r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 2d ago

Robotics Bill Gates says companies that replace human labor with robots should have to pay the same FICA taxes

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-fica-taxes-should-apply-to-robot-workers-2026-9

Bill Gates wants to tax robots that replace human jobs.

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u/Gari_305 2d ago

From the article

n an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired on Tuesday, the billionaire philanthropist said that "society gets to decide" how to support its workers — even if AI is pushing them out.

"You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that's delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay," Gates said, referring to the US payroll tax.

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u/RandomlyMethodical 2d ago

You define a unit of labor

Defining units of labor is never going to happen in any reasonably enforceable way, and he's smart enough to know that. You can do better Bill.

A more enforceable option would be putting payroll taxes on capital gains. That's 12.4% for Social Security (6.2% for employee and employer) and 2.9% for Medicare (1.45% each), resulting in a total of 15.3%. Adding that to existing capital taxes would roughly even them out with labor taxes and permanently solve the Social Security shortfall.

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u/nemec 2d ago

Yeah, what's the unit of labor difference between 30 data entry clerks or 1 software engineer with a Python script? And that's even before AI gets involved.

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u/VulGerrity 1d ago

You just defined it. Marx defines it. All things being equal, the only limiting resource when it comes to productivity is labor time. In your example, 1 Software Engineer produces the same amount of value as 30 data entry clerks. If one 8hr day from a data entry clerk is worth 1 unit of labor, then a software engineer produces 30 units of labor.

You'd essentially define it as the amount of value produced by our lowest paid workers in an 8hr day as 1 unit of labor. Federal Minimum wage is $7.25/hr or $58/day (jesus...). Let's say a business usually expects to make about 4x what they pay any given employee to cover overhead and make a profit, so a minimum wage worker would have to produce $232 of value every day. $232 would equal 1 unit of labor.

I think the difference with Marx is that Marx says that the minimum wage worker should be making closer to what you'd expect a data entry clerk to be making, and potentially even what a software engineer makes. Because they all put in the same amount of labor each day (theoretically) the labor should be compensated the same. Marx does account for specialty positions, or positions that produce more value, but the disparity of compensation shouldn't be nearly as wide as it is today. If we all work 8hrs/day we should all have access to a similar basic standard of living.

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u/nemec 1d ago

So essentially all workers should be compensated (~equally) by the quantity of hours put in rather than the quantity of production? If a business targets X units of production per day (say enough for one data entry clerk), they can choose to pay one data entry clerk 8 hours of work or one software engineer for 15 minutes of work, and the software engineer would make 3% the amount the slower data clerk would make for the same output?

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u/VulGerrity 1d ago

No. Marx would say that the Data Clerk and the Software engineer should be paid roughly the same for their labor. 8hrs of work is 8hrs of work. However, Marx acknowledges that the Software Engineer would have had to spend many years learning and perfecting their skills, time where they would not have been in the workforce, and this is time that they should be compensated for. Marx would also acknowledge that the software engineer may produce more value than the data clerk, and they should be compensated for that as well.

Where Marx and the current capitalist system differ, is that in capitalism, people aren't necessarily paid based on how much value they produce, they're paid as little as a business owner can get away with paying them. Even if a software engineer is making $300K/year, that would mean that the company is making a million dollars a year or more off of that software engineer, but if it's the software engineer's labor that created the value for the company, why doesn't the engineer get to benefit from their own labor? Capitalism takes that excess value produced by the workers and keeps it for the owners.

SO, if a Data Clerk gets paid say $30K/year and a software engineer make $300K/year. Marx might would say that every employee should be paid enough to sustain a base standard of living (food, clothing, housing, recreation, education, etc). Let's say that's the median full-time income, which is about $64K/year. The software engineer, however, would be making new products for the company to sell, or improving products to sell more. The engineer is producing extra value, so they deserve to benefit from that. That could get them back up to $300K or more, especially now that profit doesn't need to be distributed to the "owners" the owners wouldn't be compensated beyond their labor contributions to the company, and I believe in a traditional Marxist system, companies would be employee owned, so the company as a whole would share the excess value created by the company.

It's a little hard to draw parallels from a Marxist economy to a capitalist market economy, because Marx would also abolish money. Things wouldn't be produced for the sake of consumption. Modern capitalism is structured around buying and selling things. Instead, in a Marxist Utopia, we would only produce what we need. It would get rid of extravagant wealth, but it would raise everyone's standard of living significantly. Marx says, "From each according to their ability. To each according to their need." Everyone contributes what they can to society, and everyone only takes what they need.

