High-Profile Sexual Abuse Epidemic

[Matata]

Originally Posted by MoneyGuy

Pay your employees well, provide good benefits, and pay your taxes and I don’t care how much money you have. I like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett is one of my favourite people.

He had to pay them well, they knew how much money was coming in and they had skills he needed.

Gates started off as an all star star coder and programmer, but his time at Microsoft was largely defined by his ruthless business practices, how he would smash his rivals, find ways to steal their IP or get it for cheap, with the ultimate goal of creating a tech Monopoly. The primary reason for creating a monopoly is to keep all the money and power for yourself, so I'm going to assume that was his motivation. How much of gates Fortune is other people's fortunes that he pirated away for himself?

Keep in mind I just listed his Forbes value, in all likelihood he probably has tens of billions squirreled away in offshore accounts, remember the Panama papers?

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Matata

He had to pay them well, they knew how much money was coming in and they had skills he needed.

Gates started off as an all star star coder and programmer, but his time at Microsoft was largely defined by his ruthless business practices, how he would smash his rivals, find ways to steal their IP or get it for cheap, with the ultimate goal of creating a tech Monopoly. The primary reason for creating a monopoly is to keep all the money and power for yourself, so I'm going to assume that was his motivation. How much of gates Fortune is other people's fortunes that he pirated away for himself?

Keep in mind I just listed his Forbes value, in all likelihood he probably has tens of billions squirreled away in offshore accounts, remember the Panama papers?

Bill Gates really wasn't an allstar coder, he if I remember was really only involved in one project where he coded and that was prior to Microsoft, when he worked on a traffic tracking system or something like that in his home town.



He always surrounded himself with the people who could do the coding to support his vision.


Where he was brilliant is that he could see concepts and bring them into his vision. His purchasing of a Disk Operating System from a small computer hobbiest store in Seattle (I think it was seattle) and repackaging it and coming up with a licensing agreement for every PC sold secured his future. His tour of the Xerox lab and seeing Windows propelled him and Jobs to millions as they each claimed that vision and then turned their people loose on it.


Same with Word and Excel, Lotus 123 and Word Perfect and other applications were literally there before and he took those concepts and turned his people loose on it.


The Web browser concept and the Internet, netscape was really there before and was better, but Bill had the advantage of being able to give it away for free and then claim the internet was pretty much his vision.


Gates was a visionary sales person, he was a legendary exploiter, he was a technology thief in the day and age where the Computer industry was the Wild Wild West.


I'd argue that he wasn't the innovator that people give him credit for. He ruthlessly squashed his opposition and even his friends to make a buck, he was greedy and nasty and not a good guy to work for, but he made his people rich by paying them little and giving them stock options that fortunately made them wealthy.


He was the ultimate capitalist, and when he had his billions he went on a campaign to reform his image and good for his for that.


I'm not saying this as a negative thing. His negative aspects and ruthless business and personal practices have sent billions to charity.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Matata

Keep in mind I just listed his Forbes value, in all likelihood he probably has tens of billions squirreled away in offshore accounts, remember the Panama papers?

"Probably..."

No.
You do realize the Panama Papers list is published and fully searchable, right? Bill Gates is not among the persons in the list. It would have been huge news if he had been.

https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/#_ga=...219.1462690528

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by Joborule

Just a quick comment in regards to this.

Why does it matter if they do or don't? It's their money. They're not obligated to do anything with it.

They're contributed more to charity than the many contributions of companies and individuals could combined. They have done more than asked (or expected) of them.

Because Liberals like him. That’s it, that’s all.

[zamler]

Gates did not tour the Xerox PARC research lab that was Steve Jobs. Jobs had a light bulb go off when he saw the GUI and mouse took the concept and ran with it. Microsoft lagged badly for years as they clumsily tried to copy Apple and others, the advantage Microsoft had was their OS ran on generic hardware.

Gates essentially stole every concept out there Microsoft invented nothing.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by zamler

Gates did not tour the Xerox PARC research lab that was Steve Jobs. Jobs had a light bulb go off when he saw the GUI and mouse took the concept and ran with it. Microsoft lagged badly for years as they clumsily tried to copy Apple and others, the advantage Microsoft had was their OS ran on generic hardware.

