Its just area itself is expensive. Not like owns mansion with a zoo and 100 servants.
Don't try to launder it through lying with percentages. It's not modest.
Modest was qualified. The statement is accurate. Your objection doesn’t make sense.
> Modest describes someone who is unassuming about their abilities, or something that is limited in size, amount, or reach
Buying a 6 million dollar house is not unassuming.
It’s all relative.
> There's no way in which a $6 million dollar house is "modest".
Relative to his wealth bracket he is being modest but not cheap.
That's moving the goalposts. No one said anything about "relative to his wealth bracket".
And I don't think I have ever heard anyone using a term like "modest house" in proportion to someone's wealth. House-modesty is something people generally use to mean "when compared with other houses in the region".
Original post was "modest for a guy like that"
But at least that's within the realm of "modesty". At least there's at least one element of modesty to it. It's not a multi story 6 million dollar home with a floor to ceiling double floor library.
Although he may have inadvertently destroyed local news by squeezing it of revenue from classified ads (but has since done a lot to fund journalism)
Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.
Have I gotten a bad deal a few times? Yeah. Would I have gotten a better deal elsewhere? Unlikely.
Consider the thesis of the "craigslist is sketchy" argument the next time you look something up on Amazon and the first 3 results are from WODBEP, QXJEFN, and PLUDJ.
IMO the thing that actually spooks people about CraigsList is interacting with strangers, but Facebook isn't better. If you're stalking someone's FB because you want to buy their old TV, well guess what, you're the creep, not them.
It’s weird to me they even carry real estate listings, because I’m surprised anyone would trust them with that kind of money on a good you can’t easily self-validate. I wouldn’t spend more than $100 on something from Craigslist if I wasn’t confident that I can judge the quality of it myself.
> In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40]
> In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41]
> In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43]
Even if you take out revenue from scams, it does not change the question of what Craigslist could or should have done regarding governance.
Craigslist adhered to basic features and community volunteers partly to avoid responsibility.
The org had no problem enforcing its moat around UGC (posts) with lawsuits but only at after extraordinary foot dragging did they implement basic advancements in the best interests of their own community.
This has resulted in untold numbers of scam victims, yes but also it allowed bad landlords, (and tenants) to carry on with no repercussions. This continues, actually.
Craigslist was a benevolent dictator. It squandered an opportunity to be a low profit leader of p2p, instead yielding it to Facebook and a variety of venture backed products.
I have first hand knowledge of Craigslist response to market competition because my cofounder on Gliph and I are the creators of the product that Craigslist privacy relay email service is based on.
This point of who actually created the concept and tech is actually being litigated right now between Apple and a patent troll over the Hide My Email feature of iCloud in Rally vs. Apple Inc.
Anyone who thought they had invented something new here were kidding themselves.
I’d have presumed this would have come up in the evidence for that case but afaik it has not.
IANAL, but perhaps Craigslist’s response to our product, which included blocking its usage on the site after they implanted their version, served as a stronger example of the commercialization of the product still well ahead of the Rally Patent.
https://codamail.com/aboutus.html -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion -- https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html
When I designed our take on it, I was solving a problem I experienced on Craigslist. I had not seen this prior art.
I built a simple refresh for a new email address interface that people really loved to mash, and it is nearly identical to the Use Different Address link behavior on Hide My Email.
To get to my original point, if Craigslist was aware of all of these examples, they did not seem to serve as impetus to provide it, despite it being in the best interest of their users.
I would highlight again that the system described by the Rally patent, if realizable in the example services means these groups also left potentially valuable IP on the table.
As the lawsuit over Hide My Email, afaik, is serious stuff.
I appreciate folks sharing links to prior art. I have more to say, that might explain my initial comment a bit more, but have to wait on that.
You could make your point without this lie. Craigslist moderators are both very active and quick to respond. Their moderation system is explained on the website. Try flagging scams when you see them.
As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.
they don't charge for rental posts in most cities, so your conclusion is false
Even if it was not the original intent, it’s somewhat deceptive to keep it.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-ser...
Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
From what I read back when this happened you have it backwards. The classifieds on CL and other sites for sex were were largely individuals choosing to do it. They were not being trafficked or pimped. By closing those listings down it would end up pushing sex workers to find other sources of clients, like pimps.