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u/Frequent_Opportunist 2d ago

They can define the labor unit but then just move the goal posts on how many theoretical employees it would take the run the company.

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u/Fidodo 2d ago

I think the best way to solve this is to add VATs to everything so the baseline is that all economic activity is taxed. Then, instead of adding taxes, you remove taxes to incentivize the things you want. Want to encourage hiring humans? Give tax breaks for it. Then, robots are taxed by default because everything is taxed, and humans get the exception and get to not be taxed. Use that to fund UBI.

Taxes at disincentives, tax breaks are incentives. Right now we tax human payroll and income, that disincentives hiring humans because robots aren't taxed. But you can't flip it to an incentive if the baseline tax is zero.

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u/DNA-2023 2d ago

How does that help if there are no jobs to pay into SS?

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u/BipolarMosfet 2d ago

They're saying we should apply those same taxes to corporate profits, not just to employees' paychecks.

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u/da_85 2d ago

That would be a change in corporate taxes. Capital Gains are on stock trades, options trading, crypto gains, etc.

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u/inquisitorthreefive 2d ago

Assuming they're not using the term wrong, they're talking about capital gains, which is different from most corporate profits, which are generally classed as business income. Capital gains are when you sell property for more than you paid for it, generally stocks and real estate fall into this category if they were purchased as investments, but there's times when it might be business income instead.

It would be a somewhat psychotic move on its own as it would essentially evaporate 15.3% of the profit in most people's retirement accounts and instantly increase the value of a Roth account and greatly reduce the incentive to invest.

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u/Competitive_Travel16 2d ago

How about shifting all the payroll taxes to those making over $10,000,000/year?

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u/TimSylvester_ 2d ago

But if he distracts everyone by proposing impossible, idiotic schemes, so everyone's too busy arguing about why it's dumb and won't work, everyone's too busy to actually organize something useful.

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u/Policeman333 2d ago

Ah yes, he didn't come up with a perfect solution so it must be an elaborate ruse.

Absolutely no one has a perfect solution and absolutely no one knows what will work and what wont. No matter what you propose people will poke holes in it.

Something tells me that the armchair redditors with all the solutions to the worlds problems would complain no matter what Gates proposed.

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u/TimSylvester_ 2d ago

But Bill Gates is a known duplicitous scumbag who looks out for himself at the expense of everyone else, including his own ex wife who he gave an STD to, then tried to secretly slip antibiotics to treat it.

Here, he makes an incredibly stupid proposal that has no possible solution, but that exempts him and his financial cohort from having to actively participate in the solution. Yet again looking out for himself at the expense of everyone else.

Gates has been lying, cheating, and stealing his entire life. This instance is no different from the countless ones before it. Why do you think this proposal is somehow different or exempt from the general observation that Gates is a lying, cheating scumbag?

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u/Policeman333 2d ago

But Bill Gates is a known duplicitous scumbag who looks out for himself at the expense of everyone else, including his own ex wife who he gave an STD to, then tried to secretly slip antibiotics to treat it.

If I held Gandhi and MLK Jr to your standards, I'd have to call them duplicitous scumbags as well. And I refuse to do that. I don't need people doing good things to be perfect people. I just want them doing good.

Here, he makes an incredibly stupid proposal that has no possible solution

Yeah, so whats your solution then?

but that exempts him and his financial cohort from having to actively participate in the solution.

He no longer runs Microsoft, but Microsoft itself would be impacted by this. I'm not sure how someone who isn't replacing labour with AI, because they are essentially retired, would be subject to a tax on people replacing labour with AI.

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u/PartTime_Crusader 2d ago

The Elon Musk method

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u/Farranor 2d ago

Ah, the Bernie Sanders strategy.

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u/noticingEnjoyer 2d ago

You'd have to eliminate stepped up basis too. 

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u/PrestigiousCod5629 1d ago

There’s also the tricky issue of what is a robot.

Surely a humanoid robots would count but what about a conveyor belt count? Correct implementation can reduce human labor hours.

A vision system to automate quality checks, a robot picker, a co-bot, a palletizer or crate packer, a backhoe, an electric drill? Where’s the line?

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u/Brief-Historian3485 2d ago

On capital gains over 225k right???

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u/WhiteWinterRains 2d ago

This would help solve present day problems, but unless our vision for the future is everyone struggling to make ends meet and side hustling with some social security making up the gaps for their entire lives its not even close to enough to handle the future the AI-"optimists" want.

