Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has given away half a billion dollars against a backdrop “where a growing number of billionaires are lashing out against philanthropy”.
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Similar story for Joel Spolsky
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/18/tech-founder-jeff-atwood-why-im-giving-away-millions-within-next-5-years.html
i hate to be that guy, and this isn't particularly about Craig Newmark in any which way, but what i would highly prefer to his philanthropy is a system where people pay the right amount of tax. the government should be allocating social programs, it shouldn't be up to the whims of the lords to provide what they decide is important to the serfs.
Thank you for being that guy, Neutral. I was going to say this exactly, beat me to it. Pooling excess resources and deciding together how to best use them is the essence of a society.
I recently learned about the Orphan-Crushing Machine.
I find this article gives a good overview of activities of some of the super rich to campaign for more taxes.
This sort of article always risks the bad "look how this rich person is saving the world with their generosity" take but I think this particular one mostly lands on "look at how most of these billionaires are straight up comic book villain grade greedy"
Now is the time to think about starting up new non-profit endeavors. With an anticipated explosion of new AI wealth from Anthropic and others, we're entering a new wave of philanthropic spending. On the high end, as much as $100 billion of new money per year will require a raft of nonprofits to absorb it well.
https://nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-american-philanthropy
Or as Neutral suggests above, we could just tax these people and use the existing (or formerly existing) infrastructure such as Medicare (for Medicare for All), city and state governments (schools, roads, public transportation), SNAP, USAID, CDC, WHO, etc. etc. etc. Or the existing ~1.5 million 501(c)(3)s to address the problems we face. The infrastructure exists, we need to fund it.
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