A man is undecided which billionaire to devote his time and thoughts to next. He is no longer interested in Elon Musk and he has already given his devotion to some of the other obvious candidates. He has drawn up a short list and is pondering the candidates.
Eric Shunn (35) has always been drawn to rich and powerful people. He thinks it’s because his own father was just so ordinary that he has this fixation on fantastically wealthy men. His father is a plumber with his own small business. Eric has tried to get his father to expand the business and become a multinational conglomerate so he can be proud of him. His father just told him that he can take over the business when he retires and can do what he wants.
Up to 2008 Eric thought that Bill Gates was a hero, but when he went part-time at Microsoft and started devoting most of his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the allure was gone. “I like my billionaires to act like billionaires. Big yachts, lots of cars and an extravagant lifestyle. Getting involved in trying to improve the world is just a bit boring”.
He did take a few years to hero worship Jeff Bezos. Now Bezos was a great billionaire to worship. He did everything right. Treated staff in his companies with contempt, paid them poorly and created a toxic working environment. The shine started to fade when Bezos started donating money to various worthy causes such as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Worldreader, and to help with American homelessness. Eric felt that the last one really fell short of the standards of behaviour for a billionaire.
Eric moved his loyalty to Elon Musk in September 2018, who never disappointed him. No chance that Musk was going to get involved with this woke namby pamby philanthropy nonsense. There was a brief wobble in 2022 when it seemed he had transferred Tesla shares worth $5.7 billion at the time to a charity. It was spectaculated that he had donated the shares to the World Food Programme (WFP). He tweeted that he would donate $6 billion to the WFP if they could describe “exactly how $6B will solve world hunger.” The WFP never received the money. He was doing an epic trolling of the WFP.
Eric now thinks that it’s time to shift his affections to another billionaire. He has decided be more methodical this time. Consulting the Forbes Real Time list of billionaires he checked up on the contenders.
Larry Ellison was out straight away because of his founding and supporting his foundation.
Initially Eric was put off Larry Page because of the amount of money he put into the Carl Victor Memorial Foundation. Page, one of the founders of Google and the world’s 6th richest person, had helped the foundation come to have assets $6.7 billion in 2021. On further inspection Eric realised there was a lot of mystery and lack of transparency over what happens with the money. Page had set up the foundation to mostly use a mechism called donor-advised fund. There is no information regarding what has been done with 99% of the money given out.
Cynical experts claim they are used by the wealthy to earn tax benefits while delaying charitable donations.
Eric really likes the idea of cynical use of charity and has decided to idolise Larry Page.