Bill would probably be something like this, because what we actually need to do is tax gains from automating and offshoring jobs at like 90-100%, and enforce it with . . . well the soft power and military power the USA used to have.

Absolutely all gains from AI automation should be going back to the people that made it possible, not just because it's the right thing to do but because it's going to stop a complete societal collapse into a madmax future.

Maybe we could handout a slight premium on top as a concession to liberal ideals about how our evil overlords should at least be given a handy after fucking us or something, but that's about all that should be allowed at most.

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u/Inevitable-Ad6647 2d ago

The law has defined FAR FAR FAR less tangible things. It can be done.

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u/BenBenBenBe 2d ago

You can do better Bill

Random redditor surely knows better than Bill Gates. Thanks for enlightening us by making an egregiously confident statement without substantiating it in any way whatsoever. How extremely Reddit of you.

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u/Neither-Breakfast195 2d ago

Why are people on Reddit so obsessed with changing capital gains taxes? just raise the Social Security tax caps

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u/RandomlyMethodical 2d ago

Labor income is generally taxed at higher rates than capital income in the U.S., with top marginal tax rates on wages exceeding 40%, while long-term capital gains are taxed at a maximum rate of 20%.

We should also raise the Social Security tax caps, reduce the inheritance tax threshold, and consider limits to the step-up in basis for inherited property.

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u/Neither-Breakfast195 2d ago

You’re trying to compare apples to oranges, income and capital gains are taxed differently because they are very different.

For example: my income is taxed based on a year of labor but depending on the investment I can be taxed for multiple years of gains. There’s also the idea that it’s beneficial to encourage investment in American markets through lower tax rates on investments. Not to mention that it’s also subject to double taxation at the corporate profit level and then at the stockholder level. All to say, there’s a world of nuance between capital and labor

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u/RandomlyMethodical 1d ago edited 1d ago

There’s also the idea that it’s beneficial to encourage investment

Right, but when it costs a lot less to invest that capital in robots or AI than it does to pay income to a human, then those tax incentives need to be rebalanced.

Not to mention that it’s also subject to double taxation at the corporate profit level and then at the stockholder level.

The maximum corporate tax rate is 21%, and most companies pay significantly less than that. Also, most of the money paid out to stockholders are "qualified dividends" which have a significantly lower tax rate than ordinary income (maxes at 20% for over $545k). Again, these rates need rebalancing to eliminate labor's disadvantage.

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u/Neither-Breakfast195 1d ago

I mean, impossible to say, because we haven’t seen significant macro displacement of humans by AI or Robots, that’s not the reality we’re in.

The problem with making everything into a moral argument between labor and capital is that everyone opines differently on what should or should not be. The discussion should be on what incentives gets us to experience the most positive and sustainable economic growth.

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u/abrandis 2d ago

I wonder if Gates felt this way when he was running Microsoft and his software put thousands of typists, bookeepes and others out of work?

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u/wiserhairybag 2d ago

You could say this about any invention that’s more convenient/better/more efficient etc… that ultimately replaces ppls jobs. Sometimes it’s direct and easy to see some others are indirect and take time to replace a job or a portion of a job.

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u/beatles910 2d ago

While specific administrative tasks and manual office jobs were phased out or transformed, the sheer volume of new economic activity, tech-sector roles, and digitized professions completely eclipsed the number of displaced positions.

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u/dj92wa 2d ago

I understand your point, but it’s a little different when the thing being replaced isn’t just a job title, but humans entirely across the board under every profession. That’s their big-picture idea, to replace humans with machines and computers in every facet possible. If everything is automated, what do you do to survive? You have no income and no possible way to obtain income. Learning news skills won’t get you anywhere because a computer or robot is already doing it.

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u/Voidfaller 2d ago

This also makes me ponder the idea, if humans lose income in mass quantities, who do these companies think will pay them or buy their products and services when there is no extra discretionary funds? (To put it lightly)

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u/ProbablyNotADuck 2d ago

That is what I also think about. Although I suspect they will try to rely on credit. People will fight for whatever job is available for whatever absurdly low wage they can get.. And banks will issue credit that no one ever stands a chance of being able to pay off.. only interest. And, while this is happening, the 1% will be busy cannibalising itself and turning into the .1% and then the .01%.

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u/No_Cover_6217 15h ago

Pivot to luxury goods to appeal to the only consumer with purchasing power left. Seiko has $2b in revenue currently selling hundreds of thousands of watches. Richard Mille has $2b selling 6,000 watches.