Yep. Just like with marijuana and other such "vices", the thing that takes most of the violence and exploitation out of the industries that produce, market, and sell a "vice" [0] is to make it legal to produce, advertise, and sell.
There's also a side angle here where some folks absolutely disbelieve that an attractive human who really enjoys fucking would rather make their own hours getting paid to fuck than get abused by a shitty boss at an entry-level job.
Are there people coerced into sex work? _Absolutely_. But, there are people coerced into nearly every sort of job out there, so that's not saying much.
[0] Well, actually this applies to any industry. No matter what it is, if you have to do illegal shit to create, distribute, and sell it, and if there's notable amount of money to be made in selling it, then there's inevitably gonna be violent folks involved in the process.
The problem with the legalization strategy to reduce violence is that it has its limits.
It turns a high-risk game into a high-volume high-scale game.
It validates the creation of a corporate ecosystem who then are incented to create demand for the "vice" while simultaneously concealing what they know (or come to learn) about the vice's side effects.
Indeed. Organized Crime is [0] known for being entirely up-front about the side-effects of the things they break the law to sell, as well as being extraordinarily circumspect about both whom they take on as customers and how their products and business practices affect the long-term well-being of those customers.
Anyway. I agree that dealing in the public eye and ensuring a merchant's customers can air their grievances in the courts absolutely isn't a magic cure-all. I think we both know that for "vices", it's nearly always better than the black market.
[0] ...not...
US have legal porn industry and its strictly regulated and mostly safe for those wofking in it. Imagine how it would look like if it was illegal too.
Having legal framework and regulation solves problems with exploitation and traffiking though.
If sex work is illegal there will be pimps, illegal ads, criminal organizations facilitate it and abuse.
How can you both preserve peoples rights and also intervene to stop when you subjecivley think something should be regulated?
Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.
I can't claim the changes would be easy to implement, but if they made a FEW small changes the result would be 1000x better.
For example if you want to sell something on Craig's List they do some "you can't make this post because it looks too similar to a previous posting" kind of thing AND you might need a mobile number but somehow someone can stuff 1000 random keywords into a for-sale posting that's not at all about the item? So if you're looking for a "Miata" you'll end up getting listing for a bunch of other cars since someone is gaming the system?
Or it's an option to "reject duplicates" -- why do duplicates or clone postings even show up if they have their "this is too similar to another posting" capability?
Or, Craig's List lets AutoTrader and other "commercial" sites post items but if you want to actually message someone now on AutoTrader you need to upload your DRIVERS LICENSE just to send them a message? So Craig's List is OK with a reciprocal arrangement with a vendor who does not honor the same "equality" rules Craig's List was built on?
Sadly, many years ago I would send feedback to Craig's List and Craig himself would reply. I don't know if he's completely checked out of his site now, but if you're out there Craig a few simple changes could restore the utility of the service which you created. People like me would even PAY to see these improvements.
Craig and James knew damn well where most of their revenue was coming from, and pimps were able to get increasingly bold with their slang, moving from "model" to "escort" to just outright saying "prostitute" because Craigslist didn't care.
They only did something about it in 2010 when public outrage grew and prosecutors - around the world - started investigating.
Craig and James belong in jail cells, not having their di...er, egos, stroked for giving away their money to organizations that help veterans - the most lazy, non-controversial target for a non-profit.
Edit: how many times are you going to post that? You have something against sex workers? Or just Craigslist?
I filed a lawsuit in Santa Clara county for "Fraudulent Misrepresentation" and they settled with me for $5,000. (California law is very good on this. They broke two laws with no cash wages and a non-compliant job posting.) But I also told Craig Newmark, because they had their job listing on Craigslist. He pulled their job listings, and sent me an email assuring me that nobody associated with the company would ever be able to advertise on Craigslist again. I was very impressed.
Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.
That’s quite the understatement. FB marketplace search results are pretty close to useless. Search for something, it will show you maybe a couple of that something and then ads that look like listings, and things that are supposedly related (they aren’t), hours away from your search area. No way to filter or anything. I go out of my way to not use FB marketplace, that’s how bad it is to me.
But it's more likely to be apparent to someone who is a parent (the alternate meaning of my handle).
As a seller, FB marketplace is just a neverending stream of "Is this still available?" "Yes" and then radio silence.
I also found it far less common for CL sellers to share a different price in DMs than they list in the ad. CL users are also better about taking their ad down when the item is sold.
