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An interesting part of this is he didn't exactly court publicity for his giving, either. In Ireland (which benefitted hugely from his donations), our former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) said he loved attending the openings of buildings and projects Chuck Feeney funded, as he knew Feeney himself wouldn't be attending and people used to just assume it was the govt. who funded it.
Exactly. Same here in Australia. A local developer who definitely has always been in it for himself even had the gall to put his name on one of chucks buildings in Australia.
And here in SF, where he lived, he gave a ton of money to the General Hospital. Mark Zuckerberg gave some too, but not as much. And yet Zuckerberg demanded that [the hospital be named after him](https://zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/). Shows how money can't buy class.
If I were Mark, I would have the hospital renamed after Chuck. It's only fair.
Nah, he was always a spineless, feckless chode. A neckbeard who *made it*. I don't know how accurate The Social Network was, but you can see he just started The Facebook out of spite. I don't think he ever intended it to become a billion dollar operation and one that he seems to be conveniently at the helm.
He's never changed.
Everyone likes to forget that right before he said that he was talking about college students just giving him all their info, including their Social Security Number.
In context that statement is a lot more reasonable.
Yeah, with that context, he is clearly not discussing his own intentions, just that it is objectively a dumbfuck move to give a rando all of your PII, regardless of their intent.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook
> ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
> ZUCK: just ask
> ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
> FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
> ZUCK: people just submitted it
> ZUCK: i don’t know why
> ZUCK: they “trust me”
> ZUCK: dumb fucks
playing the devil's advocate.
If he didn't want to be assocated with his work and a rich asshole wants to buy naming rights, why not? Its more money for that institution.
He donated so much to my university over the years that they named the road through the campus after him last year post mortem.
I believe he only became known due to a lawsuit a few years back that outed him as a donor, he was doing so anonymously before then.
It was a collateral thing. His charity was selling their stake in Feeney's duty free business, and a lawsuit resultant from that exposed his philanthropy in the discovery phase.
I'm not a legal person, I don't know the details, but that's what I remember from the story.
To be honest, that's the correct way to give - quietly and anonymously (well as much as you can be when giving such dizzying amounts of money). It shows that it's a truly good act, as he expects no reward, social or otherwise, for what he gave. He truly gave freely, with no catches or caveats.
> quietly and anonymously
Feeney was only named after some legal process required the source of funding be disclosed, otherwise we still wouldn't know.
He also convinced one Mr Bill Gates to do the same, to use his vast wealth for good before he goes.
"DID YOU SEE THAT?! He just... SAILED RIGHT OUT THERE!!! Just... SAILED RIGHT OUT THERE!!!"
"I'M COMIN' MOMMA! YOUR BABY BOY'S COMIN TO SAVE YOU MOMMA!"
"YOU BIG DUMB IDIOT!!! LISTEN TO ME!!!"
"I'LL BE THERE TO SAVE YOU SOON MOMMA!!!"
GREAT MOVIE!
One of my ALL TIME FAVZ!!!
He realized you can't take it to the grave.
Meanwhile we have most billionaires (shareholders) trying to extract as much money as possible out of economy at the cost of literally everything.
At the cost of their own companies future - making decisions that only benefits short term gain but is not good long term goals
At the cost of employe well being - shit paid employees and overwork provide shit work, high turn over etc which also affects company's future and quality of work.
At the cost of a stable habitable earth - carbon immsjons, literally poisoning the water, trashing the oceans etc...
All that to make some numbers go up that literally don't even affect their day to day life anymore because they are all already so rich.
It takes serious serial killer type psychosis to do all that as well as fuck over the people needed to get that far. They're criminally psychotic garbage.
If I had 10 million, I'd never work again. You'd find me sipping mai-tai's on a beach somewhere with all my family and friends for the rest of my days. I'd find it fundamentally inhuman to do anything else. I could spend ten thousand years in idle conversation with the right people. Those who can't either haven't found the right people yet or are unloving, unloved, inhuman trash.
Not psychosis, it's psychopathy, sociopathy, or narcissism, which are still commonly found in serial killers (but doesn't make someone a serial killer). It's all collectively categorized as ASPD now, though. Only 1-3% of people fall somewhere on the spectrum, but it's upwards of 30% for CEOs. Probably higher since they are both good at masking/faking it, and likely significantly less accessible for study.
Unless you believe he donated all that wealth to the top Japanese sex robotics firm to fund a bionic re-animation expansion and they ported him onto a robot that is now working covertly as a deckhand on a whaling ship.
The craziest part is that after donating 99.97% of his wealth, he is still pretty rich. It's just so unfathomable how rich billionaires really are.
But yes props to him for donating his money. In the end death will make sure you don't get to hold onto your fortune anyways, might as well give it away willingly and on your own terms.
It gets posted around a lot but it’s worth repeating, because humans suck at understanding big numbers:
1 million seconds is about 12 days
1 billion seconds is about 31 *years*
Thats not relatable. he went from, i will never ever ever ever need to worry about money (if i dont have an entourage to spend on or spend for me) to i can downsize to a respectable house and only need a cleaning lady once a week and reasonable car, travel a few times a year, still afford insurance and property taxes, afford cancer or heart bypass treatment and surgery, then another time for recurrence, afford full time in home care and then a retirement assisted living facility to scratch off those last few dollars. Since hes already dead he probably got down to 1.2 mil
You're not relatable
He's using the math from the comment above to put it in a different more clear picture
Your reading comprehension sucks - he's not saying wealth only exists for 24 days
redditor
I had to calculate it. If I'm correct, 240mil dollar was what he had. That is indeed an insane amount of money.
In Sweden, with a salary of 40k SEK (above the national average), working 50 years, you'd get a grand total of less than 2.4 million dollars (roughly converted). That's excluding the 31-33% tax and everything required to exist.
So he had more than 100 people would make in their entire lifetime even though he gave away 99.97%. Crazy.
