
Which billionaires are doing the most good? - feifan
https://billionaireboard.com/
======
Arainach
Are the metrics for this described somewhere? I find the top two surprising.
From their numbers, Dorsey has donated $1B (26% of his current $3.8B net
worth), while Gates has donated $36B (36% of his current net worth).

So....Gates has donated more as a share of his net worth and SIGNIFICANTLY
more in raw numbers. What justifies putting Dorsey ahead of him?

~~~
OJFord
> Top donors this month

Is the (admittedly quite small) heading.

Also I noted that Brin (only one I clicked on) is in last place/#29 at $0 this
month. So (and to find out was the reason I clicked) this is 'how much have
these 29 billionaires donated this month'; not 'who are the top billionaire
donors, all listed are big donors'.

~~~
igravious
Donations this month is a meaningless metric.

Total % of net worth would be the obvious metric, wouldn't it?

Is this only US billionaires? There are 614 billionaires in the US according
to Forbes[0], there are only 29 listed here, ~5% of the total.

[0]
[https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/)

~~~
OJFord
Yeah, %net worth would be more meaningful, but I still think monthly is odd.
Why should it look bad if you donate nothing for 11 months and then drop a big
one, because that's what you do every Christmas or something.

Assuming accurate monthly data is even available, I think a 12mo moving
average would make more sense. In addition to the %net worth you suggest.

------
forgot_my_pwd
It is often the case that soft social pressure is the best way to enforce
desirable behaviors amongst people.

Within friend groups where there are no formally established laws or codes of
conduct, there are certain implicit standards of behavior people are expected
to abide by, and part of why they do is because of the threat of social
ostracism.

In a broader scope, in ancient societies social ostracism was often used to
deal with those who violated the norms of society; in Athens ostracism was an
official punishment.

I'm not saying we can or should literally expel billionaires who don't put
their liquid wealth towards philanthropy, but far too often we focus on
formal, legal means of compelling the super wealthy to part with their money,
such as through taxes that are easily avoided.

Social pressure put upon the super wealthy using tools like this could be more
effective than people expect. There is the threat of social ostracism, but
also the reward of social approval granted to the patrons of philanthropy.

~~~
munk-a
> but far too often we focus on formal, legal means of compelling the super
> wealthy to part with their money, such as through taxes that are easily
> avoided.

Taxes are easily avoided only because they're designed to be easily avoidable.
Simplifying[1] the tax code costs a lot of political capital due to entrenched
interests but is technically trivial - ask a seven year old to design a fair
tax system and it'd be less of a trainwreck than ours.

Deductible expenses need to be significantly curtailed and capped and
alternative minimums could be introduced to be a stop-gap against any loop
holes that were missed. Then you just start playing whack-a-mole with various
tax credits to cut out targeted and unjust programs like child-credits and
mortgage relief.

1\. Actually doing this, not just granting a bunch of money to corporations
like the GOP did.

------
DrScientist
Rather misleading.

For example it has Jeff Bezos donating 10 billion to a new 'Bezos Earth Fund'.

However it hasn't yet issued any grants so as of today, he has merely moved
money from one place he controls to another one I assume he still controls.

~~~
ztratar
Good feedback. I'm going to make the pledges into funds count for less, and
make it more obvious which $ has been pledged vs deployed.

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retrac
I'm assuming this isn't factoring in the _harm_ they're doing. How much do
Bezos's donations to homeless services offset his union-busting? Is there a
formula for that?

~~~
0x262d
Well in Seattle, their homeless charity money is less so far than the money
they have spent against the politicians trying to do anything about
homelessness besides passively asking for business to "be responsible".

~~~
malandrew
Trying to do something about homelessness and actually doing something about
homelessness are two different things. Many of the policies that those trying
to do something about homelessness in Seattle are trying to implement are
similar to those policies that were enacted in San Francisco that made
homelessness worse such as rent control.

