is
He kinda already has. Supposedly already over 100B in charitable donations and has pledged another 100B (basically all of his fortune at) over the next 20 years
The lesser of two evils are still evil
Yep. Equally evil.
- One guy already donates $100B and pledging most of his fortune
- other guy a Nazi who not only makes no donations despite being at times richest person on the planet, but leveraged his wealth to end government programs assisting the less fortunate both in the us and globally
I can see how these look the same. /s
Woosh
I was promised Bill Gates would give me 5G’s with a vaccine.
