Not shocking to hear, he’s a scumbag at heart. But now if you say that people will be like “uhhh how can you say that he’s donated so much money”

Then when you point out he’s donated literally 0% of his overall current net worth, his past (and current, apparently) behavior has arguably as much humanity if not more than he has offset, etc you’ll get whataboutism. “What have you done??”

I don’t want philanthropy to be contingent on the whims of billionaires. Gates has done a lot but it still has major issues, there is no real transparency, and it’s still authoritatively controlled because he has a great deal of influence over his foundation. The even bigger issue is that he is by far the exception. Other billionaires donate minimally only to maximize tax benefits and only to issues they have been personally impacted by.

The other day I was with people who were watching a football game. The eagles won and I asked why the owner gets to speak first at the trophy ceremony, let alone at all, given it was the teams effort. This led to a whole discussion but one thing that came up was how he donates so much money to autism research because he has a grandson with autism. This was meant to appeal to me because I have a background working in autism research and I work with people with autism a lot.

all I could think is “how fucked up is it that we have to hope that an obscenely rich person personally experiences the issue for them to decide to bequeath funding?” This inherently means that things with a much higher rate of prevalence, like autism (1 in 36, roughly) or dementia (prevalence varies widely by age range (2% to 13%) but ~10 million cases per year), will get tons of money. But what about far less common things? I’ve worked with people who have extremely rare conditions. Angelmans syndrome, prader willi, chromosomal deletions, (rates of 1-2 per 10,000) or extremely rare things like hellers syndrome (rates of 1-2 per 100,000).

This is why we fund things like NIMH, so that money can be fairly dispersed to ensure that all things are researched. Teams of people research what needs to be researched. This isn’t even just about equity; sometimes researching lesser known disorders leads to discoveries that are applicable in a broader context

But instead we let a few oligarchs hoard money. Most of them don’t bother to fund this stuff at all and they few that do only bother to do so when it’s something personally relevant to them. We have no say in the matter.