“He could have just given the company to his kids. They could have kept running the company according to daddy-dearest’s wishes”
Um, that’s not how kids work.
And his kids are probably middle-aged. So even if they are decent people, that only pushes off the risk by 20 years or so.
ETA: Ok, next point is that the family keeps the voting shares. Yeah, that means that you still have to worry about kids and grandkids being evil, but with 98% of the shares NOT owned by them, they won’t profit all that much from being evil.
If they do decide to put profit over principle, the non-profit will get a lot of that money, so that mitigates the damage somewhat.
Next point, the donation of 3 billion dollars worth of shares wasn’t that charitable because it saved the family 1.2 billion dollars of taxes. Ok… But paying the taxes would have left them with 1.8 billion more than they have now, right? I feel like a scheming billionaire could find a less expensive way of avoiding taxes, one that leaves them with MORE money than they’d have had if they had just paid the taxes rather than less.
I keep watching…
EDIT 2: The Holdfast Collective doesn’t even have a website! Oh-noes!!! How shady!
Ok, they are set up in a way that allows them to make political contributions and lobby, rather than just do charitable work. Given how much money is spent on influencing policy against environmental protections, having 100 million bucks a year to influence politicians towards environmental protection seems not like a bad thing. Political solutions are more systemic than a hundred million in charity work anyway.
I keep watching.
EDIT 3: because of this donation, his kids will have massive political influence for the rest of their lives. Whereas, if they had inherited the three billion dollar company, they’d be nobodies whom no one would give the time of day?
I keep watching?
EDIT 4: “Look, I’ll grant Chouinard’s good intentions here.”
Ok, but that’s basically the thing. If the intentions are good, this was a good act.
If you want to make a positive impact on the world, and your choices are to spend 100 million dollars a year, indefinitely, lobbying for good causes, OR increase the U.S. federal revenues for one single year by 0.003%, which would you do?
That .003% comes from a 1,2000,000,000 addition to the US’ 40,000,000,000,000 annual revenues.
I guess I keep watching…
EDIT 5: Ok, I don’t need to keep watching, because it looks like his argument is turning into something along the lines of “While Chouinard is doing something good here, the system is bad.”
Fair enough.
But if you are a billionaire operating in a bad system, what is your best course of action?
Change the system? Cool, how do you do that?
You could use the money your company earns to lobby for the changes that you believe in!
EDIT 6: I kept watching.
Wal-Mart is bad.
I mean, I get his big point: we shouldn’t have billionaires. But I went in expecting to learn that this was an actively bad act by Chouinard, rather than that is was a good act that is still part of a bad system.
I have stopped watching at 12:35 (out of 20 something), so maybe there is more to it.