Going to a separate website and (gasp!) sending an actual email or calling someone, those are strong filters for intent that FB Marketplace lacks.
Thanks -- that explains why anonymized email as an ad reply option has (silently) disappeared.
Yes, now there will be arguments about if that’s really Musk’s goal. that’s beside the point. The point is some goals require money than others
I totally see how the acquisition of twitter and funding of probably the worst US government in recent decades is in keeping with that aim. OR perhaps he just wants people to think he's cool, so he invests in "cool" stuff. This is because he has some of those mental health issues lots of absurdly wealthy people do, that results in him feeling like he constantly has to prove himself.
By hiring McKinsey to tell them they need to start selling and and acquire their competitors? That is the only way the unicorns established their position.
squandered?
how about: decided not to become an asshole billionaire like many of the other unicorn asshole billionaires, and help other people instead
I had assumed that the fee portion of the site was substantial enough to cover all costs, and generate perhaps tens of millions of profit (he's well known for having given away money to media, so obviously there's some profit). But I didn't realize that it made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Are there any articles that break down how this pencils out?
Revenue peaked in 2018 at $1 billion.
Throwing money at military veterans doesn't erase the stain of having a hand in the explosion of human trafficking and sexual exploitation Craigslist (and Backpages) enabled.
The FBI arrested Gambino family members for child prostitution, and one of their top ways of soliciting Johns was via paid ads in Craigslist. One state AG counted 200,000 ads a year and estimated the revenue to be almost $2M, in their state alone.
Some folks might not be aware, but human trafficking and slavery are both illegal. Making prostitution and other sex work legal and subject to the same worker protection laws as any other job is the most effective single thing that can be done to remove the foundation from the sex-industry wing of that rotten house. We can't control the priorities of the police, but we can give folks in the industry somewhere to go and safely complain if their workplace is unsafe.
Were I king, I'd (also):
- Create endowments for journalistic orgs. Sufficient that they can maintain financial, and therefore editorial, independence.
- Award lots of grants to independent journalists, to simply do their thing, no strings attached. This ensures plenty of content for those independent orgs.
Currently, investments by non-right-wing donors to non-right-wing orgs are contingent. Metrics, strategy, ideology, blah blah blah. Whereas the right-wing ecosystem doesn't get bogged down by the money chase, endless self-justification, navel gazing, consensus building, etc.
Mr. Newmark gets it! I hope he's as nice in person as he comes off in this article.
Concrete web design? What does that mean?
I guess you mean the site is simple but that's not what brutalism is.
Love news like this, happy tears!
Maybe a DNS-like system for crypto addresses would be a good thing for Craig to setup? One probably already exists. Maybe something like [existing domain].coin - and people can claim their .coin domain by verifying their [existing domain] first.
What happens if 100 billionaires start wanting to offload cash? How can that be efficiently and effectively managed?
Speaking or CL - lots of dormant cities. Shouldn't there be a https://cityname.craigslist.org/feed link to get RSS updates if/when something actually gets posted? Good way to help "starting up" cities.
I asked him one time what he was doing. Answering emails, he said. Customer support emails. I think he really enjoyed that part of the business.
I was on the security team for eBay/PayPal at the time they took a minority stake in Craigslist, and one of the jobs we got was securing their infrastructure (they didn't have a security team).
I wonder if they still have that arrangement with eBay...
Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.
What makes you think rich people keep working to make more money, instead of doing it because they want to build things and want to have the capital to do it? We don't exactly live in the era of inherited wealth anymore.
They absolutely do. I interact with people who do just that.
> You're projecting.
LOL. The last thing I want to do is start a company or try to make $100's of millions.
That is the explicit design of Capitalism yes.
It's literally a system built around "Those who can amass the most capital are explicitly in charge of distributing it."
It cannot go any other way. Without some external forcing, it will always lift up sociopaths who can squeeze more blood from the stone.
It's like getting upset that Apple's reviews aren't impartial and reliably screw over people trying to compete with Apple. Like, what did you expect? What are you going to do to prevent the obvious outcome?
It's easy to forget now with the massive market valuations what Tesla and SpaceX were like in the early days. Both were considered to have a very small chance of success and were in a large sense seen as philanthropic enterprises, intended more to move humanity forward then make a lot of money.
Much of the early investment in these companies and even some of the investment in these companies today is driven by altruistic motives, not personal profit seeking.
