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There are ethical billionaires, but nobody would have heard of them because they do not advertise and show off how much of a good person they are for donating. A good person do not look for validation. Charles Feeney comes to mind who donated 90% of his wealth and died with net worth of $1 million. He also lived in a rented apartment despite having become a billionaire for managing Duty Free.
Edit: okay some have been pedantic on here about Charles Feeney and his wealth, and some of my figures have been wrong, but the overall point still stands. He was worth $8 billion, donated over 99% of his wealth and spent the rest of his remaining days with $2 million.
Incorrect. The only way to acquire a billion dollars in net worth is to exploit labor.
Doesnt matter if they donated to charity. Its a tax shelter for them. Im sure Feeneys employees would have preferred to be paid higher wages.
Maybe. But we don't know how he managed his business. His wealth was, after all, came in the 1960s and 70s at the height of air travel which he sold his items to travellers, unions were also powerful and the world was operating under the Bretton Woods agreement.
What if someone suddenly inherited 1bn from an estranged relative, or if they won the lottery? I'd say that's an ethical way of gaining that much wealth
I think what defines an ethical billionare from one that isn't, is how much they share with everyone else and how much they consume for themselves. Spending that much money properly would take time. They'd have to vet charities, hire people to help them spend it on the best things, research where to invest in (i'm talking about things like green energy) etc.
Just food for thought. I tend to like looking for exceptions to rules (idk why)
There is no ethical billionaire because to amass a billion dollar means other people that produced that much value did not get paid properly. Simple as that. If you inherit a billion dollars, it was still made on the back of workers.
If you've got no power to stop the estranged relative exploiting other people and their environment to acquire the money you'll later inherit from them, then inheriting it won't be unethical when it happens. There might be milage in the idea that it would be unethical to not give it to the people whose labour was exploited by the dead relative, but they're not necessarily the most ethical option for donating the money once you've got it.
That's just not true.
Let's say a person became a billionaire running a consulting firm. The going rate for consultants at every other consulting firm is paying their employees $100/hour. Our billionaire paid their employees $200/hour.
Are you saying that wouldn't be ethical?
No because if a person a billion dollars by paying someone 200$/h, it means that the worker produced way over that in value for the billionaire.
That's fine that a company takes a cut on that, but to get to a billion dollars, that means that the the company brings in way more than that.
Usually, the salary of someone is roughly half the cost of the employee, so let's say it cost the employer 400$/h for one employee. If the employer add a profit of 10% on that which is pretty reasonable, it would take 25 000 000 man/hour to get a billion dollars in profit. Or roughly 2800 years working 24/7, everyday of the year.
For a more realistic scenario (40h/week, 52 week a year), that's 12 000 years.
That's a scenario where there is only the billionaire employer taking a cut. Add other C-suites taking a chunk too and it gets more ridiculous.
It's not because other companies pay less that means that the company paying more is ethical.
Yes, that wouldn't be ethical. It's not a question of paying more than others, it's a question of taking more for yourself personally than the value of the work you personally do.
Let's skip the consulting firm thing because that sort of business has a lot of ethical questions inherently, and just say they became a billionaire selling widgets. Let's also posit that widgets are a useful, quality product that enhances the lives of those who purchase them in some way. And we'll stick with your proposition that they pay $200 an hour to their employees.
If they became a billionaire, it is still unethical. It means two things: their employees wages should have been even higher, and/or their product should have been less expensive. It'd have to be more than a vague hypothetical to pinpoint where the most unethical stuff is happening, but it IS happening, because a human is not capable of doing work worth a billion dollars in their lifetime.
Inheriting a billion or more is not inherently unethical because you didn't necessarily have a hand in accumulating it. However, few people will remain ethical after that, because it is difficult to possess that level of wealth without some of it being used unethically. Perhaps if you converted it all to cash and put it in a money bin, Scrooge McDuck style, you could know that your wealth isn't out there doing unethical things, but there's few other ways.
I hope you try to practice what you preach brother, and not just type down long winded comments on lemmy on why your brain is smarter and your heart wider than all the rest of us sinners.
What are you babling on about. I am not a billionaire and will never be.
You have jack shit to say to you resort to insults. I'll go low too, go back to sucking the dicks of billionaire and justify their horrid impact on human misery.
A billionaire that runs a consulting firm undoubtedly caused wages to stagnate, overworked employees, exacerbated inflation, and cost people their jobs. Consulting firms are parasites that leech off the economy to the detriment of workers.
Have you even read the comment you are responding to?
Also, no idea what consulting firms do, clearly.
You have no idea what billionaires do, clearly.
Neither does anyone on here, but at least you don't deny it :)
Ethics within the concept of Production of Commodities (consulting is a commodity in the form of a service) isn't determined by how much someone gets paid with respect to the median or average within said field, but by who owns and controls the wages, via ownership of the firm itself. It doesn't matter how nice the boss is, if the firm isn't democratically owned and operated, there is still a fundamental unchallengable hierarchy.
And in my scenario the person who owns and controls the wages isn't taking the stance of paying the lowest wage the market will bear.
Let's push this a little further though. Let's say the company paying $100/hour is ethical by your definition. And by your definition the comoany paying $200/hour cannot be.
I would argue the second is still the more ethical company, especially when you consider the community it's within. There would be more resources for more people.
Sure, if you want to imagine an impossibility. The reality of the matter is that those who control and own the Means of production will always act in their own self-interest, the "good men of history" idea is Utopian, and still anti-democratic.
Your argument is akin to saying if a Dictator is really nice, even if there's no democracy, it's fully ethical. The lack of ability to contest even a benevolent dictator means the foundation giving the dictator power is itself unethical, even if the way the dictator treats his subjects is ethical.
I fully believe a benevolent dictator has more capacity to be ethical than even the strongest democracy.
And it's ridiculous to argue otherwise.
In reductive terms, there is ultimately the best decision. The thing that is the best. Humans, by definition, have varying capacity, and varying experience. I can say, unequivocally, that younger me was an idiot. And the decisions I make now are much better than the decisions I made when I was younger.
In a democracy you're optimizing for the most acceptance of outcome. People of varying capacities and varying world views will argue their opinions, and results will be the closest to the middle ground that most people can live with.
So yes. If you're maximizing for ethics a single person can do that.
That's reeeeeeally far from a billionaire. If he donated 90% and died with a million, he died with 10% so he had 10mil.
Look things up before being pedantic about them.
If you want to be pedantic about it he ackchyually lived off $2 million. Still gave away $8 billion to charity. (and actual charity, not "a charitable organization" that is mostly a tax shelter for the family's wealth)
His donations are estimated at $8 billion. The 90% figure is wrong, not his wealth.
You're right but that's just being pedantic and my point still stands that he donated vast majority of his wealth. As of 2016, he was worth $2 million. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/nyregion/james-bond-of-philanthropy-gives-away-the-last-of-his-fortune.html,
Bill Gates is much the same, he's given away over half his net worth to charity at this point.
He's not the worse billionaire, but still done enough to get two episodes on behind the bastards: https://youtu.be/lFS9DFXtj1M
I domt think so, we have evidence of plenty of unethical practices he did when he lead microsoft in the early days.