~~~
0x262d
The left politicians I’m referring to have their hands completely tied by the
centrist majority who won’t act on this, and people who profit from high rent
turn around, point to the lack of political action they caused, and say it
means the politically blocked proposed solutions are “unviable”.

Also you’re just incorrect about rent control. SF has it in a tiny fraction of
apartments. Of course rents elsewhere are skyrocketing.

~~~
malandrew
> Also you’re just incorrect about rent control. SF has it in a tiny fraction
> of apartments.

That's flat out wrong.

"San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then
172,000 units of the city's 376,940 housing units are under rent control.
(That's about 75 percent of the city's rental stock.)"

source: [https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-
housing/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/)

Please point out a solution from these politicians on the left that won't make
things worse.

~~~
0x262d
taxamazon.net/about

------
dominotw
Public's perception of Warren Buffet is really puzzling to me. He seems to
largely escape the scorn for billionaires, even looked at as a 'good guy'.
Whats his secret?

We seem to hold CEO of coke more culpable for filling oceans with plastic than
coke's shareholders like buffet who profit more from it than the CEO. Really
bizarre phenomenon.

~~~
dhosek
I think some of it is that he doesn't really live like a billionaire in a lot
of respects, takes anti-wealth political positions (he's an opponent of
California's Prop 13, for example pointing out that he pays less in property
taxes for his Malibu estate than people with much more modest properties in
California), is explicitly not forming a money-based dynasty in his family (he
has given his kids "just enough so that they would feel that they could do
anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing") and
intends to give away his fortune to charity. There's a pretty good summary of
his views and actions in the Wikipedia article on him.

~~~
dominotw
Not sure any of that offsets funding and profiting off of obesity epidemic and
filling oceans with plastic.

Coke is killing ppl with coronavirus by causing massive obesity crisis in
america.

------
janpot
Not impressed in the least. Donating some money is easy if you own more that
you can ever spend in a lifetime. Would be way more interested in which
billionaires are doing the most harm.

~~~
ztratar
I didn't want to make a site centered around shaming / punishment / anger.

I think it's a valid thing to make that data public though.

Lmk if you build the site.

------
0x262d
I'm not sure how they can be considered to be doing much, or any, good, when
effectively they are passively siphoning off profits and despite all the
"good" they do, as a class they get rapidly richer every year. That has always
been a conundrum behind Bill Gates' charity. Of course, it's not really a
conundrum. The charity is just tax-advantaged PR or tax-advantaged
complementary investment masquerading as goodwill.

~~~
0x262d
Also the idea that a significant amount of billionaire wealth is moved by
"inspiration" rather than naked financial calculation is incredibly naive.
Unless they somehow lucked into this, they are billionaires for a reason:
naked financial calculation.

------
alexwasserman
I'd be interested to see this as a percentage of net worth or income as well.
If a person with $1B gives it all away in one months that's about as
philanthropic as you can get - much less so for someone with another $50B to
spare. Tracking this on a "last month" basis with no information over time is
just ridiculous too.

Also, the descriptions here seem pretty varied, and highly slanted.

eg. Balmer joined Microsoft when it was still a start-up, and just gets
credited for the CEO years, rather than as helping grow it along the way.

Sergey Brin just has "Immigrant" for the second sentence. Martha Ingram
"Author of three books". Neither of those provides any insight into the value
that provided.

Overall that just makes the whole page look especially suspect, coupled with
picking these 29 (or "About 30" as the About page puts it).