While the typical business venture like a new ad network or a social media platform might have some subtle economic benefits that economists can tease out through studying their second and third order effects, I think it's hard to to argue against the notion that the latest mega companies including the AI companies, but especially Tesla and SpaceX, are doing much more good for humanity and have the potential to do much more good for humanity than companies traditionally have. There are already literally hundreds of thousands of people who now have internet connectivity that did not before, thanks to Starlink, for example. Tesla, for its part, has contributed to significantly lower pollutant emissions, especially through its impact on other auto companies, in spurring them to commercialize battery electric vehicles.
And the wealthiest man today, Elon Musk, whatever you may think of him, is not into "ostentatious displays of wealth". The man lives in a tiny fabricated home most of the time, and seems far more concerned with his social causes than personal consumption.
It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has. We should ultimately judge people by that, not abstractly by “charity == good”? If a billionaire donates millions to the Against Malaria Foundation I would judge that differently than a donation to an art museum in a developed country - and I think people should, and it matters morally.
The difference between for profit and non-profit isn’t really important either compared to “what concretely did they spend money on and what does that plausibly achieve”.
(Tbc some cause areas he donates to are explained, and they seem reasonable and close to his life, but unfortunately not in any depth).
He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800...
They spent $23M in 2024, 10.7% went to executives and 24.4% went to other workers.
From the 2025 Impact Highlights of their website:
- 300,000+ military and family veteran families supported
- 12,290 families were helped by Nourish the Service
- 726 virtual, 1567 in person events
- 10,000+ military voices shared through surveys etc.
- 200,000+ new families joined
Tax the richs, or eat them.
When CL bullied people who lightly scraped their site with CFAA threats, the EFF would not help. Ultimately, they ended up on the wrong side of history.
While Musk has created hundreds of thousands of jobs and God knows how many millionaires, Newmark complains about him while having only created around 50 jobs. 50.
Instead of building something else and employing more people he watches TV and feeds pigeons.
Bravo. He's basically a beatnik who won the lottery.
I know. I just have to figure out how to pass off my snark as "effective ambiguity."
He SHALL serve a prison sentence, it MAY be reduced.
For a few years I certainly didn't, despite donating more than 10% of my income to charities, since the standard deduction was increased and the SALT cap was very low.
but empty words to the american working class
it may be too late, now ppl hate the rich
I don't know how long this asymmetric upside down pyramid structure will hold. Monopoly on violence requires participants to believe in its continuity, any fracture in perception no matter how small, will create an increasingly chaotic redistribution effect.
First, it's so easy to start a business in the US.
$1000 (maybe less?) gets you an LLC or an S-Corp, properly done with an accountant. $200/mo gets you a virtual office or a coworking space. Tax code is also friendly to small businesses. Healthcare is the only disadvantage, though you can get on group plans to work around that.
If you have an idea, it's easy (well, easier) to scale it in the US.
Actually, going back to taxes. Tax in the US is CHEAP compared to other developed countries. I met someone from Denmark some time ago that told my wife and I that they left to escape 50% taxes. Here, the worst you'll do is ~38%, federal, state and city combined. This means that you can make great money as a worker bee depending on the industry.
All of this is a major reason why so many people all over the world come to the US, make their money (with enough to send to family back home) and move back.
In American discourse, there's a ton of talk about inequality from the haves against the have-mores, pushing policy that often times will lead to worse outcomes for the have-nots.
Broadly speaking, the median Mississippian is about as rich as the median German, with the tradeoff being that the Mississippian has greater access to private goods (e.g. a fishing boat or a big car), whereas the German has greater access to public goods (e.g. socialized insurance or college).
My point is that even "the poor" in America are really quite well off, and not just in historical terms.
Because most big-city coastal Americans think of the median Mississippian as that way.
> If you neglect everything it takes to live a good life [...]
We're speaking past each other somewhat. You seem to have a belief system that says a good life is not possible without the stuff that Germany provides via taxation and redistribution. Whether that stuff is a necessary or sufficient condition for a good life for you, I'm not sure; but it is clear you place a lot of importance on it.
I'm saying that in America, more of those things are left to choice to the people, and that a good life, even a great life, is available to the average Joe (hence my banging on about the median) in one of the poorest states in the union, to a degree that is not matched anywhere else.
