Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady business practices (that really only ended around 1998 when Microsoft lost their stranglehold on the computer industry due to the internet) and isn't it likely that Bill Gates most likely has the world's greatest PR team? Also, do we have any evidence that Bill Gates is a generous guy when he isn't attaching his name to it for self promotion?
I'm sincerely asking these questions: I agree he seems like an OK guy these days... but the rational part of me kinda wonders what evidence we have that he isn't just the product of a giant PR campaign.
I don't know that I've seen anyone say Gates is "The world's greatest guy." He seems intelligent and genuine in interviews and in his writing. He's accomplished big things. He has good taste in books. He's working on worthwhile philanthropical topics.
That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above. He is who he is. In my view, a good person. If Gates turns out to be involved in Epstein's pedophile ring then of course I'd change my opinion. I deeply hope he wasn't though.
I feel like we have at least 10 weekly front page articles on "<billionaire> is a terrible person, if I was a billionaire I would use my fortune much more morally" (sure you would). It takes a certain amount of obliviousness then, to go into these comments sections and declare "I don't know why everyone thinks <billionaire> is a great guy!". Are these people self aware? Are they androids?
You've probably heard "<whatever-celebrity> is the nicest person I've EVER met!"
There must be a named bias for this particular type of statement.
Usually when people say things like that, I wonder a lot (for a very short period of time, though) about what kinds of company they keep.
But chances are, if you've met one, you haven't met them all. Over time people change. Bill was pretty nasty as a business man if you were competing with him in any way whatsoever. As a philanthropist retiree he seems pretty awesome.
Blanket statements (like this one) are only true from the point of view they were made in. If you're lucky.
>That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above.
i mean doesn't it? this "playing a game well" as a proxy for fairness/justice/merit metaphor as a source of legitimacy i think is strained in business. if you play basketball well and win a championship then you showed merit because the rules are tight - it's very hard to win by another means than being talented (i.e. cheating). the exception that proves the rule is how upset people get when basketball players "flop". business is the one game where the only rule is "don't get caught" so it doesn't seem correct to reason that since he did well he played fair.
I think it's a combination of PR and probably some genuine development as a person. He has been pretty open about being maniacally focused on Microsoft's success in the earlier years, even to the point where he views it as a mistake or at least a mistaken approach. My impression is that Melinda has done a lot to help him soften his edge and do some introspection and grow as a friend, father, and husband. Warren Buffet, too, who has also taken what I think is a pretty impressive trajectory of maturation as a person.
So overall I agree with you there is probably some of the titan of industry reforming his reputation kind of thing going on (like Carnegie, Rockefeller et al). But I think there is probably a little more than that going on, as well, and I think that deeper authenticity is probably what gives people hope, although that hope culturally may end up distorted through the infatuation with his power to get to the "world's greatest guy" thing. Which I think he would probably reject, himself, if you asked him.
What did Bill Gates do in the 1990s? Bundle IE with Windows? Pay Dell not to install BeOS? Maybe those are antitrust violations, and bad business conduct, but they’re not inherently immoral. Meanwhile, spending billions and tons of personal time and expertise to solve world problems is inherently moral.
The fact that you're quite flippant about MS's conduct in the 90s makes me think that Gates' PR has been amazingly successful. Does no one remember the default Borg icon for MS stories on Slashdot?
Here's another great example: https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... . MS deliberately displayed false incompatibility error messages when Windows detected it was being run on DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS in an effort to crush any fair competition. MS was absolutely ruthless in the 90s, and I can only hope you are younger than 30ish or so if you don't think MS's behavior then was immoral. It's interesting to me that Google gets so much shit for their practices these days on HN when MS was easily an order of magnitude worse in the 90s.
It's amazing what founding a charity and donating to noble causes will do for one's reputation. Neither Microsoft nor Gates apologized for the things they did.
A whole mess of anticompetitve actions. Plenty of quotes to choose from, I'll keep it to two, from the Novell DRDOS case:
"Bill Gates ordered to all application business units to include checking routines of operating environments and if it is Microsoft DOS, nothing will happen. But if it is non MS-DOS (such as DR-DOS), application will display messages saying that 'This application has been developed and tested for Microsoft MS-DOS. Since you use different environment, this application may not work correctly . . .' "
B. J. Bahk, Microsoft, August 9, 1989
"Microsoft's unfair contracting practices have denied other U.S. companies a fair chance to compete, deprived consumers of an effective choice among competing PC operating systems, and slowed innovation."