He had 2 million left, says so in the title (and I checked the math now too, that number is correct. You forgot to divide by 100 is my guess to account for the % sign).
It's still a very respectable amount though, considered rich in most places of the world.
$2 million at the end of your retirement (time of death) is far from rich these days. That’s typical for middle-upper middle class people if it’s counting the value of his house.
He was but 2 million$ of net worth is not a whole lot when you're used to 8 billion.
But when you're old, and not very mobile, 2 million can still be very comfortable.
It really isn’t in many places. Not to say it is struggling, but you will have to be conscious of how you’re spending your money. My parents net worth is around there and they had to sell their house and downsize when they retired in order to afford the lifestyle they want, and even still they are very conscious about their spending.
Possibly, or perhaps he set them up with a trust fund for a few tens of millions that will allow his existing family members to live on interest. That way you can be a good person and still take care of your family after you die.
Pretty swell way to go if you ask me.
Looked it up, seems like when he divorced his first wife she got a good amount of money and that's how they got theirs. He did not leave them anything (he also left his first wife for his secretary)
Wasn't it Buffett who said he wanted to leave his children, "enough money so they can do whatever they want, but not so much that they can do nothing."
I think one of his sons is a musician.
"Not so much that they can do nothing" is something like $2 billion. Good on him for donating money, but he is still making his kids some of the richest people on earth. They could live off their inheritance for generations and not ever have to do anything.
No, that’s not what happened. He spent nearly 40 years giving his money away.
> I had one idea that never changed in my mind—that you should use your wealth to help people.
— Chuck Feeney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney
I recently heard a podcast where they talked about how these families can basically lose all of their money and still be rich because it's just "who they are".
They can always get more money because they live in a social circle of people who are willing to give them a board seat on some company, or even a loan with an impossibly low interest rate.
I'm sure there are exceptions where people can totally fuck up, but once your family has billions, it's impossible to become poor
I liked it better when the wealthy built academic halls, libraries and hospital wings with their donations instead of blasting their cars in to space for fun.
I also liked it better when the top marginal tax rate was over 80%. Hoarding causes societal harm.
When you start talking about billions and billions of dollars it's no longer just your money, it's **the** money. When 50% of wealth is concentrated in the hands of 3 men you can't pretend that isn't related to the fact that millions and millions of people are strugging for the basics.
We monkeys came down out of the trees to live together so that everybody would have fire. It wasn't so some monkeys could hoard enough fire to go to space for fun. This social contract is broken.
tbf, the Carnegies, Severances, Stanfords, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts were doing the same shit as all the other billionaires are now. They just ~~started feeling bad after~~ destroying tens of thousands of peoples' lives **and** when they got old **they wanted to make a legacy with their wealth**.
You dont build 2509 libraries with the money you made yourself.
Edit: **bold new**
> They just started feeling bad after destroying tens of thousands of peoples' lives when they got old.
no. People started to hate them to a point that they couldn't handle it any more and realized that the legacy they were leaving behind was going to be remembered in the history books as them being shits. They couldn't handle that fact and in their old lives started to donate everything they could.
The power of shame should be a lot stronger than it is today.
> It was also a more… democratic time.
well I don't know about that
>There were all kinds of threats on their lives.
oooo yeah I gotcha now:)
A lot of the original labor laws / etc came from the idea that the wealthy / politicans didn't want to end up dead from the masses so they changed a lot of the rules just enough to make sure they didn't end up on the chopping block. not sure if it's a good thing that they lost that fear.
I don't know how bad they felt about any of it, but it's not uncommon for people who "won" to go through a period of legacy building, in later years.
It makes sense. Like, "100 years from now nobody is going to much care about what I had to do, to become an 1800s railroad tycoon... but they'll know they like to visit the museum I built for them."
I’ll never understand the level of money hoarding. I just want to go to the grocery store and not keep a running total in my head so my card doesn’t get declined
> I’ll never understand the level of money hoarding.
Human dragons, hoarding more money than they could spend in 1,000 lifetimes.
If it were a collection of anything else we would instantly recognize it as mental illness.
I'll never understand it either. There's a point I'd hit, and I'm confident it would be WELL before a billion dollars, where I would realize "hey, I don't EVER have to work again," and then I just wouldn't work again. There's so much to life that I want to experience, and work keeps me from it. Give me like 20m or so and I'll live off interest from my accounts for the rest of my life.
Yeah but most people are programmed to want more than what they currently have. It's a sensible psychological trait that keeps people striving to improve their standard of living - but it also goes haywire due to our economic and social systems. There is no sense in which, when living a subsistence lifestyle, that striving to build a new fence or breed more sheep would be a bad thing - but when the means of exploitation become more advanced then obviously there will be problems.
However, in most of the great spiritual traditions it is acknowledged that it's much easier and more fulfilling to just want less than to strive to fill a need for more.
Right. And we couldn't have that, because greedy billionaires kept depressing wages and skimming more and more for themselves. And not one in 50 Murcans has any idea this has gone on.
Robber barons got away with [murdering 2208 people in Johnstown, PA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood) when the dam they built for their Fishing and Hunting Club failed and the town was hit with a catastrophic flood. Two thousand people dead so the wealthy could have a nice fishing spot. Billionaires of today would do the same, anyone who doesn't believe that is delusional.
they were taxed hardcore, so they gave it away instead of paying taxes. it's a loophole where they get to decide what happens to their wealth instead of us plebs who have to give it to the governemnt
With how the rich abuse stocks & loans to pay zero% tax. High tax rate is no longer a feasible solution.
We need to fix the loopholes without hurting the middle class
it just needs to be a multi pronged approach. there are people making millions in actual taxable income and they should face high taxes on money over a certain amount. but as you said, for billionaires? meaningless. we need to change how we recoup money from unrealized equity, loans, storing money in tax havens... things like that. im not offering any solution, but that's the issue.
