I reserve my praises until I learn how exactly he gave away the money. Family-controlled foundations that only do political lobbing while avoiding taxes are a thing .
I wasn’t able to find details with a quick search, but it sounds like it wasn’t his own foundation:
After the AppNexus sale, O’Kelley and his wife carefully chose which causes to support. Their donations focus on education, social justice, technology access, and healthcare initiatives.
https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2025/08/could-you-give-away-1-5-billion-like-this-ceo/
Perhaps the only good billionaire is one who isn’t.
Their donations focus on education, social justice, technology access, and healthcare initiatives.
Okay, but you realize the could just be the Gates Foundation, right? Or whatever bullshit charity Zuckerberg runs?
I think it’s the Cuck Foundation
Perhaps the only good billionaire is one who isn’t.
Duh
I honestly hope that’s the case. “Hopeful” is a nice change of pace.
well political lobbying would be good if it’s lobbying for socialism i’d say
I would argue that legalized corruption is bad, even if you happen to agree with the cause.
Well, the current method of taking the high ground to make change for good ain’t exactly working out too well.
Lobby for removing that legalized corruption?
I don’t know if there is something much newer and more focused on the foundation aspect, but The Rich and the Super-Rich spends a bit of time on discussing foundations and how they work to preserve wealth.
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I’ve said stuff like that before, but I bet we can do even better. You don’t just tax the extra money they make and be done. You publicize the great things the money does, and you give the people awards, titles, and attention in whatever way seems effective.
So maybe next year AWS keeps growing like crazy and Jeff Bezos’s yearly “donation” is like 30 Billion dollars. He never sees that money, yet he still lives a billionaire lifestyle. The government uses that money to have schools offer every child in the country three hot nutritious meals per day, and some hallway in DC gets a plaque that says Jeff Bezos: Savior of the Children and the Future of American Brainpower. We all win in the ways we care about.
If it’s ok for companies to psychologically manipulate and/or physically harm people in pursuit of profit, then it’s ok for we the people to use the bottomless narcissism and ambition of the CEO class as an energy source.
Well that’s certainly nicer than how the French handled it
Should have shared the money with the workers who built the company into a $1.6B valuation and worth acquisition.
duckin’ A
If anything he should have invested it into effecting political change. But that other person is right; it’s never good enough for you.
In Russia that’s an oligarchy. Yet here you are advocating it?
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I’m not advocating for the system. I’m just suggesting a way the money could do the greatest good.
Money can buy political change. That shouldn’t be true, but it is.
If you’re so hungry for a target to be mad at that you imagine them like this, maybe it’s time to take a little break.
Jesus Christ, it’s never good enough for you, why even bother trying.
Just because he gave it away, doesn’t remove his responsibility for how he “earned” it.
I agree, but it doesn’t sound like his choices are bad. There’s a comment further down.
Look, at least he does not seem to have raped anyone.
That’s a low bar.
At least there is a bar
…by working hard for it?
He didn’t work hard for it, his underpaid employees did. He just sold their hard work and kept the exorbitant profit.
At the end of the day, stolen wages are still stolen wages.
Lol, i know, right?
So many upvotes for the guy above you defending billionaires
That’s correct, there’s no way to be the good guy in a system like this. All you can do is try
Good for him.
Raise the taxes, remove the cap on FICA contributions, implement universal healthcare.
I love the sentiment but want to make sure it’s understood that M4A would cost less, not more, than what we have today. The US government already spends more per citizen on healthcare than most governments with universal programs. The money just doesn’t go to healthcare, it pays for profits and unnecessary overhead (like CEO salaries) at insurance companies, physician networks, hospitals, and medical suppliers.
The US government already spends more per citizen on healthcare than most governments with universal programs. The money just doesn’t go to healthcare
Then the US is nor spending that money per citizen, now is it?
“Per citizen” doesn’t imply that the money is going to each citizen. It just means “total spent divided by the number of citizens”.
The government is spending it, then the private system is skimming from it.
He sold the company for $1.6bn, but he had a 10% stake. So his stake was worth $160m. He kept $100m. So he gave away $60m.
He did not give away a billion dollars. The article headline and the article itself is written in such a way that it arguably obscures the facts and confuses.
It’s great he gave away $60m but it’s got little to nothing to do with his opinion that he doesn’t believe in billionaires; including that in the headline makes it seem like he gave away a billion dollars.
$100 million invested into dividend stock would gross him $1-5 million per year. About 1/3 of that will be paid in taxes, depending on what kind of dividends those are.
Me personally, I think I’d be happy with $10 million but I guess you get hungry when there’s a lot of food in front of you.
Depends if you want rich people play money or just comfy people play money.
Also if you want to say buy a beach front house in california or a nice mountain home in Colorado. That alone can run you a few millions dollars upfront not to mention a the on going costs.
100m is honestly not a lot of money if you plan to not for for the next handful of decades and want to actually enjoy a rich life style.
10 mill will put you in a nice middle class home and keep you living a middle class life style for the same length of time.
Wealth to life style scales pretty well from 10 to 100 million dollars when your looking at a 35 year span.