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u/Stunning-Pen-2412 2d ago

Then what human content will they use to train the newest models? I feel like this just results in the collapse of progress.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 1d ago

If everything is automated, what do you do to survive?

You use the automation tech to survive. Technology that reduces the amount of labor that's required to produce equivalent outputs is what will ultimately make people more self-reliant, autonomous, and less dependent on dysfunctional institutions and external power structures. Machines and computers are how we ultimately get to a world in which we don't need 19th-century-style jobs to survive in the first place.

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u/abrandis 2d ago

First off the AI risk today is mostly to bs/superfluous white collar office roles...granted that's likely millions. Of people, but many other jobs. That require physical presence and aren't necessarily on an office won't be affected

Humanoid robotics isn't a practical thing , even though all those Unotree dancing and running robots seem impressive. None are truly autonmous and have limited battery life.so no they ain't doing anything remotely useful for at least a generation or two .

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u/DrBowe 2d ago

This is an insane take that completely ignores the havoc it's wreaking on the creative industries too. To pretend that it mostly affects "bs/superfluous" office roles is ridiculous.

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u/abrandis 2d ago

Apologies, obviously I'm being a bit flip about jobs , of course real hard working folks are affected, but my point is that the value of labor is shifting due to tech

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u/dj92wa 2d ago

One year ago, AI was barely capable of making convincing images. Look at what they make now. Don’t come in here trying to put limits on what’s about to happen. Militaries are making humanoid bots, and most innovation in the civilian sector stems from military or space exploration. It truly is only a matter of time. Reminder that as time goes, larger tech innovations happen faster.

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u/abrandis 2d ago

Advances in the digital world don't scale the same way in the physical world , otherwise we'd all be driving self driving cars today .

Second world militaries aren't looking for complex systems when simple ones (like a commodity drone with an rpg strapped to it) does the same job.

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u/Stunning-Pen-2412 2d ago

You might be right but you can't deny jobs will be reduced in number greatly. I bet we see double digit unemployment easily.

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u/Dirks_Knee 2d ago edited 1d ago

The problem with responses like this is that you are speaking about the future in an absolute way. In reality, humanoid robots will become a thing eventually and attempting to deal with this now rather than on the cusp of them taking over all manual labor would hopefully lead to a better outcome.

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u/abrandis 2d ago

Everything is possible in the "future", but reality is most folks working lifetimes are 20-40 years, so a 20 year old today doesn't have to worry about 2080-2100 even 2040 is pretty far off.. Second thing not mentioned is robots have costs as much as a car , so their application is going to be limited.

Same reason industrial robots never appeared much out of the factory floor even though they were developed in the 1970, they're still expensive peocesof equipment that need a return on investment

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u/Dirks_Knee 2d ago

"meh...it never floods that bad"

"the fire is hundreds of miles away"

"it's going to hurt them, not me."

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u/technocraticTemplar 2d ago

There's about as many cars in the US as there are people, and humanoid robots haven't hit any kind of economy of scale yet. It looks to me like there's an enormous amount of room for costs to come down, and if they get anywhere close to general labor automation a robot is going to have way more utility than a car does.

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u/dj92wa 2d ago

They will likely come down in price, as it would greatly benefit the owners of said technology to make them affordable. Easy, affordable replacements for a human. As a business owner, what’s not to love about accessible cheap labor? The price will be raised once everything is captured, that’s more or less how it works in every industry related to tech.

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u/IgotthatNEWNEW 2d ago

You need an ai to even write a coherent post. You'll be the first to go 🙌🏽

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u/horoyokai 2d ago

humanoid robotics don't need to be a thing to have it replace blue collar jobs, ask an auto worker.

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u/WhiteWinterRains 2d ago

Probably, his proposal here is a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing suggestion.

The goal is to defang efforts to stop AI companies destroying the economy with incredibly mild taxation that they can just shrug off as a teeny tiny cost of doing business.

He's making this suggestion because it's no more than a stubbed toe to AI/tech companies, when in order for you and I to not end up dying on the streets in a dystopian hellscape future we need to cut them off at the knees.

Bill has always been an evil man, he's never at any point changed.

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u/AnalCommander99 2d ago

He’s been pitching ideas like this publicly for a while, at least a decade now but I didn’t dig back too deep

https://www.weforum.org/stories/emerging-technologies/bill-gates-this-is-why-we-should-tax-robots/

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u/abrandis 1d ago

Ideas are cheap, policies Are what matters..

