The prospect of still being billionaires, but with less billions, was just too much to handle

Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.

Oh well, guess we're fucked.

Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

tbh I'm surprised that there are 9 who did

On an unrelated note, Bill Gates is in the epstein list.

Meh. I actually don't think its a good idea. You just draw power away from the best of a segment empowering the biggest assholes. Taxes should be progressive and include all sources of income not just wages and the tax brackets should go all the way up to the highest income level. So there should be a level for over 100 billion and another for over 10 billion and over 1 billion and so on. Five figure income should be zero.

The fact that there are 256 billionaires is an absolute failure of our society.

Wowza scoob. Imagine that. Rich people lying.

Just wow.

They broke their arms patting themselves on their backs and can’t write checks anymore. 😢

why did they only use an 8-bit number to count billionaires , surely there are more of em

/dumbface

You don't understand, they're making money so much faster than they can reasonably give away.

Who would have thought

I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had "way more power than Obama" and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a "foundation" which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.

In Gates' case, a lot of his "charity" involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying "fuck your patents" and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.

by followed up you mean: "Ok after I die, I will donate half of my money to my tax-exempt family-owned-and-operated charity, that just happened to only pay salaries and donations to causes that serve the interests of our family-owned-and-operated shell companies"... :D

it's like sequeezing your late's father dry-drenched cumsocket which he used his entire life, then drinking it, and brag about it... to which I say thanks but no fucking thanks.

Link to report instead of awful Fortune link: Giving Pledge

giving half their wealth to what? charities that they control for pushing agendas (and possibly money laundering if we are talking about billionaires in third world countries with much less regulations)

These people are genuinely sick in the head, this level of pointless greed is not normal. Of course they aren't going through with it.

Is any of that because what would have been half their worth 15 years ago is now less than half of what it would be?

Like, if someone had 100 billion in 2010, and did give away 50 billion in that time, but also made a further 20 billion in that time, did they give away half their worth or not?

I've not read the article, so maybe that question is answered in there.

Can't say that I'm shocked.

Lmao fuck them my taxesare higher then half

Once you start to have money, you get a money dependency. No matter how rich you get, the "baseline you really need to live the life you want and nothing more" growths together with your wealth.

Take lottery winners and ask them if they could give away half of their gains. Will you be surprised if most of them say no, even though the day before they would have set their "minimum needed to live a happy life for the rest of my days" at a much smaller fraction of it?

Now take a similar population, but who in addition rationalized them deserving that money through their hard work and talent.

Pledge

Words are meaningless.

This article has slightly more dirt but still seems a bit vague on hard numbers and names.

Or their wealth has grown so rapidly that they gave away half of their 2010 wealth?

Wow the greediest scumbags on the planet lied about giving up their ill gotten power? I'm shocked! SHOCKED! \s

That’s 247 billionaires we could have put in the buffet. Never trust a billionaire. Eat them at first opportunity.

As though a wealthy person would speak the Truth...