There's so little rationale here it makes the whole site look like advertising
for something I can't work out.

~~~
ztratar
Creator here -- didn't know I was posted to HN! I was planning on doing a Show
HN tomorrow. Oof.

\- Totally agree. I have all the data on doing percentages. The "score"
actually normalizes across their percentage. Will add this more visibly.

\- The "last month" is just to give any billionaire a chance to get to the top
spot. Also open to making it more.... "last 3 months" or so? We had a lifetime
ranking at first, but then the site felt too static and cast a lifetime
judgement on people instead of giving them the opportunity to attain a top
spot.

\- Agreed on the descriptions. All the data was crowdsourced, so we can go
through and improve these.

\- Suspect in terms of what exactly? We definitely launched early (as one
does). Open to more feedback!

------
0xebfc
Since the angle this website introduces itself with is:

"These are the world's most powerful people. Let's track their impact &
inspire them to do more good"

This doesn't seem like a good motivator, because doing something for the sake
of reputation doesn't directly incentivize solving a problem in an effective
way.

And w.r.t. the title of the post, it seems like there are a few steps critical
steps being omitted in the relationship between money donated and "doing
good". For instance, not all organizations are as effective as others; if the
motivator is to increase the $ count of donation, then what's the point in
thinking about "doing good"?

Can I be ranked as "doing the most good" by contributing more money than
anyone else in the list, while still doing measurable damage to parts of
society that aren't being included in the metric?

See, if this website were neutral -- if it just showed the damn numbers
without injecting it with an arbitrary value judgement, this would have been
great. Instead, this serves to create anxiety to those who view it to do
something for the wrong reasons.

The more I think about this, the more banal this site seems to me. I'd
appreciate being pointed out if I'm missing something, but otherwise this
website tells me more about the mindset of the authors than anything else.

~~~
ztratar
Thoughtful perspective!

This is the v1 of the site and I'm looking to improve it.

\- How can I make it more neutral? \- Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply
accelerate the deployment of capital? Can you combine the two incentives?

My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill
Gates with their wealth. Even determining who that is right now is
extraordinarily difficult. Making the data public is step #1, and then
figuring out how to help them leverage philanthropy effectively is step #2.

~~~
0xebfc
"How can I make it more neutral?"

Just show the numbers. If there's something you'd like to show what the
numbers mean, then be careful about explaining that. Make clear distinctions
between metrics and goals. Think about all the metrics you think will tell you
that you're approaching a goal; then find all the ways they will break. I
already said how your metric-of-choice is broken and cheat-able.

"Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital?"

Is this what you believe your role is?

\---

"My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like
Bill Gates with their wealth."

You're going to burn yourself out by trying to find human levers to change the
world. Some of us will be there to welcome you to the club, but I know some
people who haven't made it. I'm not one to say whether you should hop on or
jump off that train. Usually, there's something else that's going on in my
life that leads me to that kind of mindset.

There are contradictions in our language and value-systems, and it's total
bullshit, but we chose to pretend to believe them because that's what you need
to do to get in for the ride. Lots of people forget that they are pretending,
and some of re-remember it in adulthood or something.

So the difficulty in determining in "who that is" might be one of those
contradictions popping up.

------
ilikehurdles
"Which billiaires have donated the most money this month" is a more accurate
headline. That any of their donations are good enough to offset the evil of
having so much wealth concentrated in the hands of a single person is pretty
doubtful, or at best controversial.

------
Yizahi
Are they though? I don't want to spread baseless hate and I actually respect
many of those people. But if someone would calculate total absolute positive
and absolute negative for each of then I'm not sure that total would be above
zero line. I talking about widespread and increasing economical inequality in
all countries since last world war ans each billionaire is partially
responsible for this process which I consider more negative than positive. I'm
not advocating for some forceful wealth exchange but I think it is possible to
at least discuss the issue.

------
CPLX
For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend the book _Winners Take
All_ by Anand Giridharadas and his various media appearances and upcoming TV
show on Vice as food for thought.

------
dandigangi
Interesting site but they frequently use those donations for tax purposes and
moving money around in particular ways to get it back (outside of just taxes).

~~~
ztratar
Do you have real data on that?

I see that argument everywhere, but haven't found substantial proof.