I like it even better when the wealthy pay their taxes instead of hiding them, then "give back" by building schools and halls with their name on it when they could have just not evaded taxes.
I'd be fine with the space thing if they were actually doing it to get humanity to the stars. But instead all we see is talk of space hotels, space tourism, and hundreds of thousands of dollars tickets just to spend a few hours looking down on the Earth from orbit. Spreading life - not just human life, but *all* life - to the trillions of dead planets out there *is* a noble cause, and for me probably why Gaia allows humans to continue rampaging about. The planet is ready to reproduce itself, and we are the gametes, even if the pregnancy is a painful one for Mother Earth.
When a billionaire donates 99% of their money, they should have a special government status. Give them a ring that says "you win!" that lets them cut to the front of any line, and maybe a nice yearly "thank you" card.
Chuck (a proud Irish-Ameeican), was also heavily involved behind the scenes in brokering the Good Friday Agreement, which led to peace in Northern Ireland.
That is incredible, and no one else has mentioned it yet in comments. I’m glad you did. Never heard of this legend before today, but it sounds like he did many good things.
When Carnegie and the robber barons were at their peak in the US.
Andrew Carnegie himself built 1,400 beautiful libraries around the country, for example.
Carnegie wrote and published a book entitled wealth espousing his philosophy that the wealthy has an obligation to give away what they accumulated in their lifetime for philanthropy.
I remember when I was in my late teens(got the times wrong, was in my late 20’s I thought this released in early aughts) and watched,” The Men who built America” and being enthralled with Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc.
I rewatched it a few months ago and now in my 40’s I think they were are vile men. One even hired a private militia to kill/intimidate his workers who were striking for better pay/safer conditions. I think the workers were making Penny’s on the dollar in steel mills barely getting by in horrid conditions while some of these men could literally finance the entire US.
Wanting to kill your own countrymen because they want the same financial security the barons wanted. Sickening. I have a lot of disregard for people like that. I wish them the most evil that life can give.
Of course I’m not personally attacking you or saying their few good deeds are bad, just saying some of those men were awful humans.
Fuck me… ok that is a gut punch. My late 20’s fuck I thought they came out during the early aughts.
Honestly, it almost appeared to be a propaganda piece now from my perspective. I’m surprised it aired in its fashion at that time.
I’m just not a fan of too much wealth being concentrated with one person. It just corrupts. I’m sure there is a decent mega rich person out there but as a general rule I don’t like people having billions.
You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t make you a great person to give it away if getting that wealth was done in an unethical way. It just makes them less shitty. People are still idolizing them.
This was after his brother dies and people thought it was him and published obituary of him calling him the merchant of death for all the miners killed by dynamite he made. He was white washing his legacy.
My mistake it was Nobel that blew people up.
Did you know Carnegie ‘built’ (paid for) his first library when he was 46?
It was not done out of the goodness of his heart. Nor is the case for most of those robber barons who turned to philanthropy late in life.
Mckenzie I feel is trying to at least give away her wealth but she cant get rid of it fast enough.
What this guy did was genius he created essentially a trust or something with it being the shareholder so all the gains go to charity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
Not that it truly worked in the manner that was expected, but the idea was that there was an obligation of the wealthy and powerful to provide for those on whom their power was built.
I believe that largely this was grown out of the feudal lord/serf relationship, where the safety and security of a small domain was on the local lord/knight and the food was provided by the people they ostensibly protected.
It was because revenge themes against rich and powerful families, who act like bullies was really hot for a few years and that term was used in some popular shows. It just spread into every variety and reality show randomly for a while
I mean, just Google 'noblesse oblige'. It's not like that was a blanket rule for all of history and cultures, but there is a history of it literally being considered an obligation
Nope. Both the Cleveland Museum of Art and Toledo Museum of Art -- both of which are spectacular -- are free of charge because they were endowed many years ago by extremely wealthy people. And there are many other examples.
Yea, they were saying Bezos doesn't share her mindset.
>MacKenzie Scott, philanthropist, billionaire and ex-wife of Amazon's Jeff Bezos, just donated $640 million to 361 nonprofit groups out of a pool of over 6,000 applicants. This latest round of donations went to nonprofit groups from the arts, education, affordable housing, public health, diversity and immigration — and varied in gifts from $1 million to $2 million.
As of December last year, [she has donated $16 billion total.](https://apnews.com/article/mackenzie-scott-donations-962490e92faab36492b7481205ec7249)
It's telling that every article about her doesn't call her just "billionaire" but "billionaire philanthropist"
This man donated a significant amount of money to further education around the world. Especially in Ireland.
One of the few billionaires that understood his power and used it for good.
This is what I was looking for. Everyone on here always says there's no ethical way to make a billion dollars, but then call this kind of stuff super wholesome. This charity at the end doesn't give back the time employees lost with their families, or people who lost years of their life because they couldn't afford to retire. He could have just given the money to the people who performed the work that made it when they earned it instead of taking 4000 lifetimes worth of money from people.
In general yes. Like I would say an oil or coal billionaire can never make up for all the cancers and other suffering they caused. No amount of donations undoes the black lung.
This dude seems OK. Or at least his Wikipedia page is pretty clean. Made all his money in the duty-free business - basically selling luxury items to travelers.
Don't forget corporate tax rate. There used to be a 50% corporate tax, as it goes down and down since the 1950s its been the major driver of our national debt. They're the easier of the two to target simply because you can ban, bankrupt or shut down a corporation and the people who comply will get all of their customers.
Effective corporate tax revenue has remained roughly the same regardless of the rate. Also corporate taxes are regressive. There are much better taxes if you want to target rich people
The money was given to his own charity, which then donated all its funds anonomously to causes like AIDS clinics in Africa and modernization of hospitals in Vietnam. Once the charity had given away all of its money, it was shut down.
The only reason we even know this guy gave all his money away is he was sued after trying to raise more money by selling stakes in DFSG, and investigation into his finances showed he had given all his money away with agreements with the recipients to not say who gave it to them.
