Speaking for myself, just knowing there is someone in the billionaire class who is still an incandescent beacon of humanity, humility, and hope has in some nontrivial way increased the quality of my years since she started on this path.

She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.

the worlds GDP is like $120,000,000,000,000. Her work is worthless in comparison. the only possible benefit of concentrated wealth is taking concentrated bets on a new research or technology or social organization. But to give to generic charities is a waste of time and reveals a profound lack of creativity on her part.

Right, but she is not pathologically like the other billionaires. She married a man who became one. Same with Melinda Gates. So I guess our hope is that more billionaires will lust after young Russians or hot newscasters and get divorced, so their normal wives can do what normal people do with more money than they’d even need and help others.

> She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.

MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy is great, and I'm both glad she exists and glad that her existence apparently upsets the Garry Tans and the Elon Musks of the world, but I don't think this conclusion is the take away at all.

She's an anomaly in the system, not proof that the system isn't horrendously harmful.

She is an outlier in the sense that she is both “new money” and also “old money” (she did the equivalent of inheriting money in her settlement with Bezos).

She was, at one time, a normal person, with normal friends and normal parents. However unlike most other “new money” billionaires she acquired her wealth without the corrupting influence of being a master of the universe business person where everyone in your circle is falling over themselves to gas up your ego.