------
Simulacra
Something feels almost PR spin about this. “No, look, see, billionaires Are
doing good!” I can’t help be feel suspect about this website.

~~~
ztratar
What would make it feel less like that?

I was at first making it a lifetime-oriented ranking, but that felt like
"shame these specific people!"

I think there's a middle-ground between celebration and shame that I'm trying
to hit.

------
karmakaze
I think a better metric would be which are the most effective for X.

It's up to whoever put in the work to have the ability to contribute, decide
what cause they support. As long as most of the top causes get support we're
in good shape. If they're being ineffective toward their chosen goal, that's
something I'd like pointed out.

------
ztratar
Creator here - didn't know this was posted! Was going to launch tomorrow lol.

Anyways, here's the launch blog post: [https://www.zachtratar.com/introducing-
billionaire-board.htm...](https://www.zachtratar.com/introducing-billionaire-
board.html)

------
jameson
I wonder how the ranking would look like if we use the total amount donated in
proportion to net worth. (not saying it's not. looks like multiple factors are
involved)

A person donating $10 when his/her net worth $20 is different from a person
donating the same amount but the net worth of, say, $1000.

------
door19
No one should have a billion dollars

~~~
yogthos
I think a better way to put it is that nobody should have a billion dollars
more than another person. The wealth isn't the problem if it's distributed
evenly. The problem has always been inequality. It would be a fantastic world
where everyone could do anything they wanted and have as much agency over
their lives as possible.

~~~
zozbot234
> The wealth isn't the problem if it's distributed evenly.

Isn't that what these billionaires are doing? Giving their money away. The
more billionaires donate, the closer we get to your world where everyone has
as much agency over their lives as possible. (Including the donors, of
course.)

~~~
ilikehurdles
Are they? Is wealth inequality decreasing?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course. The answers are no, and no.

If billionaires overall do tend to donate significant portions of their
wealth, then the fact that wealth inequality is increasing in spite of that
practice is hard evidence that individual charity is an ineffective means of
lifting people out of poverty. If the converse is true -- that they aren't
donating their wealth -- then that too suggests that something like a state is
necessary to force their hand.

~~~
zozbot234
In all seriousness, the way wealth inequality is measured wouldn't tell you
that in the first place. You'd have to look at _consumption_ inequality, which
would include stuff like Larry Ellison's yachts (on the "high inequality"
side) and perhaps poor people's final consumption resulting from these
donations (on the "low inequality" side).

~~~
ilikehurdles
I never considered this as a potential measure, but it would be really good to
track. Is this something you came up with or has there been any other work
done to explore this notion of consumption equality?

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nacho2sweet
Just tax them.

~~~
benbenolson
True gifts are freely given, not forcibly taken.

~~~
munk-a
That's sorta the crux of the matter - paying into society isn't a "gift" it's
a debt. We all live together and support each other and nobody needs to get
showered with glamour for doing their part according to their ability.

I don't want Billionaire to feel forced to give "true gifts" through social
pressures or otherwise - I'd prefer if their wealth was properly utilized
through a just level of taxation.

~~~
benbenolson
>properly utilized through a just level of taxation

Why'd you need so many words to say "taken?"

------
fmakunbound
This is hilarious and pathetic at the same time. They should be paying tax.

------
longtermd
* Donated last month * Donation amount: 0$

[https://billionaireboard.com/billionaires/jack-
ma](https://billionaireboard.com/billionaires/jack-ma)

~~~
Yizahi
He is probably busy banning github pages criticizing him and simply forgot to
donate. We need to be more tolerant to our Great Leaders.

------
gorbachev
Jeff Bezos should not be on any list championing charitable donations. He
gives out the minimum possible for looking good on a PR release about it.

------
sharatvir
This just looks like PR for the benevolent feudal lords.

Rather than "giving back", maybe these people should stop taking away in the
first place.

------
jsnk
This is so cringey

~~~
ztratar
What would you like to see different?

------
asdff
Those that take an upper middle class salary and give away the other 999.9
million dollars. Funny how much that shortens the list.

------
ztratar
Not sure why this post was flagged or taken down. It follows the guidelines
and is something I made.

Feeling quite bad about this situation.

------
simonswords82
Surprised to see jack above bill

~~~
OJFord
It's monthly. I'm not sure how confident the author can be about getting
accurate data that quickly, or how significant it is even if it is accurate.