Put another way: you've defined a good life in large part as access to taxpayer-subsidized goods and services, or at any rate the lifestyle outcomes enabled by such access. By that metric, you're right, Mississippi comes behind Germany, and America as a whole likely behind Germany. But if you look at people voting with their feet over the past few decades, more Germans settled in America than the other way around in absolute numbers; which is even more striking if you consider the difference in population. Clearly there exist people who value the stuff that America has to offer that Germany doesn't.
Objectively wrong, because Germany does better in the things that subjectively matter to you?
> Germany's average life expectancy is ahead of Mississippi by 10 years.
Comparing like for like, that gap drops down to 5-6 years and puts Mississippi on par with, say, Thailand or Latvia. Hardly grounds for condemnation.
> Germany ranks as one of the highest in the world in general satisfaction of the people, Mississippi does not.
Those rankings are all stupid, but in most of the ones I've seen, Germany ranks a scant few spots higher than the US. Sure, if Mississippi were a country, the distance would be greater, but how meaningful is it? I just saw one that ranks Saudi Arabia and El Salvador ahead of Spain and Italy[0].
And in any case, why do people keep leaving those satisfactory countries for America?
Different groups of people have different ideas of what "general satisfaction" is. Hence, such cross-group studies are pretty suspect.
This is no good because different companies use different criteria for infant mortality. For example, the US leads the world in trying to save premies, and does well at it. But the failures are counted as infant mortality. Other countries categorize premie death as a miscarriage.
Some societies do not count a baby as an infant until it has survived its first year.
> life expectancy difference
Criminality, drugs, tobacco, alcohol and obesity strongly affect life expectancy. It's an error to blame it all on the health care system.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2026/...
America used to be a great place to be. To put it in perspective, I myself am an American in the top 5% of earning households. I am strongly considering leaving. The value is no longer here. I don't want to live in a country where my healthcare is conditional, on principal. I don't want to live in a country where the Epstein class is protected.
People in America used to pay for healthcare out of pocket, instead of relying on insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
> where the Epstein class is protected
Epstein died in jail.
> The value is no longer here
Rosie O'Donnell didn't stay in Ireland very long.
> I am strongly considering leaving.
Fortunately, you live in a country where nobody is going to stop you from leaving.
He was awaiting trial, so death by his choice wasn't necessarily the justice he deserved.
His co-conspirator is in a cushy prison as a favor from the administration. Trump promised to release files but has been avoiding it in every possible legal way. It appears there are still things missing. What do you call that other than protection? I might buy that there is not great evidence for any more prosecutions, but they are at least reputationally protected as much as possible.
> Rosie O'Donnell didn't stay in Ireland very long.
She has only visited the US, which is congruent with this thread saying it's a less desirable place to live.
Ghislane is in prison. Trump shows no inclination to pardon her.
Rosie shows no sign of ever going back to Ireland.
Biden could have released the Epstein files.
Trump called the police on Epstein.
Trump reportedly called the police in 2006, after their investigation became public, saying "everyone has known he's been doing this." Why didn't he call sooner then? And if he was working with the police, why did he say in 2019 he had no idea of the crimes? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/trump-epstei... That article also quotes the DOJ: "We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the president contacted law enforcement 20 years ago." So the claim is just something in the files, right alongside the worst imaginable allegations against Trump. Do you believe those too?
I believe Biden had legal and procedural reasons not to release them (ongoing cases and keeping DOJ independent), but even without those, the argument cuts both ways: Trump could have released them in 2017. He could have released them before 99.8% of Congress voted to force it. If Biden or Obama were covering for Dems or something, why wasn't Trump glad to release the files as soon as possible? Even if you say "both sides are bad" on this issue, that would be a reason people are disenchanted and want to leave the country.
I'll admit after googling Rosie, it's murkier than I thought. I don't really care to sift gossip rags and try to predict what she'll do, though I'd lean toward you're wrong if you mean she will never set foot in Ireland again nor live there for any significant time. But what is your argument really? Famous liberals who say they are leaving don't actually leave for long, because USA is actually great because of conservative policies? Maybe for most of them, but I feel like them leaving for any significant fraction of the year kind of undercuts your "nobody sneaked into East Berlin" idea though. I don't think many people would performatively leave if there was literally nothing better about their destination. They leave because the value has diminished, and maybe they come back because it's not zero.
Getting rid of the rich is probably a pretty bad idea for the rest of us.
