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Sergey Brin (discuss.online)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/billionaire@lemmy.ca
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[–] 81 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (11 children)

From "don't be evil" to "be extra evil" in a few short years. But this doesn't mean he's somehow an exceptionally terrible person. Pretty much anyone who gets into a position like this will turn out this way. Which is to say, billionaires simply shouldn't exist.

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  • [–] 31 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    Man, just once, I'd like to see a billionaire that decides to spend enormous amounts of money on cool shit, without also being a terrible human being. Basically thinking of Musk, but the version of him that most people thought he was back when SpaceX was first making waves. That was all ruined by the fact that he turned out to be a Nazi.

    Like, if this guy has $300 billion, I wish he would just get it in his head one day that he wants to see real high speed rail in the US and just throw $100 billion at it to force it to happen. Not because it's profitable, but because it's cool, and having $200 billion vs having $300 billion makes absolutely no difference to anything.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    No one who gets to have that enormous amount of money in the first place is a decent enough person to spend it in good will.

    Any person with 100 million dollars is set for life. Having more than that is simply greed.

    A person with the funding and genuine intent to have "the boring company" develop and execute the Hyperloop would have done it by now, instead of having it just be tubes with fuckin Teslas in them

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Once you get into a position like that, you're basically just surrounded by yes-men who tell you how great you are non-stop. It would take a very strong character to not go bonkers in that kind of situation. Add to that the fact that people who become billionaires will be pretty self obsessed to begin with and you have a recipe for disaster. Actually, the crusty old French philosophers had this shit figured out 250 years ago.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    True, but I feel like they are all missing out on the opportunity for some long term ego stroking. Just look at half the early skyscrapers built in the early 20th century; the Chrysler building for example is named after the man, not the company. Do it right and people could be praising the Brin Rail System for decades to come, and he'd be remembered forever for that. Instead he's just one more tech-douche, and that's all he'll ever be remembered as.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah but the people who built these skyscrapers during the gilded age weren't exactly paragons of virtue.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    CEOs, most billionaires, they're psychopaths. That's why they're good at the job. Now we have a bunch of psychopaths controlling all the wealth in the world. If you look through history, they've always been the enemy.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Yeah, there are studies about this. Once people get a certain amount is power, empathy starts to break down and they can't see other people's perspective anymore. That means they also don't care about others anymore.

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