I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…
Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he’s been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He’s basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That’s what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him
Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it’s success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone’s life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.
Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude’s entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force
Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…
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“I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…”
They are but as usual it’s the WORKERS who are the good brilliant people, not the ownership class and 3 letter executive dirt bags. They’re the same in EVERY industry. Owner/CEO ONLY cares about profit profit profit, fuck everyone and everything else.
Workers, they’re a mixed bag as there are so many different people, but in the tech space they’re generally intelligent “good” people.
Idk, given how many evil mobile games and dark patterns there are, there are plenty of “bad” people, or at least people who won’t push back against bad decisions from management.
Nobody is going to “push back” very hard against the people who control their food, shelter, and other basic human needs. If they had that level of comfort, they wouldn’t be working there in the first place.
Yup, it’s very much like the prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone in tech refused to do this nonsense, we wouldn’t have dark patterns and whatnot and stakeholders would find another way. But if enough people are willing to do this nonsense, the “good” people end up worse off.
The workers also just care for profits. Nobody is working for free. Everyone needs to pay their bills. Companies will stop making profits when workers dispense with their wages, but I bet that’s not gonna happen.
Technically workers do not care about profits, they care about wages. The average worker doesn’t benefit from profit because they represent a fixed expense. The work they produce is worth more than their salary which is how a company produces profit. As long as a company breaks even and the salary is enough to meet one’s needs a worker does just fine. However a worker’s job could easily be axed in the name of profit because they are what is being profited off of, not the entitled beneficiary of the business as a whole.
Profit it just the take home winnings of the investors or owners of the business and the few jobs at the top where compensation is based off of profit percentage or lavish bonuses for making the targets.
Wages are also subject to change based on performance or company profits.
But what I mean is that the company and the worker have the same interests in some way. Everyone wants to make money to pay the bills. Companies are no charities and your work isn’t either. If you dislike your relationship with the company, you can just resign that relationship any time. But one thing will never change: the worker will only do the work required from him and the company will only pay the wage required from them. There is nothing evil about that. It’s human nature for the past 20.000 years.
So many people don’t understand that profit comes after all expenses which includes labor. :/
Tom from MySpace really is the nicest guy on this list…he was my first friend on there! 😎
Capital demands growth. It doesn’t care how you do it. It doesn’t track or reward whether you did it by making the world better or by creating death squads and working with the CIA to kill thousands of people and overthrow a government that wanted to charge you taxes and limit the amount of land you could have.
It’s been this way, and worse, for a long time. But bear in mind that Twitter gave us the ability to see how billionaires think. Modern media made them more accessible. They didn’t change, our knowledge of them did.
I don’t ever remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs being good people. Or Jeff Bezos, trying to kill bookstores.
The guys behind Google seemed okay at first and I think they really wanted to do good. But the way the company culture was built was toxic.
But in the end it’s all about the greed. As soon as a company becomes public and whose stocks become available on the market, it turns to shit.
Look at how Steam is going well and actually helping personal computing progress. Gabe Newell is doing a great job because he loves that he does and ensures the people who work for him do too.
Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).
There are no saints at this level.
I mean their unwillingness to do anything about the market abuse and rampant child-gambling aside, the lootboxes for purely cosmetic items are one of the least predatory ways to do microtransactions. It’s not like EA where the only way to unlock entire characters in some games is to grind for hundreds of hours or pay, or like COD where they took the lootbox idea and made it actually affect (multiplayer) gameplay
the least predatory ways to do microtransactions
Damning with faint praise.
TBF to Valve, their lootboxes were limited to cosmetic items in a free to play multiplayer games. You can ignore those and it wouldn’t change the gameplay at all.
Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC
You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.
And in politics, too!
I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world?
Nothing happened to the world. You just grew up.
yes
when I was growing up
This is really the key. We’re all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we’re kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn’t realize the extent of what was happening.
Edit: The evolution of social media also adds a lot to this. We are both more connected to each other as is his society, and therefore more aware of BS think it’s pulled by corporations. Then, of course, you have folks like Elon Musk who seem to make a point of making sure everyone knows how big of a piece of shit they are, and how proud of it they are.
Yeah we’re baffled about how kids get sucked into worshipping Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I remember a brief time in my life when I thought Steve Jobs was the greatest and that he singlehandedly invented the iPhone with a rusty pair of pliers and gumption.
You listed a bunch of people who were “good”, but honestly, none of them were. You just weren’t necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.
Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it’s just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.
thanks, I didn’t know anything at all about his daughter (after reading your comment) and found this pretty good article/interview with her.
Greed. A sane person will walk away from working once they have enough saved to comfortably retire.
$100 million can let you live comfortably forever, but there are plenty of people who want that much every year.
Those are the folks who become ‘leaders.’
And they should be eaten.
Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today, and Jobs was an abusive narcissist shitcunt on a surface level.
Tom and Zuckerberg both came from the same time. Zuck was shit since day 1, today has nothing to do with it.
I think you just have some very rose tinted glasses.
Adding to that, Bill Gates put quite some effort into image building and mostly succeeded.
It’s hard to beat ignoring doctors and not treating your very treatable form of cancer, then using your wealth to get a liver transplant and then dying anyway. Dude committed manslaughter because of his own arrogance.
Before Microsoft, programmers were treated like factory workers by HP and IBM and setup in large open floor rooms like a secretary pool from the 1960’s. Gates thought programmers were important and gave every programmer a private office.
Gates did dirty tricks to competitors even to tiny ones they could have bought out (stacker). But he was never Musk’s level of evil.
Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today,
Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman destroying competition but as far as I know he didn’t support fascists or facilitate pogroms.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter has done far more harm to our societies than whatever shady tactics Bill Gates used.
Not to take away from Zuckerberg, Musk, and the less-known people in tech like Thiel, but Bill Gates was and is a huge piece of shit who harmed more than just his competitors. Among other things he convinced the world that we need IP and patents for covid vaccines instead of sharing them freely, which alone cost countless lives around the world. I don’t even want to know what other ills his “philanthropy” has and will cause. https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
Gates and Jobs both are responsible for consumer based computing. Proprietary software lynched what should have been a global birth of inventive software engineers.
The crap that Zuck shills had its groundwork laid by those two.
Proprietary software lynched what should have been a global birth of inventive software engineers.
That actually happened. Just wasn’t perpetuated after 1995 or something.
Going back even further is assholes like Edison and Ford.
I think it’s easier to name the people who have been decent in tech. Woz seems like a decent guy.
Ted Waite all in all was decent. Not perfect but decent.
Gabe too.
There are no good billionaires
You don’t even know whether Gabe is or isn’t a billionaire.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/gabe-newell/
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
If he wasn’t a billionaire it would be very simple, there are no good multi millionaires either!
Ok, I was wrong, I didn’t know about all the boats and the second company/charity.
The Forbes thing is just an educated guess though. And are you saying anyone with 2 million dollars or anyone with 2m in assets is automatically a bad person?
People around you are starving and barely able to afford to pay rent and you’re worth 2m? Sorry my man, you’re one of those who is taking advantage of the system.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/28/americans-median-net-worth-by-age.html
Overall the median is under 200k, you’re talking about someone worth ten times that.
Why are we using his first name
Because people think he’s their friend because he offers a good product when the truth is he’s just another one of those leeches at the top of a big company taking money from people’s pockets and accumulating it while their clients can barely afford to pay rent.
Stallman was right about everything
While at the sametime being a gross person.
Stallman is a notable figure in the industry but he was never the leader of a large tech company. That’s probably why he’s a decent guy
he was never the leader of a large tech company. That’s probably why he’s a decent guy
I think you have that backwards.
The FSF isn’t exactly what you think of when you hear the words “large tech company”… but you could argue that in some ways it is one couldn’t you… 😁😛
You could, but the OP is talking about the people who became filthy rich or at least notable. I don’t know if Tom ever made any real money. Almost all of the people listed used their corporate power to smash competition and dominate the market.
If anything, Stallman is the antithesis of most of these people.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tom-myspace-sold-social-media-153011703.html?guccounter=1
Don’t know how he invested it but the guy certainly wouldn’t have had to work another day in his life
What he did is important, but he’s definitely an asshole as well
Old captain crunch is another one that turned out to be a weirdo
He was a big defender of paedophilia, necrophilia, incest, and bestiality. He thinks people should have the right to fuck their pets and their children. Not to mention the reports on his creepy behaviour with women.
Stallman is an incredible steward of FOSS, and he’s been very prescient in predicting the absolute nightmare of proprietary software, but he is not a decent guy overall IMO.
It hurt me to find that out, because I looked up to him. But I guess it’s another sobering reminder of why celebrity worship is bad. I see way too many people try to bury or deny his scummy side, just because they worship him as a FOSS celebrity figure.