When the top 1% are not in the top tax bracket, something is horribly wrong.
The federal income tax is based on income, not wealth.
They are not in the top bracket by choice - a luxury option unavailable to non-wealthy people in the working middle-class who actually are in the top tax bracket.
As you helpfully noted in your second half of your comment, high wealth, deliberately low income[0] means they are not in the top tax bracket[1] on the basis of their carefully calculated, tax-optimized income.
0. Taxable events need be overhauled to cover loopholes, including removing tax-advantages of borrowing against securities. The legal fiction that allows rich people to spend money not recognized as income is deleterious.
1. Warren Buffet, IIRC, noted his assistant was in a higher tax bracket than him.
There is no optimization for anything actually, its just income. There's lots of different forms of taxes that the US government takes part in as you know. Quitting your day job removes the income part until distribution/settlement for any owned assets.
You can argue for a wealth tax, but conflating two separate concepts is not how you do it.
My footnotes are the entirety of my argument, and it's not even as radical as a wealth tax. My argument has 2 easy steps:
1. Remove the arbitrage between actual liquidity events and the limited set of what the IRS currently considers taxable events. Borrowing against securities not being taxable is an example of what's broken. Arbitrage using trusts or LLCs needs to be deleted, based on controlling interests and/or ultimate beneficiary.
2. Align tax rates on capital gains vs. income
Is is also broken that you don't pay taxes on the mortgage you borrowed to buy a house?
Or the money you borrowed to buy a car?
What about the money you borrowed when using your credit card?
Or the money you borrowed to fund your college years?
For the vast majority of folk who take out the loans you listed, the loans are leveraged and are either unsecured, or secured by the car or property the loan was made out for, and therefore no underlying value to tax prior to the loan being issued. You knew this already, and I have doubts you're making this false equivalency argument in good faith.
Mortgage loans are secured by the house.
Car loans are secured by the car.
They are equivalent. There's nothing special about margin debt.
that 700K is income, but the billion is assets.
earning 700K is the income from $10 million in the stock market (although working to earn $700K is in exchange for you time while the income from $10 mil is passive. OTOH people with the work ethic to earn like that tend to like what they do.
a billion in the stock market is $70 million a year, a large number but far from a billion.
TLDR: 700K compares to a billion 1 in 1000, but the truth is closer to 1 in 100
They are arguing to take enough to destroy the businesses they create.
Remember Bernie Sanders saying billionaires should not exist? That's taking away 99.9% of Musk's wealth.
you're overcorrecting WAY too far. Tax rate percentages are much higher on high income people, and THAT is why they pay most of the federal budget, it's forced generosity paying the government.
and it's actually the top 20% who dominate income and taxes, but including that extra 19% is important because that is the class of people ("coastal elites") who have a (all too human) tendency to rig the system in favor of their children in terms of good schools, universities, learning high status pasttimes, "internships" at prestigious institutions, rent paid in high value/opportunity areas after university etc. These high income people basically earn their livings from the 1%.
(that should not be interpreted as a pure sign of oligopoly, capitalist markets measure productivity, and that's how it works out, production in these industries is highly valued by the populace, but turnover of these people is high, where the top of the list is almost invariably new people each generation.)
you wrote this, and I would call this "attempting to correct any misconception":
>This is a byproduct of wild wealth disparity, not because the rich are so generous with paying the government.
I'm saying that your formulation is not much better than what you are arguing against because you neglect graduated income tax. It's not because rich people have more money, it's because they are taxed at much higher rates, and lower income people are hardly taxed at all.
When I was 9, my dad arranged a tour of East Berlin for his family. As part of the deal with the USSR when the 4 zones were partitioned, this was allowed for an Air Force officer. This was at the height of the Cold War.
The Wall is gone now, but it was something to behold in those days. There's the Wall, the kill zone, the tank traps, the dogs, the watchtowers, the barbed wire, and the machine guns. All on the east side.
We went through Checkpoint Charlie on a bus, and were searched by the East German guards entering and exiting. The guards ran a mirror under the bus. They were all carrying machine guns. You could sum up East Berlin in one word - grey.
There was a museum next to Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall. It was loaded with pictures of east Germans being killed trying to escape to the west.
West Berlin built platforms next to the Wall, so you can stand on the platform and look over it and see what a freakin' abomination it was. I never heard of anyone using those platforms to "escape" to East Berlin.