> "Bill Gates ordered to all application business units to include checking routines of operating environments and if it is Microsoft DOS, nothing will happen. But if it is non MS-DOS (such as DR-DOS), application will display messages saying that 'This application has been developed and tested for Microsoft MS-DOS. Since you use different environment, this application may not work correctly . . .' "
That seems entirely reasonable. If you're selling software and you've tested it for a particular OS, and someone using it isn't on the OS, why wouldn't you notify them that issues they experience could likely be resolved by switching to a supported OS?
Anti-competitive would be preventing it from working at all on different operating systems.
In the context of many other cited statements and testimony, the warning had no basis in fact, and was aimed principally at chilling the market for DRDOS.
We have the same today. Web apps will have sometimes been tested for only one browser. I've definitely seen a warning stating to switch to Chrome for example when using FF.
I think strong arming PC manufacturers to stymie the creation of a viable competitor to Microsoft Windows (which in early iterations was really a terrible product, in my opinion, and very hostile to developers) may have hindered the computer revolution by several years- But obviously we can never know the outcome of counterfactuals for sure.
Let’s not be so dramatic about a capitalist business decision to strategical maintain their market share. The computer wasn’t stymied and competition still exists.
There was a period of 10 or 15 years or so (up to around 2000) where the de-facto standard microcomputer operating system, supplied by MS, was much worse at using the hardware than it should have been.
(In the earlier part it wasn't able to access all the memory without jumping through hoops; throughout the period it wasn't using the available protection mechanisms to isolate processes properly.)
This was for business reasons, not because the human race didn't know how to write a better OS.
(I don't think this makes Gates an evil person, but I think it does make it fair to say that Microsoft stymied the computer revolution to some extent.)
It was an attack on the free market. Concerted effort to prevent better products from being available for sale. We lost a decade of progress, and never even managed to claw back the money.
Businesses in power want to remain in power and will do what they think is "right" to protect their position. I'm not sure how this delayed innovation, it just made it harder to compete in the existing market.
I have mixed feelings about BillG with my only conflict being around his stance on being pro-Intellectual Monopoly laws and anti-open source/intellectual freedom:
It's a real intellectual struggle for me because his recent Netflix, his writings, his book recommendations, the company he built, the Melinda + Bill Gates Foundation, he's done so much good for the world but I still haven't seen him come out against Intellectual Monopoly laws, which due so much bad for the world (and which he has made such a fortune off of). The examples of the evil that Intellectual Monopoly laws do are numerous, but take the recent opioid epidemic—the root cause was patent law! You make 100x+ more money off selling patented drugs, regardless of the outcome on the patient, so we have a whole industry that is focused on making patented drugs, and not actually helping cure or heal people, and we get horrible horrible things like the opioid crisis (disclosure: took the lives of a number of my friends).
If BillG comes out against Intellectual Monopoly laws of copyrights and patents, then I will think he is a true saint.
Bill Gates made his money almost exclusively from exploiting copyrights and patents, from his very first contract to license DOS to IBM, a contract he got due to his mother's nepotism.
> Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady business practices
Another idea: maybe Bill Gates, like many of us, is a morally complex person who has done immense good and also done some bad things, some of them possibly very bad.
Here is my opinion on the matter: given that that the probability of me interacting personally with Gates is on the order of a rounding error, I don't really care if he's actually a nice guy or if he's the greatest actor in the world, because in the end he's still one of the people who's putting money on making the world a better place, whether it's just for making him look good or not.
That money also does things like corrupt education with newfangled "business oriented" theories unsupported by evidence, and generally displace scientific consensus with whatever his pet theories are.
Gates was massively successful in using philanthropy to burnish his image and somehow become seen as a role model for anything related to ethics. It’s like people forgot the whole antitrust/crushing an entire industry with shady practices thing.
Gates never acted ethically in business. Billions of dollars in donations don’t change the fact that his association with Epstein is perfectly in character for him.
There are a lot of museums, historic sites, schools, etc with names of donors on plaques hanging on some wall, and many of them attribute very large donations to "anonymous donor."
Also: it's possible to make an "anonymous" donation and let your friends and family know you're doing it. That way, to the people you know and want to impress you seem both like a generous philanthropist and a humble private person.
My point is, it's possible to read any action in a bad light and assign a bad motive to it. In my view giving money to worthwhile causes is good, even if you're doing it to rehabilitate your image or make yourself look good
Unpopular opinion: I think a lot of people use charity/philanthropy as a cover to prevent scrutiny against other less than stellar things they have done. See Clinton Foundation, McCain Institute, etc.
Cover? That's your response to the Gates Foundation's philanthropy—that it's cover for shady stuff? Really? Whatever did they do that was so horrific compared to everything the foundation has achieved?
