I wonder if there's a survivorship bias there: those who can and do reject the status quo.

My hot take is that men with extreme wealth and power are desperate to keep it as part of their identity, where the women I mentioned do not have the same character and personality flaws, and therefore use it as a tool to do good because they are not optimizing for status, power, and wealth: they are optimizing to do good. Doesn't always hold, there are exceptions.

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority." -- Lord Action

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DennisP 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One giant exception was Chuck Feeney, who made $8 billion on duty free shops and gave almost all of it away, much of it anonymously. By the end of his life he and his wife had a couple million and lived in a rented apartment.

	▲	idiotsecant 21 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Giving away your fortune in secret is so much more virtuous than doing it with a giant foundation with your name on it. Much respect.
	▲	toomuchtodo 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Philanthropies https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Great human, thanks for mentioning.

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seki285 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a difference in men and women... until there's not. Very convenient.

	▲	toomuchtodo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's a large body of medical research around women having more empathy than men, specifically around brain volume in the inferior frontal gyrus. Does it always hold? There are always exceptions. Broadly speaking, in most cases, it is a function of brain structure, per person. Do you have many examples of exceptional wealthy and powerful women who are monsters? I do not. I welcome corrections and citations, and am happy to be proven wrong on this. TLDR Show me the brain fMRI and I will show you the soul. In some cases, facial structure is enough for weak but meaningful signal (as a proxy for brain structure). (politics are also brain structure, citations in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48634883)

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IncreasePosts an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think more likely is that bill and Jeff built their wealth through their businesses, which they are still directly involved in. Giving away their wealth would be equivalent to giving away the business they built from the ground up

I think there's also a question of efficacy. Bill and Jeff are really good at turning $1 into $10. Melinda and Mackenzie? Not so much. If bill or Jeff wanted to maximize the amount they can give, the best strategy would be for them to continually earn until they die, and then donate it.

	▲	toomuchtodo 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that Bill and Jeff are better at exploitation at scale. That’s how you become that wealthy. We are lucky they’re divorced and the wealth is in the hands of better stewards to distribute it to do good.