• Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    People like him are legitimately such massive failures.

    Countless people could do better… Millions - no, billions of us. Instead, we have edgelords like him in positions of immense power and influence.

    He is the personification of everything wrong with the world today.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      You wouldn’t get where he is because to be billionaire is to be a sociopath.

      Unless you inherit your fortune, you’ve crushed countless businesses and employees just to get more money.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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      5 months ago

      Amen to that.

      The fact that people idolize him just boggles the mind. How much of a failure does someone have to be to look at Musk and go “this is my kind of guy”?

    • where_am_i@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      if you could so easily have done better, why didn’t you?

      Or do you mean growing up in South Africa was a generational privilege you didn’t have access to?

        • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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          5 months ago

          Hey, Elon (or was it his incestuous pedophile of a father?) said they barely made a few hundred thousand dollars with it (N decades ago, so inflation adjusted that’s probably at least a million). They were practically destitute!

      • barsquid@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Username fits. How can you be aware of what country he is from without being aware of the apartheid emerald mine?

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Hi Elon.

        Because not everyone can have rich parents and their connections. But I know you are just arguing in bad faith.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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      5 months ago

      The best trick conservatives have managed to pull is to convince people that everybody is as unhinged, corrupt and immoral as they are. “Both sides” aren’t the same.

      • JoShmoe@ani.social
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        5 months ago

        Saying sides is a bit too black and white for me. But I suspect the overall corruption between the establishment is not equal.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          there’s one general group of people who want to help feed people and make everyone as happy as possible, one group that just sort of doesn’t care about anything, and one group that genuinely doesn’t seem to understand that other people have feelings and emotions.

          • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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            5 months ago

            one group that genuinely doesn’t seem to understand that other people have feelings and emotions.

            Those are called conservatives:

            In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent either left-wing or right-wing political policies. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism were associated with right-wing political orientation, whereas narcissism and psychopathy were associated with political extremism. Moreover, the relationships between personality and right-wing political orientation and extremism, respectively, were relatively independent from each other.

            We found eleven significant correlations between conservative [Moral Intuition Survey] judgments and the Dark Triad – [narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy,] all at significance level of p<.00001 – and no significant correlations between liberal [Moral Intuition Survey] judgments and the Dark Triad. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three “dark and antisocial” personality traits, our results raise some prima facie worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments

            I ran a follow-up study testing the Dark Triad against conservative and liberal judgments on 15 additional moral issues. The new issues examined include illegal immigration, abortion, the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the war on terrorism, laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and environmentalism. 1154 participants […] Twenty-two significant correlations were observed between “conservative” judgments and the Dark Triad (all of which were significant past a Bonferonni-corrected significance threshold of p = .0008), compared to seven significant correlations between Dark Triad and “liberal” judgments (only one of which was significant past p = .0008).

        • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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          5 months ago

          So you’d agree it’s not in fact accurate to say that this applies to most politicians today?

  • Cossty@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Are there any billionaires who actively use their wealth for good? I only know about 2 and even those idk if I should count. One was some guy that gave all his billions to charity and kept for himself only one million. Other is bezos’s ex wife, as far as I know she periodically sends very large sums of money to charity.

    Idk I feel like writing a check for charity is not good enough, they could be so much more active and done lot more if they idk… build hospital, shool… cheap housing etc.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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      5 months ago

      I’m of the “there are no ethical billionaires” school of thought. And veeeery often the charities they do give to are some sort of tax evasion schemes that employ eg. family members and that only actually use a tiny percentage of the “donated” funds for actual charity

    • fellowmortal@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      An individual giving money to good causes will always be limited by the fact that it is based on the whims/biases of that individual. So, it is possible to see that some billionaires like Bill Gates and (dare I say it…) J K Rowling give substantial amounts to charities - we can also see that they are donating to personal pet causes. Society already has a way for rich people to give to a structured system that (attempts to) give(s) out the money to a wide variety of causes - its called tax and the system is government! If these people who society has allowed to become so wealthy just paid taxes and supported a proper, fair government then they wouldn’t need charities… but then they wouldn’t get to name buildings after themselves.

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      George Clooney is worth 450 million and has his satellite project. Any possible “ethical billionaire” probably lives a private life or has diverted enough of their wealth to preclude themselves from being a billionaire.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Bill Gates has given huge amounts to charity, as in a massive chunk of his net worth, he eventually plans to give away the vast majority of it.

    • VicksVaporBBQrub@sh.itjust.worksM
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      5 months ago

      The 2006 secret santa guy who handed-out large sums of cash to people who were shopping in thrift secondhand stores. Billionaire or millionaire? Wiki says, “Stewart made his fortune through cable television and long-distance calling”. Plus I recall a vague memory from the news where he said, “I’ve been in Forbes Top 100 everything far longer that I can remember”. So that’s something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Stewart_(philanthropist)