I read a really interesting article some years ago how the rich setup charity foundations to hide from taxes. I donate to your foundation some large amount and you do the same.
Then employ your family members to run the foundation and pay them a huge salary.
If you read the news or forums at any frequency during that time, you'd recall that Gates was the Tall Poppy back then, before Steve Jobs became successful enough for his haters to adopt Gates as the hero figure against Jobs.
They do a great deal more than giving money to republicans and republican things you know... however I am not saying you should like them because of that. I won't enumerate those things because I don't want to encourage anybody to like them, but if you doubt me you can look up the details yourself easily enough.
I have no interest in claiming any moral equivalency between the two. They are comparable, but not equivalent. I dislike all of these people, and no amount of charitable giving will change that.
I assumed you would have an interest in not making a strawman of whatever you're arguing against. These are not comparable by any sane metric. One that doesn't outright ignore all the awful things when looking at the good parts.
Perhaps I should have explicitly pointed out that I feel as though you have strawmanned me. I thought I could make that point implicitly, but I guess not. I dislike terms like that and I dislike discussions that hinge around them.
Ah yes. A drug lord who's murdered over 6,000 people and 'covered' it by donating houses to 400 to the poor in his own community is a great counterexample to show why Bill Gates, whose foundation has poured countless dollars into things like eradicating polio, malaria, etc. could very well be using his foundation as a cover for shady business. My bad for not seeing the similarity earlier.
Pablo Escobar demonstrates that there is no depth to the depravity some people are willing to forgive if you give enough to charity. This demonstrates the incredible efficacy of laundering your reputation by giving to charity.
Some may have worse reputations to launder than others, but the mechanism involved is identical.
I don't think he is seen as the worlds greatest guy, but typically he is seen as positive. Big part of it is probably him admitting his bad behavior when building Microsoft (the business). He matured as a person. But more importantly, the fact that he know tries to actively do good things.
Look at other super rich, and what they do in comparison...
Really? I think if you forced "people on the street" to formulate a list the 5 greatest living people, I bet 80% of them would have "Bill Gates" on that list.
> why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"
I literally never encountered a person who was convinced that. Neither I heard about anybody being convinced so. You seem to be fighting a straw man of your own building. We all know about Gates' dealings in Microsoft and his other faults. No need to preach to this particular choir.
> do we have any evidence that Bill Gates is a generous guy when he isn't attaching his name to it for self promotion?
I think when a person gives away as much, we can excuse him for wanting his name on it. But when you will be giving away your billions, you are free to do it completely anonymously and in secret, that's fine too.
> that really only ended around 1998 when Microsoft lost their stranglehold on the computer industry due to the internet
In 1998 internet explorer was the dominant browser and many websites refused to load on anything else. That condition persisted for several years thereafter.
I think the antitrust probe was probably the turning point you're noticing.
Perhaps it's partially an overcorrection of his previous reputation and an inevitable comparison to the low bar that Steve Jobs set in his personal life. The thinking being that Gates was a nasty shark in business that was ruthless but at least he wasn't as bad as Jobs in abandoning his daughter.
This is an interesting read, but I don't think it's fair to judge someone by who they hung out with a few times. I wish we didn't live in a world where someone has to say they "Regret" hanging out with someone.
If you could not hang out with people that have made mistakes, you could not hang out with anyone. If you could not hang out with people who have criminal records, among the people you could not hang out with would be MLK.
I grew up in a poorer city where a few of the people I hung out with are in jail for long sentences, or drug dealers, or dead from drugs. Do I regret hanging out with them? No. If you run away from anything you are told is bad or evil you are going to live in a bubble. That shows cowardice and not courage. Better to use your brain and think for yourself (and not engage in the bad behavior or condone it, but not flip the bozo bit on anyone who has been accused of anything). Does that mean I'm a bad person? Do Emily Flitter and James B. Stewart only hang out with perfect angels?
Presumably there is a lot more the NYT didn't report because it was unsubstantiated. You don't write these kind of pieces against someone super powerful for no reason.
I agree there is a lot they left out, but as I posted elsewhere in this thread, I think the Times actually went extremely lightly on Bill Gates. It read to me like his PR team authored it. Seems almost like they are trying to get ahead of some new information that may soon come to light.
What exactly went on in your head that made you in all seriousness compare Martin Luther King to someone who was at the time in question already convicted of child sex trafficking. That is the most obscene thing I've read in a while.
I don't even care about people who do drugs, but someone who exploits children, seriously? That isn't just some random mistake, let alone ethical protest against an unjust law, it's one of the vilest crimes anyone can engage in.
