I feel like a lot of people either weren’t around for the '80s and '90s (in fact, more and more as time goes on…) or have completely forgotten what Bill Gates was like then. Basically all advancement in computers, software and networking happened despite him. The great secret that allowed Linux to change the world was precisely that Bill Gates couldn’t buy it and kill it.
Don’t get me wrong, on the list of billionaires he is definitely one of the least assholish, but that’s a more of a threshold than a bar. His philanthropy with malaria is commendable, but other endeavors (covered elsewhere on this blog) are actually quite destructive and aggressively promote neo-liberalism. We can’t know, but it’s easy to imagine that if he had been paying Eisenhower-era taxes on his wealth instead of pocketing it, it’s likely that a great deal more good would have been done with that money.
I have to laugh, of course, especially about the rationale, but obviously if you’re a billionaire riding coach would generally be unwise, and I appreciate him not running his own aircraft just to push 180lbs across the Atlantic.
