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 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.
Convicted monopolist. Slimy and dishonest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE
His direct influence is in numerous places in the Horrorween Documents.
Screw that guy.
yeah, it’s basically this kind of shit from every wealthy business man. Even the fabled Rockefeller was hated for the same reasons, dude controlled 80% of global/american oil refining and people still hated him, even though his product was the market leader.
I think that is lack of competition regulation.
yeah, it’s pretty common for any super aggressive business sector, they just completely vore the entire market sector in hopes of gaining total control, shits weird.
Monopoly is a super profitable and comfortable position, but it’s when capitalism fails.
…wish I hadn’t looked up vore…
Was going to say this.
Dude literally broke the law, and then settled to avoid paying for acquiring fees.
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.
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.
Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft’s software empire.
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.
It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.
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.
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.
Do you mean when he started to chip the population through the covid vaccines? jkjk
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.
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.
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 huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today,
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.
Proprietary software lynched what should have been a global birth of inventive software engineers.
That actually happened. Just wasn’t perpetuated after 1995 or something.
Adding to that, Bill Gates put quite some effort into image building and mostly succeeded.
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
While at the sametime being a gross person.
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
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
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He was a big defender of paedophilia, necrophilia, incest, and bestiality. He thinks people should have the right to fuck their pets or their children. Not to mention the reports on his creepy behaviour with women.
Stallman is an incredible steward of FOSS, but he is not a decent guy overall.
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.
Not to mention the reports on his creepy behaviour with women.
That - yeah.
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.
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.
and incest with mutual agreement (between adults) are fucked up, but should be defended.
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.
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
“I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
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.
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…
as long as no one is coerced
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.
“I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”
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 I’m unwilling to believe it.
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
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
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.
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.
I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable
Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:
- Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
- Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
- Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.
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 🔔
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.
Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
It’s well known that ORACLE is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Gates was always a dirtbag.
He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.
Maybe a hot take or I’m not education on him enough. Seems like Gates is a great guy personally with his fundraisers and charitable programs. But as a business man he is awful because of the reasons you mentioned.
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…
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.
fundraisers and charitable programs
I’m pretty sure most of that is tax-deductible.
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.
Dude was friends with Epstein after his first conviction for pedophilia. Had sleepovers at his mansions and shit.
Bill Gates admirable? Did we grow up in the 90s in the same dimension? Him and Windows were the butt of almost every IT joke, and there was his whole thing of never doing anything original or innovative except gobbling up companies and tech who were. Then the court battles. Those were a pretty big thing, even as a teen I followed the progress of it on the news. Then holding the whole web back for almost a decade as we had to deal with the monopoly of IE.
<blink><marquee>
My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!
They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.
There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.
You listed a bunch of people who were “good”, but honestly, none of them were. You just weren’t necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.
Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it’s just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.
thanks, I didn’t know anything at all about his daughter (after reading your comment) and found this pretty good article/interview with her.
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
the least predatory ways to do microtransactions
Damning with faint praise.
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.
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
Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.
Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of “human” in the company’s choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be “good”, or they leave.
The information technology industry in the US has always had a thread of Ayn Rand’s philosophy running through it. Some of the people who were part of the computer revolution in the 70s and 80s knew her personally, and thought of themselves as Randian heroes (which is to say, they were narcissists). This is sort of a foundational aspect of the culture of Silicon Valley, so it’s always been there.
I highly recommend the documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton
And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.
There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.
This is okay but my post about AI is not? Same as reddit 😔.
Narcicistic sociopaths are the best profile to boost profit. Even some of the “good guys” you listed as founders were some trashy pricks.
when I was growing up
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.
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.