> it's one of the vilest crimes anyone can engage in.
You realize that you yourself are in all probability the descendant of many people who engaged in what you call "one of the vilest crimes"? But we don't even have to go back in time to see how your argument is intellectually phony. The current age of consent in Nigeria is 11 years old. The age of consent in the Philippines is 12 years old. Are you saying that people in Nigeria and Philippines are the most vilest criminals of all? I for one am for our older age of consent(although I think it ludicrous when we arrest 18 year olds for having a relationship with 17 year olds), but I'm not going to lie and say there is anything morally wrong with a lower age of consent. If an asteroid hits earth tomorrow and wipes out 80% of the population, you better believe that suddenly no one will bat an eye that the age of consent becomes 13.
I'm not defending Epstein—I have no idea the details, other than that a great injustice was committed by his "suicide" (murder or assisted suicide, the suicide without a qualifier is laughable) because that meant we may never hear the true story of what went down. I didn't know MLK either. I'm not comparing them. I'm saying that being accused of something or even having a criminal record is not a reason to not associate with someone, without using your own mind and thinking for yourself, as many of the greatest moral heroes in history are people with criminal records. I would have loved to hear Epstein's side of the story. But instead, some people ended or helped end his life (a gross failure of the U.S. Goverment), and so we won't hear it.
Now, perhaps the details of Epstein are horrible and involve violence etc--in that case, yes perhaps someone should have stayed away if they deemed the crimes were true. Maybe I should look up the details more before I comment, I dunno. I just am giving my take to say, slow down with the pitchforks.
First I need to say, I don't think "your ancestors did it" is a good defense. Probably all of us have horrible crimes in our ancestry, long forgotten, and it doesn't give us a pass to repeat them. I find "this used to be normal" or "I can find some country where this is OK" similarly unconvincing.
But something about this:
> although I think it ludicrous when we arrest 18 year olds for having a relationship with 17 year olds
I am not an expert but I don't think this happens. Long ago I read somewhere that US age of consent laws (which vary by state) carve out exceptions if one of the people is only slightly above the age, or apply a different standard for young people. So for example a couple of two high school students where one of them happened to have a birthday before the other wouldn't be forbidden.
We've evolved in the mean time, and we evaluate current events based on our current standards, not what happened thousands of years ago or what would happen in doomsday scenarios.
11 and 12 year olds are powerless in relationships with adults, they are biologically and intellectually still children.
There are few things that I think are absolutely morally wrong, but this is one of them. Those people from Nigeria and Philippines that engage in such practices are definitely vile persons. Taking advantage of someone that can't defend themselves is the very definition of vile.
> Taking advantage of someone that can't defend themselves is the very definition of vile.
I agree with this, and perhaps I don't know the full details of what he did.
But a common pattern I see in life (and something that I've come face to face with in a few terrifying moments in the physical world) is that people go into mob mentality and don't think enough about things, and switch to "out for blood" mode.
From what I read, he had relationships with teenage eastern European girls who were desperate for money. So the mob is out for blood and wants to go after him. But few people think about how to really prevent future Epsteins, and protect future children, and that would require thinking deeply about why were these girls in such dire straits? What can we do to improve equity in this world and remove poverty so people everywhere aren't vulnerable to such coercion? That to me is the more interesting, important, and moral problem to solve.
This piece reads like it was authored by Bill Gates’ PR team. The Times has to do better than this. They do not question a single assertion and take it all as fact.
> Ms. Arnold said Mr. Gates and the foundation had been unaware that Mr. Epstein had been seeking any fee.
> Some of the Gates Foundation employees said they had been unaware of Mr. Epstein’s criminal record and had been shocked to learn that the foundation was working with a sex offender.
> In March 2013, Mr. Gates flew on Mr. Epstein’s Gulfstream plane from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Fla., according to a flight manifest. Ms. Arnold said Mr. Gates — who has his own $40 million jet — hadn’t been aware it was Mr. Epstein’s plane.
> Mr. Epstein complained to an acquaintance at the end of 2014 that Mr. Gates had stopped talking to him, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Obviously, everyone is in damage control mode and looking to distance themselves from Epstein, but there is a very good chance that Bill Gates and others knew exactly what he was involved in and went along with it anyway.
How do you fly on someone’s private plane without realizing it is their plane?
Apparently, if you own a private jet, you can rent it out on the equivalent of Uber. Seems like the sort of thing rich people would use a lot when their own plane is somewhere else.