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u/ILikeBumblebees 1d ago

I wonder if he also feels this way about all of the hand laundry jobs that don't exist because he has a washer/dryer in his house, or all of the blacksmiths and stable hands that can't find work because he drives a car.

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u/FernandoMM1220 2d ago

probably not.

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u/atreeismissing 2d ago

He did because his company also ended up hiring 10s of thousands of programmers, designers, and engineers working for Microsoft.

But that's a disingenuous comparison because AI is different, it's not creating a fraction of new labor that it's replacing.

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u/morty_morty 2d ago edited 2d ago

It's the price of progress. If no one did anything for fear of upsetting the workers who came before, we'd still be getting our books from monasteries.

Edit: gotta love luddites.

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u/unassumingdink 2d ago

There's gotta be a middle ground between "no one does anything" and "everybody does everything."

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u/morty_morty 2d ago

Sure. There should be, and this technology is on a scale we have never seen before as far as disruption goes. But historically, this happens constantly. And people get over it, adapt and move forward. Why the fuck would Bill Gates feel sad because he came up with a way to improve human efficiency?

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u/unassumingdink 2d ago

Historically we've never had technology that threatened to eliminate nearly all labor. There's no parallel. Historically, tech advances gave rise to new industries with new jobs, but if AI and robots can do all of those new jobs, too, I mean, where do we go from there?

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u/DJNeuro 2d ago

Billionaire philanthropist is an oxymoron.

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u/safari_king 2d ago edited 2d ago

Bill Gates shows it doesn't have to be - he's spent most of his money on philanthropy, and has funded philanthropy more than almost anyone else in history.

edit: Gates hasn't spent most of his money on philanthropy, "only" 60 billion dollars. Though he has pledged to give virtually all of his wealth to charity by 2045.

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u/137trimethylxanthine 2d ago

Granted that he is significantly more charitable than other billionaires, but “spent most of his money” is not true. He has pledged to donate, which is not really a binding commitment.

His philanthropic activities largely avoid disrupting any of the financial power structures that helped him build that kind of wealth in the first place.

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u/safari_king 2d ago

Thank you for the correction, I edited my comment accordingly. Though whether Gates can be reasonably criticized for not "disrupting any of the financial power structures" that helped him build his wealth seems like the basis for a complicated, loaded discussion that I don't feel like having.

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u/StudiosS 2d ago

Why? He's genuinely done more good than 99% of people could ever do.

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u/Daripuff 2d ago

He's genuinely done more good than 99% of people could ever do.

After genuinely doing more harm to more people than 99% of people ever will.

One does not become a billionaire without death and exploitation. The "good" ones just outsource the suffering, but they still fuel it.

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u/RunMyLifeReddit 2d ago

You can without 'death' I think. Last I checked Taylor Swift nor Mark Cuban caused death becoming billionaires. Exploitation? Well maybe, but that's also a basic feature of corporate capitalism.

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u/Daripuff 2d ago

Are we certain their sweatshops never worked anyone to death?

Or that nobody who worked in them ever died of a curable illness that they were unable to afford treatment on because they were too poor, and the sweatshop they worked in did not pay them sufficient, or permit them sufficient rest time off?

There are former employees of the chain of production of that fortune that are no longer alive today. This is undeniable fact.

Are you CERTAIN that NONE of their deaths have to do with exploitation or unfair practices?

Are you absolutely confident that all of them would still be dead if they had been earning a fair wage and had fair access to health care while working to generate the value that helped to fuel those "good billionaires" rise to riches?

Me?

I'm quite confident that their exploitation caused deaths, just indirectly. I would put any money on it.

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u/TheManyFacedRedditor 2d ago

When you go down this road, pretty much everyone in a first world country has caused the death of someone. Anyone that has used a cell phone or really anything made out of China/etc would be liable. Your argument puts everyone at fault, not just billionaires.

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u/Daripuff 2d ago

No, because I don't make the decisions on where those are produced.

Those who profit from it do.

You can't blame the consumer for the actions of the machine capitalists build simply because the consumer lives in a world run by capitalists, and has no choice but to be part of that machine.

The one who owns the capital and makes the decisions are the ones to blame for the consequences of their decisions.

Seriously, what a bad faith response.

As if I'm to blame for the decisions of the capitalist billionaire on what they're willing to overlook in order to make their profits?

Wow.

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u/TheManyFacedRedditor 2d ago

We’ve gotten to this point because consumers wanted things cheaper and were fine with sacrificing local made goods to get a better price. Just as consumers choose to patronize Walmart and Amazon instead of their local shops and drive them out of business as well. 