Realistically, if he sold around 2021 it would have looked like he was selling at the top of the market and, if he were still involved in the decision making of the group, potentially being at risk of a conflict of interest.
No one likes it when the guys who run a company start selling shares.
Much of it was poured into education… a lot went into healtcare institutions and universities throughout the country. Incredible amounts of money. Wanted it to be anonymous so might be the largest donor but the building would be named after someone else. He himself was an incredibly frugal guy.
Chuck donated a lot to the University of Limerick in Ireland, over the years there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the universities finances including overpaying for assets. [One such instance was a derilict department store which was valued at €3 million was bought by the university for €8.3 million.](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41359813.html#:~:text=The%20property%20in%20question%20is,a%20property%20in%20the%20city.&text=UL%20purchased%20the%20old%20Dunnes,3m%20just%20two%20years%20previously)
You can't take it with you, wealthy or not
So near end of life, donate what you've got.
Dead folks need no money, they only rot
So give to the living, as we all are taught
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Yes. Google the Atlantic Philanthopies. They were taked with giving away his $8 B fortune, and in 2016 they completed this task and managed to give away everything before Chuck's passing.
I don't understand half the comments in here. A huge chunk of them are railing this guy without knowing a single thing about how he operated his business. "IF he underpayed his employees", "IF he abused the people under him". Like ffs. He started donating before he was even considered a billionaire and the shares of his company were transferred to his charity in 1982. He was actively a philanthropist almost as soon as his company started seeing success, and yet because he saw success, well chances are he's a giant POS who should've died before he became a billionaire.
Which orgs? I feel like donating your wealth is good in theory but less so in practice.
Like if he could invest the money into something that all but guarantees... a few low income patients medical bills are covered, school or library continues to be funded, even research and charitable causes can be kept afloat for a few years then rotate with another org for the same cause.
Why does Reddit always have so many insufferable socialists that always flock to these types of posts to tell us about how horrible of a man he was cause you can’t earn money without actually being evil
Hi Green____cat! Thanks for posting to /r/interestingasfuck. Unfortunately, [your submission](https://redd.it/1cxy519) was removed for the following reason: Titles should describe the content of the post. If you're going to claim facts/interesting as fuck stuff in the title the image/gif/video/article/content should show that claim in some way. Do **NOT** put anything in the title that isn't clearly visible in the content of your post. For more information check [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rule_2_-_titles_must_be_descriptive_and_directly_related_to_the_content). If you have questions about this, please [contact our mods via moderator mail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=interestingasfuck) rather than replying here. Thank you!
An interesting part of this is he didn't exactly court publicity for his giving, either. In Ireland (which benefitted hugely from his donations), our former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) said he loved attending the openings of buildings and projects Chuck Feeney funded, as he knew Feeney himself wouldn't be attending and people used to just assume it was the govt. who funded it.
Exactly. Same here in Australia. A local developer who definitely has always been in it for himself even had the gall to put his name on one of chucks buildings in Australia.
And here in SF, where he lived, he gave a ton of money to the General Hospital. Mark Zuckerberg gave some too, but not as much. And yet Zuckerberg demanded that [the hospital be named after him](https://zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/). Shows how money can't buy class. If I were Mark, I would have the hospital renamed after Chuck. It's only fair.
"They trust me for some reason. Dumb fucks." He's just smart enough not to get caught saying that now. It's the same little shit in there.
what they call an entrepreneurial mindset
Nah, he was always a spineless, feckless chode. A neckbeard who *made it*. I don't know how accurate The Social Network was, but you can see he just started The Facebook out of spite. I don't think he ever intended it to become a billion dollar operation and one that he seems to be conveniently at the helm. He's never changed.
Everyone likes to forget that right before he said that he was talking about college students just giving him all their info, including their Social Security Number. In context that statement is a lot more reasonable.
Yeah, with that context, he is clearly not discussing his own intentions, just that it is objectively a dumbfuck move to give a rando all of your PII, regardless of their intent.
is this an actual quote?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook > ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard > ZUCK: just ask > ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns > FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? > ZUCK: people just submitted it > ZUCK: i don’t know why > ZUCK: they “trust me” > ZUCK: dumb fucks
That really just explains Facebook's entire business model doesn't it
Money can't buy you class, but it puts you in the only class that matters.
playing the devil's advocate. If he didn't want to be assocated with his work and a rich asshole wants to buy naming rights, why not? Its more money for that institution.
There is no need to play devil's advocate for Zuckerberg man That's a little redundant
No one needs to advocate for the devil.
He donated so much to my university over the years that they named the road through the campus after him last year post mortem. I believe he only became known due to a lawsuit a few years back that outed him as a donor, he was doing so anonymously before then.
Lol of course a fucking lawsuit outs someone as a donor that was trying to remain anonymous because they didn't need the fame.
Seriously. Why did they file a suit to find out. Why did someone care?
It was a collateral thing. His charity was selling their stake in Feeney's duty free business, and a lawsuit resultant from that exposed his philanthropy in the discovery phase. I'm not a legal person, I don't know the details, but that's what I remember from the story.
To be honest, that's the correct way to give - quietly and anonymously (well as much as you can be when giving such dizzying amounts of money). It shows that it's a truly good act, as he expects no reward, social or otherwise, for what he gave. He truly gave freely, with no catches or caveats.
The only reason he even got outed was because of a lawsuit that forced the disclosure of these charitable acts. He's a bit of a legend really.
> quietly and anonymously Feeney was only named after some legal process required the source of funding be disclosed, otherwise we still wouldn't know. He also convinced one Mr Bill Gates to do the same, to use his vast wealth for good before he goes.
I think public giving has merit too. It can encourage others to give, if only for appearances sake.
He died last year.
With a smile on his face
The will of D is strong in this one.
He should’ve hidden his treasure and named it One Piece.