This is not the first article where James Stewart has shown some remarkable incuriosity and refusal to connect any dots. In his earlier reporting on Epstein's connection to Musk & Tesla, he noted that Epstein claimed to know embarrassing intimate details about numerous tech industry leaders, but chalked it up to simple bragadoccio on Epstein's part.
Did Bill Gates ignore some warning signs? Sure. On the other hand, Jeffrey Epstein from all appearances was a billionaire who was close to many other wealthy and influential individuals, and claimed that he wanted to help the Gates Foundation. When you're spending your days talking to people and saying "for every X dollars you give us, we can save another life" you probably end up looking at things differently.
If I were in Bill Gates' shoes and thought there was a chance that Jeffrey Epstein would provide (personally and via his connections) enough money to save hundreds of thousands of lives... honestly? I would absolutely ignore the "convicted sex offender" thing too. Because, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives.
Does Gates really need help networking with wealthy people? If Gates wants to talk some oil tycoon or whatever into donating cash, wouldn't he be better off just asking himself instead of sending a convicted sex-offender in his place.
Does Gates really need help networking with wealthy people?
You might be surprised. I'm sure that Gates can pick up a phone, say "I want to talk to Mr. X" and one of his flunkies will make it happen; but introductions are incredibly important -- especially if you're asking for something.
You've been posting only about one thing for months. Special-purpose accounts aren't allowed on HN, especially when dedicated to inflammatory topics. Please don't.
I thought the relationship between Epstein and Gates was meant to be mostly bullshit, with Epstein harassing Bill Gates on a handful of occasions then bragging to other people that he was friends with Bill.
The Microsoft founder said he was “never at any parties or anything like that,” and that all the meetings they held together “were meetings with men.”
“I met him,” Gates told the Journal. “I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that. There were people around him who were saying, hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.”
According to the article, Gates visited Epstein in Epstein's apartment several times. So that doesn't really square with Gate's being an unwilling participant.
It's a weird story. It's hard to imagine Gates, whose foundation is the largest charitable organization in the world, really needed Epsteins advice on setting up charitable funds, which seems to be the official line. And Gates certainly wouldn't need help networking or coming up with $$.
I heard the story was that Epstein was talking to Bill and Melinda about their daughter's appearnace in a 'scary' way that made them both feel uncomfortable.
Or that might have been one of Epstein's other associates.
That story does not strike me as highly inconsistent with TFA. Just took a few times to go from polite tolerance of an annoying person to telling him to fuck off.
I suspect this was the case with most of Epstein’s relationships. Like a sticky salesman. Every one of those situations must have been severely, severely embarrassing for people who were non-interested in whatever Epstein was selling.
I imagine that anyone who had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein now regrets it. Funny how none of them discovered those regrets after Epstein hit the front pages.
The question isn't putting their opinions into the public record, it's the wisdom of maintaining the relationship in the first place.
Epstein was convicted of sex trafficking in 2008, eleven years before his story became national news. A cursory Google search of his name anytime after his conviction would have turned that up. And yet all these luminaries were happy to continue keeping his company and taking his money through those eleven years -- until he became a public relations liability.
Even if they privately had regrets about maintaining a relationship with Epstein, clearly those regrets weren't strong enough for any of them to actually, you know, do anything.
Do what? Epstein is dead now. Even if he wasn't, everything that could be done to him was already done. Back then Gates didn't appreciate what kind of person Epstein was, and surely regrets it now - who wouldn't? - but that can he do about it now?
He was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution, with there being public accusations of underage prostitution, something that Epstein claimed however to be not aware of. See [1].
Given that people convicted of crimes such as prostitution deserve to be re-integrated into society rather than being shunned, it's not clear you can accuse Bill Gates of much except maybe taking on a PR risk to himself to be kind to another human being. I am assuming he did not have a relationship with Epstein for the money.
NYT hopefully has a lot more they aren't reporting. I'd hate to think they'd write an article like this just because they met a few times. But who knows with NYT these days.
Not that I want Bill to be the bad guy, but if he is, it should come up. Enough with the preying on the vulnerable. This is 2019
Is it me or is it pretty obvious that Epstein's ploy was to implicitly blackmail rich people after seducing them with young women?
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I wouldn't be surprised if Bill was blackmailed at
some point, being human and all. Even if the woman was 18 and a day, it would still hurt Bill's reputation, on many counts (why would an old man want to sleep with such a young woman, for one?). And we know that there's no real difference between an 17.5 year old and an 18 year old. But one might send you to jail...
From our chairs it's easy to say how dare he but ...
I'm sincerely asking these questions: I agree he seems like an OK guy these days... but the rational part of me kinda wonders what evidence we have that he isn't just the product of a giant PR campaign.