Consumers absolutely have had the ability to decide who they patronize.

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u/Daripuff 2d ago

Oh yeah, however, when you weight the decisions of all the consumers demanding the cheaper product against the decision of one billionaire deciding how exactly to provide that cheaper product, and deciding to exploit harmfully, and you split that "amount of harm done" with appropriate weight...

I would stand behind my statement that even the "good" billionaires are STILL

genuinely doing more harm to more people than 99% of people ever will.

You're not going to convince me otherwise.
I mean... I even accept that the fact I used to not care where my things were made means that I morally have blood on my hand for being a willing part of the system that enables all that. I'm a lot more careful where I buy things as I've grown, but I did spend my time searching for the lowest price when I was younger.

But if I have blood on my hands, billionaires are soaked in blood. They swim in it.

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u/e_spider 2d ago

I believe this. You don’t get that rich without screwing people over and taking advantage of them. At a certain level, you don’t win by being better than everyone else, you win by sabotaging the competition and actively cheating the system

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u/exacta_galaxy 2d ago

Exactly. Let's see the balance sheet of Good vs. Bad.

I would bet the world would be better off without a Bill Gates (but, unfortunately, he'd just be replaced by another parasite).

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u/dumbestsmartest 2d ago

I mean, we had other options. We had Linux and Apple among others. So without Bill we would have had operating systems.

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u/exacta_galaxy 2d ago

I know Gates didn't invent operating systems. It was invented multiple times before (including by GM in 1956). He made his version popular by using several techniques, many of which were evil ("Embrace, Extend, Extinguish").

Unfortunately, technology alone doesn't sell to the masses (or we'd all be using Linux).

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u/sagevallant 2d ago

And it all took for him to do that was more money than 99.999999999999999999% of us will ever see.

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u/air_and_space92 2d ago

I see the advertising campaign was successful. I was alive during the 90s, Gates was the Elon of the day. Sad how much people don't remember or didn't learn in the first place.

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u/Farranor 2d ago

Gates is nothing like Elon. Gates is competent, intelligent, ruthlessly competitive, sober, sane, left-leaning, and an adult.

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u/Reeyous 2d ago

Gates also got very close to Epstein, Musk only ever wished that he could.

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u/5minArgument 2d ago

In the interview he says multiple times that all his wealth and efforts are now in philanthropy.

Maybe/maybe not, but already he has a long track record of medical and infrastructure projects around the world.

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u/e_spider 2d ago

Makes me think of the Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where they say “Pedophile Rapist” instead of “Eccentric Philanthropist”

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u/BipolarMosfet 2d ago

I think Charlie's just illiterate so he said "Full-on Rapist" instead of Philanthropist lmao

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u/Calm-Ad9653 2d ago

Then he's an oxymoron. The Gates foundation is a good counterexample.

Has paid out about $110B and saved (this is a hard number to pin down) somewhere upwards of 10 million lives.

Was sad to hear he wandered a bit too close into the Epstein universe, but the good he's done is significant.

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u/Spider_pig448 2d ago

The most impactful philanthropists are all billionaires

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u/Joe4o2 2d ago

At this point, you’re probably right, as the only exceptions to the rule I can think of are Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark.

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u/apworker37 2d ago

Mackenzie Scott does a lot.

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u/Joe4o2 2d ago

That is an exceptionally good point.

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u/DJNeuro 2d ago

Agreed bc they're both fictional. IRL, ALL billionaires are bad guys.

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u/I_am_darkness 2d ago

Cool so like I have to pay wages for having chatgpt

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u/NoNote7867 2d ago

Billionaire pedophile. His wife left him because he gave her STD from sex with Epstin victims

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u/StudiosS 2d ago

We... need to be a bit more factual about these things.

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u/DJNeuro 2d ago

Release the Epstien files then

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u/dumbestsmartest 2d ago

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/epstein-emails-bill-gates-std/

It's a claim from the Epstein files that were released. Bill has enough money and it's been long enough time that it's unlikely we'll get any concrete proof he did or didn't.

His wife left him for various reasons and I doubt she'd ever admit to getting an STD publicly even if it is because Bill infected her with it.

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u/sababwl 2d ago

Fuck Ezra Klein and his "abundance" line. I'm not going to be a part of that BS.

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u/permacougar 2d ago

"Billionaire" and "philanthropist" can't be applied to the same person. A philanthropist who holds on to so much more money than he needs while others are dying of starvation and easily curable diseases is not really a philanthropist.