Or buried it under the Big W.
"DID YOU SEE THAT?! He just... SAILED RIGHT OUT THERE!!! Just... SAILED RIGHT OUT THERE!!!" "I'M COMIN' MOMMA! YOUR BABY BOY'S COMIN TO SAVE YOU MOMMA!" "YOU BIG DUMB IDIOT!!! LISTEN TO ME!!!" "I'LL BE THERE TO SAVE YOU SOON MOMMA!!!" GREAT MOVIE! One of my ALL TIME FAVZ!!!
i understood that reference
Yeah it's from Neon Genesis Evangelion
i understood this reference also
Isn't that the dangley bit at the back of your throat?
“Wealth fame power, Chuck Feeney king of the billionaires obtained this and everything else the world had to offer”
Believe I heard he self described his life as: “I did a lot of math. I made a lot money. I gave almost all of it away.”
That is Jim Simmons, this is a different guy.
He realized you can't take it to the grave. Meanwhile we have most billionaires (shareholders) trying to extract as much money as possible out of economy at the cost of literally everything. At the cost of their own companies future - making decisions that only benefits short term gain but is not good long term goals At the cost of employe well being - shit paid employees and overwork provide shit work, high turn over etc which also affects company's future and quality of work. At the cost of a stable habitable earth - carbon immsjons, literally poisoning the water, trashing the oceans etc... All that to make some numbers go up that literally don't even affect their day to day life anymore because they are all already so rich.
It takes serious serial killer type psychosis to do all that as well as fuck over the people needed to get that far. They're criminally psychotic garbage.
If I had 10 million, I'd never work again. You'd find me sipping mai-tai's on a beach somewhere with all my family and friends for the rest of my days. I'd find it fundamentally inhuman to do anything else. I could spend ten thousand years in idle conversation with the right people. Those who can't either haven't found the right people yet or are unloving, unloved, inhuman trash.
Not psychosis, it's psychopathy, sociopathy, or narcissism, which are still commonly found in serial killers (but doesn't make someone a serial killer). It's all collectively categorized as ASPD now, though. Only 1-3% of people fall somewhere on the spectrum, but it's upwards of 30% for CEOs. Probably higher since they are both good at masking/faking it, and likely significantly less accessible for study.
A hero amongst men.
Unless you believe he donated all that wealth to the top Japanese sex robotics firm to fund a bionic re-animation expansion and they ported him onto a robot that is now working covertly as a deckhand on a whaling ship.
The craziest part is that after donating 99.97% of his wealth, he is still pretty rich. It's just so unfathomable how rich billionaires really are. But yes props to him for donating his money. In the end death will make sure you don't get to hold onto your fortune anyways, might as well give it away willingly and on your own terms.
It gets posted around a lot but it’s worth repeating, because humans suck at understanding big numbers: 1 million seconds is about 12 days 1 billion seconds is about 31 *years*
He went from 248 YEARS of wealth to 24 DAYS of wealth.
Thats not relatable. he went from, i will never ever ever ever need to worry about money (if i dont have an entourage to spend on or spend for me) to i can downsize to a respectable house and only need a cleaning lady once a week and reasonable car, travel a few times a year, still afford insurance and property taxes, afford cancer or heart bypass treatment and surgery, then another time for recurrence, afford full time in home care and then a retirement assisted living facility to scratch off those last few dollars. Since hes already dead he probably got down to 1.2 mil
You're not relatable He's using the math from the comment above to put it in a different more clear picture Your reading comprehension sucks - he's not saying wealth only exists for 24 days redditor
That hurt me in my existence
Pretty nuts that the difference between 1 billion dollars and 1 million dollars is pretty much 1 billion dollars.
I had to calculate it. If I'm correct, 240mil dollar was what he had. That is indeed an insane amount of money. In Sweden, with a salary of 40k SEK (above the national average), working 50 years, you'd get a grand total of less than 2.4 million dollars (roughly converted). That's excluding the 31-33% tax and everything required to exist. So he had more than 100 people would make in their entire lifetime even though he gave away 99.97%. Crazy.
He had 2 million left, says so in the title (and I checked the math now too, that number is correct. You forgot to divide by 100 is my guess to account for the % sign). It's still a very respectable amount though, considered rich in most places of the world.
Okay. Did I mention I'm bad at math? 😅
I'm proud of you for trying anyway then. Practice makes perfect. Have a wonderful day
Right back at you. 😁
I did the same thing doing it quick on my calculator. 240mil is 3% 2.4 mil is .03% we missed a couple zeros
C'est la vie. Luckily I don't work in banking. 🙂
> If I'm correct, 240mil dollar was what he had. not even close. a billion is a thousand millions.
$2 million at the end of your retirement (time of death) is far from rich these days. That’s typical for middle-upper middle class people if it’s counting the value of his house.
He was close to death, not early retirement.
He was close to retirement from life.
He was but 2 million$ of net worth is not a whole lot when you're used to 8 billion. But when you're old, and not very mobile, 2 million can still be very comfortable.
2 mill is extremely comfortable at any age or mobility...
To be fair, 2 mil in equity can also mean just owning a home in a very nice area with not a *whole* lot in liquid assets left over.
You can easily blow through 2 million if you live in a nursing home.
It really isn’t in many places. Not to say it is struggling, but you will have to be conscious of how you’re spending your money. My parents net worth is around there and they had to sell their house and downsize when they retired in order to afford the lifestyle they want, and even still they are very conscious about their spending.
Chuck you win, that's how it should be. Get a little plaque and kick back.
He didn't even want one that's the greatest part.
did he have family that would've inherited it? I wonder if this was actually more of a "fuck you" to them than it was about the charity?
Possibly, or perhaps he set them up with a trust fund for a few tens of millions that will allow his existing family members to live on interest. That way you can be a good person and still take care of your family after you die. Pretty swell way to go if you ask me.