In West Berlin, there was the Russian War Memorial. It was an island of East Berlin surrounded by the west. The memorial was surrounded by barbed wire. There were two guards on duty there, with machine guns, of course. We waved at them, and they grinned at us.
Then an officer came out and looked them up and down. Their faces turned to stone, looking straight ahead.
I asked my dad about it, he said the guards were a pair who didn't know each other, with strict orders to shoot the other if one attempted to get escape through the barbed wire.
It was pretty obvious to my 9 year old mind that people simply do not like living under communism.
I've read a lot of history books over the years. It's pretty clear that communes and communism and socialism do not work. They don't work when people do them freely, they don't work when people are forced into it.
And the more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is. The evidence is strong and everywhere.
It's too bad the Westerners did not leave a section of the Wall standing. It would stop people from rewriting the truth about it.
After my dad passed, I realized I had taken for granted all the anecdotes he told me. These days, when I think about one of them I write it down in a log.
I do have my grandfather's letters when he went around the world in 1895 on a steamboat.
All human beings deserve to live a happy life. We live in a world where few have accumulated more capital than they could ever spend in their lives while others starve to death.
I don't think anyone with a good moral conscience can support America's brand of capitalism. We live in a world where few live, the rest survive.
That singular image should be the poster of this Epstein era.
Musk more amply demonstrated how wealth is created.
"Here is a few billion dollar to a non profit company I control but you better not write that in the article" or "I didn't care for social consequences, I was just another player, it was ultimately for you" vibes
it just doesn't have the impact it used to, ironically because then inflation was low and integrity/morality was rewarded as society.
I think Ray Dalio has done a fantastic job of mapping out the trajectory we are on. We've already started seen glimpse of it and I don't think its going to cool down. America and the West in general has growing fatigue with various elements and perhaps the biggest one is that of wealth gap disparity.
Perhaps a snapshot of where we are: The richer you get the more you need access and proximity to those that monopolized violence and pay protection money too. It's not unlike Italy in the 1800s, you need money to purchase and distribute violence to acquire more resources and eventually the gap gets too big, people can't afford bread, and they get bold.
The one exception I had for this was Bill Gates.
Then I looked into the past behavior of Microsoft, and what he was going with Jeffery Epstein.
I no longer hold him as an exception.
I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn’t have the same caliber of people as the private sector. There’s no Jeff Bezos equivalent working on inner city education. Bill Gates is really the only one who has tackled this, by investing his own time into public health, which I understand has produced real results.
Like, funding a homeless shelter or the Trevor Project won't fix the problems causing homelessness or LGBTQ teen suicides. But there are enough people with immediate problems who we do want to support them somehow until policy changes happen, if ever.
You're right that the Gates Foundation is one of the few that has achieved some lasting changes, but I would say that is because their MO is quite different from what many NGO's do. This is based on second-hand knowledge from somebody who works there, so I'm not sure if they do this exclusively, but they strongly prefer to partner with the local governments to introduce highly targeted interventions.
This simultaneously makes it extremely slow and frustrating to operate (especially in countries with dysfunctional governments, which is where help is most needed) and ironically reduces the leverage of money (which is a problem when you have a mandate to spend X% of your money annually!) but also means that whenever any change happens it is generally structural and long-lasting.
There are many other organizations that operate with similar long-lasting principles, but it seems to me most focus on immediate, short-term support, which may be a function of the limited funding and skills of the people available to them.
Non-profits are 12% of GDP, over $3.5 trillion. Excluding hospitals, universities, and churches, leaves over $2 trillion in non-profit expenditures. Of that, about $300 billion comes from the government. That is more than enough money to solve structural issues.
My dad spent his career in non-profits working on public health in third world countries. These NGOs were able to work with highly dysfunctional foreign governments to achieve real and measurable improvements in some of the poorest countries in the world. Which is why it blows my mind that non-profits spending vastly more money domestically can’t work with e.g. the government of Baltimore to deliver meaningful improvements to the abysmal literacy rates in that city, or work in infant morality in inner cities.
The key difference it seems to me is the lack of accountability in domestic non-profits. The U.S., EU, Japan, etc., care how their foreign aid dollars are used. Every project is evaluated for effectiveness in quantitative terms. That culture of measured accountability seems entirely absent in domestic non-profits.
