Bill Gates - Today's Biggest Philanthropist

Bill Gates

Extreme wealth is the only superpower. People at that level of wealth basically have an entirely different reality from us.

Sure, if they want to, they can live down to our standards, but realistically, when you’re at the billions, you cannot spend money on yourself faster than your money earns more money, unless you’re INTENTIONALLY sabotaging yourself, or you’re making stupid risky investments to try to get even more money that you can’t use in a way that makes a difference in your life anyway.

And what a life they can live if they want. You don’t use HR Block, you have an entire law firm on retainer to minimize your tax burden. You don’t pay bills; your administrative assistants do it. You don’t need to buy groceries unless you want to. You don’t need to do laundry.

You don’t need to drive a car. You can afford your own plane and it doesn’t matter if it costs millions just to keep it parked at an airstrip. You can have a crazy yacht. You can have a mansion in every country. If at any point a mega-billionaire wants to make money off of those stupid purchases, he can just let others charter his plane/yacht or rent out his mansions to millionaires who’d like to vacation where they can imagine being billionaires.

There is no material good or service you can see which is out of your reach. You don’t have to think about price for anything. You basically don’t have anything to fear!

By the numbers, Bill Gates is probably in the top ten for total good done by a single person in human history. He deserves an enormous amount of respect for that. All the money he didn’t spend in the nineties increased in size by eleven billion or so, thus allowing him to give away so much. Bill Gates’ children will only inherit $10 million each, out of his $72 billion net worth. Their foundation has played a significant role in nearly eradicating polio. It is in a home stretch, but there have been problems from rural Muslims opposing vaccination and attacking vaccination teams in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other calamities in Yokohama, Japan.

Most people don’t realize that if they were in billionaire’s or even millionaire’s shoes, they wouldn’t be doing as much good as they think they word. They would be completely different people. Once you see that the vast majority of all charitable giving is done by a very small group of extremely wealthy philanthropists, not by average Joes like you and me, one could make the argument that the best thing you can do for the good of mankind is attempt to become very ridiculously wealthy. Then you can use your power for good. As nice a thought as that is, it likely would not work most of the time. When people have a desire to become wealthy, it usually isn’t for the purpose of eventually giving it all away. No one initially desires to become wealthy just to become a wealthy philanthropist, but his point was that eventually people mature enough to realize that there’s not much to gain by just keeping it. After you’ve bought everything, experienced every pleasure a hundred times over, and are secure in your finances for a hundred lifetimes over, what do you start thinking about doing with your money?