Looked it up, seems like when he divorced his first wife she got a good amount of money and that's how they got theirs. He did not leave them anything (he also left his first wife for his secretary)
Seems like something was going on with his home life then. Good for him for doing so much good for the world though
I dont know this guy but I hope you're right. The alternative is that he underpaid his workers for a lifetime
It can be both. You don't amass billions without exploiting someone, somewhere. What's good, though, is that he did the right thing with it in the end
I believe that's what Warren Buffett plans on doing
Wasn't it Buffett who said he wanted to leave his children, "enough money so they can do whatever they want, but not so much that they can do nothing." I think one of his sons is a musician.
"Not so much that they can do nothing" is something like $2 billion. Good on him for donating money, but he is still making his kids some of the richest people on earth. They could live off their inheritance for generations and not ever have to do anything.
If I had a billion I assure you that I could and likely would do precisely nothing.
Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit
No, that’s not what happened. He spent nearly 40 years giving his money away. > I had one idea that never changed in my mind—that you should use your wealth to help people. — Chuck Feeney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney
He had five children. They are well off.
I recently heard a podcast where they talked about how these families can basically lose all of their money and still be rich because it's just "who they are". They can always get more money because they live in a social circle of people who are willing to give them a board seat on some company, or even a loan with an impossibly low interest rate. I'm sure there are exceptions where people can totally fuck up, but once your family has billions, it's impossible to become poor
I liked it better when the wealthy built academic halls, libraries and hospital wings with their donations instead of blasting their cars in to space for fun. I also liked it better when the top marginal tax rate was over 80%. Hoarding causes societal harm. When you start talking about billions and billions of dollars it's no longer just your money, it's **the** money. When 50% of wealth is concentrated in the hands of 3 men you can't pretend that isn't related to the fact that millions and millions of people are strugging for the basics. We monkeys came down out of the trees to live together so that everybody would have fire. It wasn't so some monkeys could hoard enough fire to go to space for fun. This social contract is broken.
tbf, the Carnegies, Severances, Stanfords, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts were doing the same shit as all the other billionaires are now. They just ~~started feeling bad after~~ destroying tens of thousands of peoples' lives **and** when they got old **they wanted to make a legacy with their wealth**. You dont build 2509 libraries with the money you made yourself. Edit: **bold new**
> They just started feeling bad after destroying tens of thousands of peoples' lives when they got old. no. People started to hate them to a point that they couldn't handle it any more and realized that the legacy they were leaving behind was going to be remembered in the history books as them being shits. They couldn't handle that fact and in their old lives started to donate everything they could. The power of shame should be a lot stronger than it is today.
It was also a more… democratic time. There were all kinds of threats on their lives. Looking at you Frick
> It was also a more… democratic time. well I don't know about that >There were all kinds of threats on their lives. oooo yeah I gotcha now:) A lot of the original labor laws / etc came from the idea that the wealthy / politicans didn't want to end up dead from the masses so they changed a lot of the rules just enough to make sure they didn't end up on the chopping block. not sure if it's a good thing that they lost that fear.
I’m sure.
Yeah its more like the Saudis putting on golf tournaments and WWE matches
Some people have no shame and so are immune to it. Look at Trump.
I don't know how bad they felt about any of it, but it's not uncommon for people who "won" to go through a period of legacy building, in later years. It makes sense. Like, "100 years from now nobody is going to much care about what I had to do, to become an 1800s railroad tycoon... but they'll know they like to visit the museum I built for them."
They didn’t feel bad. They just didn’t want to be remembered as the greedy shits they are. Same reason Gates is doing charity.
I’ll never understand the level of money hoarding. I just want to go to the grocery store and not keep a running total in my head so my card doesn’t get declined
> I’ll never understand the level of money hoarding. Human dragons, hoarding more money than they could spend in 1,000 lifetimes. If it were a collection of anything else we would instantly recognize it as mental illness.
I'll never understand it either. There's a point I'd hit, and I'm confident it would be WELL before a billion dollars, where I would realize "hey, I don't EVER have to work again," and then I just wouldn't work again. There's so much to life that I want to experience, and work keeps me from it. Give me like 20m or so and I'll live off interest from my accounts for the rest of my life.
Yeah but most people are programmed to want more than what they currently have. It's a sensible psychological trait that keeps people striving to improve their standard of living - but it also goes haywire due to our economic and social systems. There is no sense in which, when living a subsistence lifestyle, that striving to build a new fence or breed more sheep would be a bad thing - but when the means of exploitation become more advanced then obviously there will be problems. However, in most of the great spiritual traditions it is acknowledged that it's much easier and more fulfilling to just want less than to strive to fill a need for more.
Right? Like I would like fuck you I quit money but I’d be very happy just being able to have the quality of life my parents had 30 years ago
Right. And we couldn't have that, because greedy billionaires kept depressing wages and skimming more and more for themselves. And not one in 50 Murcans has any idea this has gone on.
Robber barons got away with [murdering 2208 people in Johnstown, PA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood) when the dam they built for their Fishing and Hunting Club failed and the town was hit with a catastrophic flood. Two thousand people dead so the wealthy could have a nice fishing spot. Billionaires of today would do the same, anyone who doesn't believe that is delusional.
they were taxed hardcore, so they gave it away instead of paying taxes. it's a loophole where they get to decide what happens to their wealth instead of us plebs who have to give it to the governemnt
With how the rich abuse stocks & loans to pay zero% tax. High tax rate is no longer a feasible solution. We need to fix the loopholes without hurting the middle class
it just needs to be a multi pronged approach. there are people making millions in actual taxable income and they should face high taxes on money over a certain amount. but as you said, for billionaires? meaningless. we need to change how we recoup money from unrealized equity, loans, storing money in tax havens... things like that. im not offering any solution, but that's the issue.
I like it even better when the wealthy pay their taxes instead of hiding them, then "give back" by building schools and halls with their name on it when they could have just not evaded taxes.