Gates essentially stole every concept out there Microsoft invented nothing.

Gates did as well, it was in one of his biographies.

[woob]

What thread is this??

[Wormius]

It’s the “all billionaires must be child predators, and if not, they have to be corrupt in some other way thread”

Kind of just rolls off the tongue.

[ResAlien]

Can we go with Conspiracies R Us?

[Matata]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

"Probably..."

No.
You do realize the Panama Papers list is published and fully searchable, right? Bill Gates is not among the persons in the list. It would have been huge news if he had been.

https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/#_ga=...219.1462690528

Good thing everyone in the past, present and future that hid their money offshore was involved in the Panama papers and we can put the matter to rest.

[Matata]

[Nmd

[Matata]

Originally Posted by Wormius

It’s the “all billionaires must be child predators, and if not, they have to be corrupt in some other way thread”

Kind of just rolls off the tongue.

Lol, sure he may be the greatest tech IP thief of all time, but how could I be so foolish to imply he may be a corrupt individual. How do I find the nerve to say such outlandish things?

[Bill Bumface]

Bill Gates has saved more lives than any of his business practices harmed.

Is he perfect? No. If all the world's billionaires were like him, would the world be a better place? Yes.

Now back to your regular sexual abuse scandal programming.

[Matata]

I hope he wants to make the world a better place but I wont hang my hat on it.

To get things back on track: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/b...ill-gates.html

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Matata

Good thing everyone in the past, present and future that hid their money offshore was involved in the Panama papers and we can put the matter to rest.

Originally Posted by Matata

Keep in mind I just listed his Forbes value, in all likelihood he probably has tens of billions squirreled away in offshore accounts, remember the Panama papers?

You inferred that he had money hidden offshore and used the Panama papers as a reference for that.

If you don't want to be exposed for being kinda stupid, you could just stop making unsubstantiated claims.

[Ped]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

You inferred that he had money hidden offshore and used the Panama papers as a reference for that.

If you don't want to be exposed for being kinda stupid, you could just stop making unsubstantiated claims.

To be fair, I kind of read it that Matata brought up the Panama Papers like that not to infer Gates was in them, but they were an example of lots of influential and rich people holding money offshore to avoid taxes. Panama Papers as an example, not a reference.

[missdpuck]

Oh yeah. IBM and Bill Gates. We remember it well around here.

The “down south” the article refers to is Boca Raton, Fl. So many neighborhoods that once housed IBMers turned into complete dumps after the company moved the bulk of the operations to North Carolina. It’s always kind of amazing to me that IBM had a big research lab here at that time.


IBM was a huge part of our local economy. The company was no match for Mr. Gates.

https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories...at-catapulted-. html

Hilarious that one of IBM’s execs told Gates that he wouldn’t want to be in his shoes and have to compete with IBM !

https://tech-insider.org/personal-co...1993/0816.html

Off topic I guess ...

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Ped

To be fair, I kind of read it that Matata brought up the Panama Papers like that not to infer Gates was in them, but they were an example of lots of influential and rich people holding money offshore to avoid taxes. Panama Papers as an example, not a reference.

Which is a fair interpretation, but making such a bold claim without substantiation doesn't get a free pass.

[GirlySports]

Sounds like you guys have discovered the 1%

[Matata]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Which is a fair interpretation, but making such a bold claim without substantiation doesn't get a free pass.

The Panama papers made it pretty clear everyone with lots of money is trying to hide it from the taxman.

Here's a mental exercise for you.

You earn $10B dollars. But you can get away with claiming $7B on taxes and hide $3B in offshore accounts, allowing you to avoid ~$1B in taxes. Do you

A. Keep the $1B you earned for yourself. Theres no punishment even if you get caught.
B. Give it to the government.

What percent of people do you think pick B over A? Can you really believe Gates will be one of those people, if so, I'd love to hear your reasoning, or are you just interested in arguing semantics based on an extremely unlikely scenario?