In the US, the middle class generally encompasses households earning between two-thirds and double the national median income. For 2023, the median household income was $77,719, putting the middle class range between roughly $52,000 and $155,000.
now we have income vs earned/taxed 10mm.
155k pa puts you in the 22% federal tax bracket, since it’s progressive let’s assume 16% tax over all your income, this leaves you with 140k. and this is the upper end of the middle class. not just somewhere within.
if you just spend your 10mm at 140k pa it would last 71 years. okay, inflation is a bitch, but still …
if you put it in some ETF you usually beat inflation with about 8.5% pa, which is taxable I guess. but it’s only the gain you pay tax on off course.
so if you make 8.5% of 10mm and lose 3% to inflation, and tax 16% on the remaining gains you are left with 3.9% (=390k) after taxes pa to all eternity.
so unless you assume all variables worst case (living in most expensive city, getting divorced every year etc) I’d call 10mm way above middle class
and these numbers are fur 10mm, not 100.
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How many more people/companies do we need to see doing this before we see change?
I am praising the action not the individual :)
Just a general reminder to anyone to use a site like Charity Navigator to find good causes to donate to.
Seems to be only American
Because most other Western countries have social security networks paid for by taxes, which are infinitely more efficient than the temporary bandaid which is charity.
or GiveWell if you want causes ranked according to their impact as measured in QALYs. They research these things pretty carefully to determine the impact. If you’re not a utilitarian then you may not see the point of doing this (though on the other hand, if you’re not a utilitarian, I don’t know if there’s any way to evaluate charities well.)
Good for him tbh, being a billionare WILL slowly corrode your mind and soul
Thats fucked up, why sell it? Give it back to the workers.
Sell it, keep $100M, distribute $1,500M to the employees who built the company with you.
…sit on the beach with your former employees as just people, discussing who has the cutest little umbrella in their drink and laughing at the stock value of the global conglomerate that bought a business that no longer has employees.
No, just distribute ownership amongst the workers. Keep a majority share if youre worried they arent responsible enough.
I guess it just depends on the scope. Since we were talking about giving way over a billion, I was envisioning the employees being set for life and having no concern for the continued operation of the business.
If we’re talking about thousands of people, then I guess either option is pretty sweet. Either you keep your same job but now have equity and control, or you keep your same job under new ownership but see an extra $500,000 cash just drop into your checking account.
I took a look at the article and I got no impression of the employee count, but the dude who sold the company seems like the rare ultra-rich startup CEO business owner who is somehow based as fuck.
It sounds like starting companies is just what he likes doing, and/or is driven to do. I have to admit I’m a little jealous because imagine being a decent person, and first being told you have no rent or bills ever again, and then being given 1,500 Million Dollars to just give to people and causes you care about. That would be off-the-charts fun and rewarding.
(edit to add: the article may have been written in a misleading way such that he gave away less than half the money rather than over 90%, so maybe he’s not quite so based. Still way ahead of the pack. Something I have often said is that in order to become a billionaire, you have to be the kind of person who can have $100M and still put in overtime because you aren’t satisfied. It sounds like this guy at least works because he wants to and is thinking in the right direction)
Article snippet:
The 48-year-old is now building his third startup, a supply-chain emissions data company called Scope3. Still, he claims you’ll never catch him joining the billionaires club. “I will never be that wealthy. Even if Scope3 is immensely successful, we will give that money away.”
Just seems sick to build a company off the backs of your employees then say, “you know what take the equity and spend it elsewhere who cares about the people who got me here. They have been gifted a job like the good servants they are.”
Oh. I thought this was The Onion for a second when I saw the title.
He’s not wrong. Being circled by scavengars like some kind of dying leviathan is not a sane way to live.
The question is: does it bring lasting benefits to the people?
If he gives away a billion once, eventually it will be consumed and then we’re stuck in the same situation again. The rich must give money away repeatedly, that’s the only way to sustain society going forward. For that, solid and robust policy changes will have to be implemented.
Well, yeah, I mean you are not wrong but in this case the guy sold his company for a billion (or rather more) and I assume that company wasn’t running for just a few months. So in order to do it again he’d first have to start another company that reaches that selling price.
Other billionaires of course would need to keep giving back money they continuously amass, yes.
Well, you among many others in this thread are just describing communism, at least on some level.
When a billionaire gives money away, it’s usually to their own charity, and it’s to avoid paying taxes. Of course it sounds good to say they gave it away but it reality, they give it to a charity they fully control.
Or to reinvent their image, and not be look upon as a terrible person. Aka, gates
Basically he paid the cost of buying the Benevolent Nerd Dad image when you’re primarily known for running a company with some of the most anti-competitive practices ever around.
and his now potential association with epstein. i had a feeling it was because of this.
why didn’t he pay a bunch of that to the employees?
Because that’s against how the system works. Shareholders can and will sue your company if you don’t maximise profits. I honestly do not believe that we will achieve an acceptable distribution of wealth under capitalism.
That’s a certainty as equitable distribution of wealth is diametrically opposed to the fundamental working of the capitalist system.