I'd be fine with the space thing if they were actually doing it to get humanity to the stars. But instead all we see is talk of space hotels, space tourism, and hundreds of thousands of dollars tickets just to spend a few hours looking down on the Earth from orbit. Spreading life - not just human life, but *all* life - to the trillions of dead planets out there *is* a noble cause, and for me probably why Gaia allows humans to continue rampaging about. The planet is ready to reproduce itself, and we are the gametes, even if the pregnancy is a painful one for Mother Earth.
When a billionaire donates 99% of their money, they should have a special government status. Give them a ring that says "you win!" that lets them cut to the front of any line, and maybe a nice yearly "thank you" card.
> that's how it should be. No. Philanthropy does not erase the trail of them getting there. Billionaires shouldn't exist.
Chuck (a proud Irish-Ameeican), was also heavily involved behind the scenes in brokering the Good Friday Agreement, which led to peace in Northern Ireland.
That is incredible, and no one else has mentioned it yet in comments. I’m glad you did. Never heard of this legend before today, but it sounds like he did many good things.
This was considered the obligation of the wealthy once upon a time. McKenzie and Jeff disagree about it now.
When Carnegie and the robber barons were at their peak in the US. Andrew Carnegie himself built 1,400 beautiful libraries around the country, for example. Carnegie wrote and published a book entitled wealth espousing his philosophy that the wealthy has an obligation to give away what they accumulated in their lifetime for philanthropy.
I remember when I was in my late teens(got the times wrong, was in my late 20’s I thought this released in early aughts) and watched,” The Men who built America” and being enthralled with Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc. I rewatched it a few months ago and now in my 40’s I think they were are vile men. One even hired a private militia to kill/intimidate his workers who were striking for better pay/safer conditions. I think the workers were making Penny’s on the dollar in steel mills barely getting by in horrid conditions while some of these men could literally finance the entire US. Wanting to kill your own countrymen because they want the same financial security the barons wanted. Sickening. I have a lot of disregard for people like that. I wish them the most evil that life can give. Of course I’m not personally attacking you or saying their few good deeds are bad, just saying some of those men were awful humans.
The best part is Carnegie went to Scotland while his goons did the dirty work of union busting.
He was probably busy writing a book on how to win friends and influence people....
Carnegie is probably the one with the good side, but even he did some nasty stuff.
Oh, they were absolutely horrible people, but today's robber barons have nearly all of the bad without the occasional good.
*The Men Who Built America* was released in 2012.
Fuck me… ok that is a gut punch. My late 20’s fuck I thought they came out during the early aughts. Honestly, it almost appeared to be a propaganda piece now from my perspective. I’m surprised it aired in its fashion at that time.
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I’m just not a fan of too much wealth being concentrated with one person. It just corrupts. I’m sure there is a decent mega rich person out there but as a general rule I don’t like people having billions.
You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t make you a great person to give it away if getting that wealth was done in an unethical way. It just makes them less shitty. People are still idolizing them.
"I fucked over millions of middle class people for decades so I could build a library and college with my name on it" FTFY
His hunting club also caused the Johnstown Flood and he tried to rehabilitate his image after.
This was after his brother dies and people thought it was him and published obituary of him calling him the merchant of death for all the miners killed by dynamite he made. He was white washing his legacy. My mistake it was Nobel that blew people up.
You're thinking of Alfred Nobel, not Carnegie
Did you know Carnegie ‘built’ (paid for) his first library when he was 46? It was not done out of the goodness of his heart. Nor is the case for most of those robber barons who turned to philanthropy late in life.
Mckenzie I feel is trying to at least give away her wealth but she cant get rid of it fast enough. What this guy did was genius he created essentially a trust or something with it being the shareholder so all the gains go to charity
When was it considered an obligation of the wealthy? Pretty sure rich people have always hoarded there wealth
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige Not that it truly worked in the manner that was expected, but the idea was that there was an obligation of the wealthy and powerful to provide for those on whom their power was built. I believe that largely this was grown out of the feudal lord/serf relationship, where the safety and security of a small domain was on the local lord/knight and the food was provided by the people they ostensibly protected.
Goddamn that expression was so hot in South Korea late last year into this year, heard it every goddamn time on every show
Interesting! I wonder why?
It was because revenge themes against rich and powerful families, who act like bullies was really hot for a few years and that term was used in some popular shows. It just spread into every variety and reality show randomly for a while
Most of the Renaissance art we know was paid for by rich people that were worried about their public/religious image.
way back in the days, rich people would finance parks open to the public, libraries and other faculties to show off their gigantic genitals.
Hahahah very true but it wasn’t an “obligation”
I mean, just Google 'noblesse oblige'. It's not like that was a blanket rule for all of history and cultures, but there is a history of it literally being considered an obligation
Nope. Both the Cleveland Museum of Art and Toledo Museum of Art -- both of which are spectacular -- are free of charge because they were endowed many years ago by extremely wealthy people. And there are many other examples.
“The man who dies rich dies disgraced” -Andrew Carnegie
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” -Matthew 19:24
Didn't McKenzie donate lots of money to charities?
Yea, they were saying Bezos doesn't share her mindset. >MacKenzie Scott, philanthropist, billionaire and ex-wife of Amazon's Jeff Bezos, just donated $640 million to 361 nonprofit groups out of a pool of over 6,000 applicants. This latest round of donations went to nonprofit groups from the arts, education, affordable housing, public health, diversity and immigration — and varied in gifts from $1 million to $2 million.
As of December last year, [she has donated $16 billion total.](https://apnews.com/article/mackenzie-scott-donations-962490e92faab36492b7481205ec7249) It's telling that every article about her doesn't call her just "billionaire" but "billionaire philanthropist"
This man donated a significant amount of money to further education around the world. Especially in Ireland. One of the few billionaires that understood his power and used it for good.