If you donated a dollar, she got fifty cents. Her boss got twenty five cents, the company got their cut, the university took a little, so did the department and the professor. By the time it came down to some poor grad student looking at slides there was only a penny or two going to pay him/her. This kind of thing combines the worst of both government and private business.
But that's the thing, the money is not helpful when it comes to policy issues. As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will. I can only surmise that the reason more US non-profits don't achieve lasting change is because they are not able to or they are not trying to.
This is not to say they are deliberately being ineffective, e.g. consider that inner city infant mortality rates have socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism. Offhand, I really can't see how non-profits would be able to address these with even billions of dollars.
Of note, a sibling comment mentions the book "Winner Takes All" and links its wikipedia page which has this quote:
> The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. The Aspen Consensus holds that capitalism's rough edges must be sanded and its surplus fruit shared, but the underlying system must never be questioned. The Aspen Consensus says, "Give back," which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system – surgery that might threaten their privileges. The Aspen Consensus, I believe, tries to market the idea of generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice."
Not saying I agree entirely, but that is the kind of thing that could lead to billions in spending without achieving lasting structural changes.
Lasting change comes down to data-driven programs that work and the money to implement them. As long as you’re not asking for money and meet the community you’re working with where they are,[1] politics is mostly a red herring. My dad worked on projects that achieved incredible results in Bangladesh, for example, even though the government of the country was a complete clusterfuck the entire time.
> socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism.
The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. There may be overarching “factors” that contribute to a result, but there’s usually an immediate cause of a problem that you can tackle directly with an effective program.
Mississippi, for example, is now #3 in the country for NAEP 4th grade reading and math scores for black students. It’s #1 for reading and #2 for math for Hispanic students: https://mdek12.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2025/01/NAEPR.... Mississippi didn’t “solve poverty and racism.” It implemented a program that identified the immediate cause of certain problems and fixed them.
[1] Effective programs avoid creating political problems. When my dad was designing maternal health programs for Bangladeshi villagers, he met them where they were instead of where he thought they should be. For example, it turns out rural women wouldn’t use newly built clinics for giving birth because they didn’t trust “big city doctors.” So the program developed relationships with local midwives and traditional healers, who the women already trusted, and had them get training from the doctors and refer high risk pregnancies to the clinics while handling routine deliveries in the traditional way.
It didn't solve maternal mortality rates either, where it ranks dead last amongst the states: https://www.marchofdimes.org/peristats/reports/mississippi/r...
> Lasting change comes down to data-driven programs that work and the money to implement them. As long as you’re not asking for money and meet the community you’re working with where they are,[1] politics is mostly a red herring.
Kind of, but my point is it's not just a function of throwing money at the problem, because "meeting where the community is" typically a) is just the first step towards overcoming structural issues; b) requires properly skilled staff; and c) involves politics in some form. Like I would bet most of the things your dad had to do often had to be supported by the local power structures (e.g. being blessed by the village headman.) They may not even have had official policies to be changed, but for sure certain ways of doing things were institutionalized.
I know someone posted in a poor, rural corner of India whose primary "KPI" is improving the maternal mortality rate in their region, and meeting the community is only the first step in solving problems that include -- in addition to the problems you mention -- chronic malnutrition, unawareness of potential pregnancy complications, lack of appropriate medical facilities, lack of infrastructure to access any that exist, and, most insidiously, age-old biases about how "things should be" where women are at the bottom of the social totem pole. Each of them is a separate structural issue and most of them cannot be changed by working with the community alone.
I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...
If we assume you are right about billionaire philanthropy being basically ineffectual (I personally agree) there is a line of reasoning that I find explains why adequately. When systems don't have their incentives structured properly, then quite often the unexpected outcomes are stronger than the predicted outcome. Because the input to the system did not properly account for, or change the incentives which drive the dynamics of the system.
Examples about in healthcare, social programs, education... large SWE companies...
There's so little real pressure for results when you're backed by some billionaire's fortune, the existence of the organization is not threatened by non-performance... there's no free market to survive in, the goal is to lose money... the things you are trying to measure are slow signals or mostly qualitative...
I don't know whether John Arnold is spread too thin or not, but he's certainly top caliber and does a lot to measure progress before/during investment in various causes (including education). He also seems to be more agnostic on what the most appropriate solution may be at the beginning of the process.
10 decades, Rockefeller was the first billionaire 100 yrs ago, and also a philanthropist.