A moving average of last 12 months, if you really can get monthly data, would
make more sense to me.

------
atoav
The ones who are properly taxed?

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pasttense01
Charles Koch, ranking 24, is definitely not doing any good and instead is
doing a lot of bad: he contributes massively to crazy right-wing candidates,
which ends up making the world a much worse place.

------
kemiller2002
I don't like rankings like this. I'm not saying all of them, but at least a
few made their money off of the backs of others, being ruthless in business,
etc. How gracious of them to give money to people they hurt in the first
place. I'm glad they are doing good, but let's not pretend they were
completely altruistic.

Also, a number of these people donated money years ago to avoid taxes, and the
money was invested and growing. Its good we have it, but the "we gave away all
this money" is an insignificant impact to them for multiple reasons.

~~~
tyrust
>a number of these people donated money years ago to avoid taxes

This isn't how taxes work. If you donate money then you've only reduced your
taxable principal. You "avoid taxes" in the sense that it's as if you never
made that money. You don't magically reduce your burden any further than that.

People won't take your otherwise fine point seriously if you include this
commonly made error.

~~~
kemiller2002
Except for the fact that they are at least partially in control of the fund
either through a DAF or their own charity. You're right they can't spend it on
anything they want, but they have the ability to direct in many specific
instances with few exceptions. Often if it's their own foundation, to further
almost any goal they want. So yeah, they get to not pay taxes on their money
and at least spend it partially how they want.

~~~
tyrust
A DAF is just donating to a charity with an extra step, so let's put that
aside.

They can't further "any" goal they want, it must be a charitable goal. Bill
Gates can't take money from the B&M Foundation to buy himself a yacht. I don't
really see what your point is. Anyone that donates money is avoiding taxes to
spend money on something they want, where "something they want" is a
charitable goal.

~~~
munk-a
By running a charity and notably donating to it those people can get clout
though and further raise themselves in the eyes of their peers while not
paying very much for it. Additionally they can get some other soft benefits
from the charity like hosting events with money they paid no taxes on, or, if
they're Trump, just buying things they want with their charity fraudulently.

~~~
tyrust
My original point was that a benefactor that stays within moral and written
rules is not avoiding taxes, as kemiller2002 suggested. Breaking those rules
is tangential to that point.

It's a common mistake that bothers me because it often is used to dismiss (or
even demonize) what is, in the majority of cases, an altruistic act.

~~~
kemiller2002
My point is that it's not necessarily an altruistic act. It's giving someone
the choice of either paying the government or sheltering the money to be used
within a limited set of circumstances at another time. Yes, in most cases they
are putting in more money than they would pay in taxes, but they are
maximizing their ability to influence a charitable instance at some point in
time in the future. Also, you notice in that list it has their names? They
could have made anonymous donations, but they didn't. They benefit from it,
just not in a direct monetary sense. Cynical? Yes. True? In a number of cases
also yes.

~~~
munk-a
I would add that charitable donations can often be accompanied by strong
obligations that hampers the efficiency of that aide - if a donation is made
that requires none of the benefits to the homeless goes to people with a past
history of drug use then resources need to be diverted to investigate the
recipients and ensure that the accounting works out. Sometimes these
obligations are burdensome enough that organizations will stop servicing
portions of the population altogether or even refund a donation.

Chartiable donations can also come with requirements around evangelism which I
personally find aborrent and, as has otherwise been pointed out, yes it's an
absolute reduction in take home but abuse of the system is rife and the income
reduction mechanic makes this really attractive to some folks if they're hit
with a particularly hard year.

In Canada I've actually been pleased to discover that your retirement is
mechanically a charity - investing into an RRSP (registered retirement savings
plan) counts as a direct income reduction which can mean that swing years when
options may be cashed out or other windfalls happen - can be put profitably
towards your own future well being while also ensuring you don't become a
burden later in life.

------
chizhik-pyzhik
seems like a contradiction