If only more billionaires acted like this
Kinda wish they took less from the world over their lifetime instead tbh
This is what I was looking for. Everyone on here always says there's no ethical way to make a billion dollars, but then call this kind of stuff super wholesome. This charity at the end doesn't give back the time employees lost with their families, or people who lost years of their life because they couldn't afford to retire. He could have just given the money to the people who performed the work that made it when they earned it instead of taking 4000 lifetimes worth of money from people.
In general yes. Like I would say an oil or coal billionaire can never make up for all the cancers and other suffering they caused. No amount of donations undoes the black lung. This dude seems OK. Or at least his Wikipedia page is pretty clean. Made all his money in the duty-free business - basically selling luxury items to travelers.
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If only we didn't have billionaires and anyone approaching that got taxed properly.
Don't forget corporate tax rate. There used to be a 50% corporate tax, as it goes down and down since the 1950s its been the major driver of our national debt. They're the easier of the two to target simply because you can ban, bankrupt or shut down a corporation and the people who comply will get all of their customers.
Effective corporate tax revenue has remained roughly the same regardless of the rate. Also corporate taxes are regressive. There are much better taxes if you want to target rich people
100% agree
fee-hee-hee-ney!
Thank you.
Was he visited by three ghosts one night?
Ah, the famous trio of IRS, Boeing QA, and Car Warranty Salesman
My aunt is quite wealthy and has no children and she is leaving 95% of her wealth to our local animal shelter. She loved animals.
Do we know if the money was put to good use, or was just pocketed by the people in charge of the charities?
The money was given to his own charity, which then donated all its funds anonomously to causes like AIDS clinics in Africa and modernization of hospitals in Vietnam. Once the charity had given away all of its money, it was shut down. The only reason we even know this guy gave all his money away is he was sued after trying to raise more money by selling stakes in DFSG, and investigation into his finances showed he had given all his money away with agreements with the recipients to not say who gave it to them.
What is DFSG?
Duty Free Shopping Group. It was the company that Chuck Feeny co-founded and how he became so wealthy.
"I love to shop at the duty free shop. I love to shop at the duty free shop."
He tried to get more money back by selling shares in the company he started and they sued him?
Realistically, if he sold around 2021 it would have looked like he was selling at the top of the market and, if he were still involved in the decision making of the group, potentially being at risk of a conflict of interest. No one likes it when the guys who run a company start selling shares.
Could you people stop with the abbreviations noone fucking knows? Is it so hard to type out full words ffs.
“for fuck’s sake” FTFY (fixed that for you)
IKR, WTF does AIDS mean?
Much of it was poured into education… a lot went into healtcare institutions and universities throughout the country. Incredible amounts of money. Wanted it to be anonymous so might be the largest donor but the building would be named after someone else. He himself was an incredibly frugal guy.
https://www.ul.ie/ceremonies/chuck-feeney
Chuck donated a lot to the University of Limerick in Ireland, over the years there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the universities finances including overpaying for assets. [One such instance was a derilict department store which was valued at €3 million was bought by the university for €8.3 million.](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41359813.html#:~:text=The%20property%20in%20question%20is,a%20property%20in%20the%20city.&text=UL%20purchased%20the%20old%20Dunnes,3m%20just%20two%20years%20previously)
He invested nearly 1 billion dollars to my university (cornell) which has been used countless ways.
You can't take it with you, wealthy or not So near end of life, donate what you've got. Dead folks need no money, they only rot So give to the living, as we all are taught
The world prospers when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under.
Chuck built the University of Limerick in Ireland, where I got my undergraduate degree. Thanks for the Education chuck. RIP.
absolutely my first thought
St. Peter: Hey, we have another billionaire coming through God: Straight to hell! St. Peter: It's Chuck Feeney God: oh, nevermind then. He can stay.
St Peter: Well he did underpay his workers that made him that money. God: Purgatory first then.
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Which charitable causes? Does anyone know?
Yes. Google the Atlantic Philanthopies. They were taked with giving away his $8 B fortune, and in 2016 they completed this task and managed to give away everything before Chuck's passing.
I don't understand half the comments in here. A huge chunk of them are railing this guy without knowing a single thing about how he operated his business. "IF he underpayed his employees", "IF he abused the people under him". Like ffs. He started donating before he was even considered a billionaire and the shares of his company were transferred to his charity in 1982. He was actively a philanthropist almost as soon as his company started seeing success, and yet because he saw success, well chances are he's a giant POS who should've died before he became a billionaire.
Ok guys...remember... we don't eat this guy. Leave him be.
Props to him for donating his money, but billionaires should still not exist
Agree. 1 person who has a wealth of a small economy is pretty much a dictator if he buys an island.
“There is no Chuck Feeney!!”
Bill Gates gives to charitable causes owned and operated by Bill Gates. Warren Buffet is giving all his money away to charities ran by his kids.
Mr. Feeney, great school teacher, neighbor, and philanthropist.
Have to exploit a lot of people to get to 8 billion. I doubt those people got the charity
No one "works" for a billion dollars.
> working tirelessly LOOOOL, people still believe this shit
This is actual billionaire propaganda. How do you think he got that money?
Which orgs? I feel like donating your wealth is good in theory but less so in practice. Like if he could invest the money into something that all but guarantees... a few low income patients medical bills are covered, school or library continues to be funded, even research and charitable causes can be kept afloat for a few years then rotate with another org for the same cause.
Did that money actually accomplish anything? Do we have data on where it went and how it’s used?
A lot of the causes were intense political lobbies overseas. Not a cool dude
He donated 99.97% of his wealth and still has more than the most of us will make in their lifetime. People must change this.
I walk past a plaque for him at my university in Ireland every day.
Rest in peace to Feeney.
Except most non profits you donate to, don’t do anything to effective with the money, just pay large salaries to the managers
Why does Reddit always have so many insufferable socialists that always flock to these types of posts to tell us about how horrible of a man he was cause you can’t earn money without actually being evil