Let’s note that necrophilia with mutual agreement (pre-mortem, and same with cannibalism) and incest with mutual agreement (between adults) are fucked up, but should be defended. Animals can’t consent, children can’t consent, so not that.
Not to mention the reports on his creepy behaviour with women.
That - yeah.
But I guess it’s another sobering reminder of why celebrity worship is bad. I see way too many people try to bury or deny his scummy side, just because they worship him as a FOSS celebrity figure.
Believing in discourses and narratives without understanding that they are never real is bad.
You can believe only in what you see with your own eyes since inception and till death.
and incest with mutual agreement (between adults) are fucked up, but should be defended.
Why are you saying between adults, as if that’s what he said? He was talking about children. I even provided multiple examples of him saying so.
He’s saying all of those. Those concerning children obviously can’t.
I had never heard that about him. That’s disappointing.
Yeah, for me too. Because I love practically everything he says when it comes to software.
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
“I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
In the interest of fairness, he did claim to have changed his mind on some of this, although that only happened 2 days after his job became on the line after making strange comments about Epstein/Epstein clients/Epstein victims, particularly in presenting Epstein’s underage sex workers as being willing.
For me, suddenly having a change of heart on a decades-held (and publicly-championed) opinion, only to suddenly change your mind the second it threatens your job seems a bit too convenient, so I’m unwilling to believe it.
as long as no one is coerced
Well, the opinion that a child can consent is technically acceptable, because the line at 12,13,14,16,18,21 years is arbitrarily drawn which is why it differs in various countries.
But in practice he should have used common sense and at least drawn his own line.
“I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”
That’s scary, but I’m not sure how really wrong he is. The issue is again with child’s consent being less certain, affected more easily by various distractions.
so I’m unwilling to believe it.
So am I, the question is whether he has internal consistency or not in his views. If yes, it’s still better than, well, just being a jerk and proud of it.
I would say it’s not a sincere change. It’s groupthink.
Well the skit keeps getting smaller and smaller
Holy shit…
I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable
Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:
- Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
- Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
- Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.
Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.
Steve Jobs decided to kill himself by being an idiot.
So…there was a redemption arc there.
I’m not a fan of
HitlerSteve Jobs, but I am a big fan of the guy who killedHitlerSteve Jobs.That man’s killer’s name?
Steve Jobs 🔔
Yes but Steve Jobs also bought himself a pointless liver transplant that someone else didn’t get. One he would have never needed if he had listened to doctors instead of trying to treat a very treatable kind of cancer with a diet. So while he did the world a favor, he also took someone with him on the way out.
Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
It’s well known that ORACLE is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Larry Ellisons Oracle gobbled up many great companies and open source projects and sucked the life out of them, such as Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice, MySQL to name just a few
That was a single blow, Sun owned OpenOffice and MySQL when bought.
See the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation.
Well, buttflapper…
Capitalism filters sociopaths to the top. It’s a feature, not a bug. It has always been this way. Read about Henry Ford and JD Rockefeller, John Kellog. The list goes on.
It’s not even capitalism but just society in general. Good people typically look at what it takes to lead and want nothing for it. To strive to be in charge of things you have to have a certain arrogance and to succeed you have to be ruthless enough as well.
Bill Gates admirable? Did we grow up in the 90s in the same dimension? Him and Windows were the butt of almost every IT joke, and there was his whole thing of never doing anything original or innovative except gobbling up companies and tech who were. Then the court battles. Those were a pretty big thing, even as a teen I followed the progress of it on the news. Then holding the whole web back for almost a decade as we had to deal with the monopoly of IE.
<blink><marquee>
My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!
They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.
There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.
Because tech is capitalism, and it goes hand in hand with fascism
I generally think Satya is a fairly decent guy.
Microsoft is still a fucking shit show, but still.
A CEO can be good. But a CEO with public shareholders has no choice.
I’m not saying that most CEOs aren’t bastards but it’s not necessary to be in the position or compete. But when you have public shareholders they are going to demand that you take every dollar through whatever means possible.
My father was the CEO of his small business. At his funeral, everyone talked about how kind of a person he was. We were rich growing up, but we never lived like it because he was too busy helping people.
He didn’t have shareholders. Just coworkers.
I’ve had a couple of good CEOs. Any really good CEOs end up getting fired when they go public because they’re not willing to exploit the people for the product.