We in India love billionaires, benevolent ones at that. We love when rich people give back to society. Those stories just give us emotional boners like no porn can. But while they do all that, they also tend to f**k people over a lot. Just look at some of your favourites.
1. Bill Gates- Vaccine Apartheid
During the early days of the pandemic, countries in the Global South compelled the World Health Organization to unveil a technology sharing pool, C-TAP, essentially removing intellectual property barriers when it comes to COVID treatments and vaccines. This would have made the vaccines cheaper and easily available in developing countries like ours.
But Gates maintained his stance on profiteering off a pandemic intellectual property rights and pushed for a plan to allow companies to hold exclusive rights to life-saving medicines, this despite the millions they received from the public.
2. Elon Musk: Racism at Tesla
Despite being every tech bro’s wet dream and world’s richest edgelord, Elon Musk has continued to deflect responsibility in matters of the racism charges labelled against Tesla by black employees. Black workers have been harassed with racist graffiti, including that of the KKK, and have been called the N-word and other racial slurs.
3. The Koch brothers: Amongst the world’s biggest polluters
If you haven’t heard of them, congratulations, this is your first time reading about the guys that are primarily responsible for the dystopian post-apocalyptic hellscape your kids will grow up in. Actually, you might get quite a glimpse of that world sooner than you think. The brothers have also used their billions to constantly fund climate change deniers and ‘researchers’.
4. Mark Zuckerberg: WHERE DO I START?
Nobody who started a website to rate women’s bodies should ever have the power to tank democracies. But Zuckerberg’s Facebook has done exactly that. And not to forget that time, Facebook was accused of failing to protect data from third parties, serving ads through the use of phone numbers provided for security, and lying to users that its facial recognition software was turned off by default.
5. Steve Jobs- Denied paternity of his daughter by claiming he was sterile.
Jobs denied paternity of Lisa, his daughter with Chrisann Brennan, who was born on May 17, 1978. Jobs claimed that “he was sterile and infertile, and, as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child.” He would go on to have three more children with Laurene Powell, his wife.
6. J.K Rowling- Blatant violent transphobia
Yes, I know you still think Rowling lost her billionaire status after donating too much to charity but then again, you daft lot keep buying hard copies of those books and they keep making more movies. So, getting back to the subject at hand, Rowling is now an insufferable transphobe enjoying the smooth selling in the far right, and uses her voice and platform to demean, defame and gaslight trans people.
7. Vince McMahon- Racism, sexism, not providing health insurance to wrestlers
Those who are of the opinion that McMahon only plays a narcissistic scumbag on TV should know by now that he’s a scumbag in real life as well. Many former wrestlers like Rowdy Piper and CM Punk have spoken about the ill-treatment they had to face at the company. Not to forget that even though WWE wrestlers can only wrestle for WWE, they are only hired on a contractual basis and aren’t provided with the same facilities as a permanent employee would, in any other regular job. Oh and did I mention, he’s had a history of class A sexism and racism as well.
Look, I don’t know how to break this to you but billionaires are not good people, guys. Making the working class think they can one day become the ruling class by doing what they did is the biggest pipe dream there is. They are literally just a**holes with a god complex, even the ‘good’ ones.