Thursday, July 27, 2017

Who Is The World's Richest Person ???

According to this report, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is now "the world's richest person":

http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-richest-person-philanthropy-2017-7

I'm not so sure about that.

I think the world's richest person would have these qualities:

  • loved by his family
  • loved and respected by his employees
  • loved and respected by the public
  • beloved of G-d

Is that Jeff Bezos? What do you think?

As far as "philanthropy" goes, the whole thing makes me shudder. What have previous philanthropists done?

  • Andrew Carnegie gave us libraries, but left mountains of slag and tailings piles;
  • Henry Ford gave us the Ford Foundation, and left us a shattered city named Detroit;
  • John D. Rockefeller gave us the Rockefeller Foundation, and left us a world polluted with fossil fuels and their emissions.

These were not equitable trade-offs, and I'm sure you can think of other examples.

I don't think that enabling rapid social change even can be called philanthropy. Many of the problems Bezos and the other tech titans say they want to fix are ones they directly caused themselves - disruption, unemployment, poverty, and underfunded governments to whom they have chosen to pay little or no taxes. They're not "philanthropists"; they're more like saboteurs who destroyed whole nations and who now want to rebuild things more to their liking ... and more profitable to THEIR corporations.

Mr. B - You may have a lot of money, but you don't have our love and respect. You are NOT the world's richest person.

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