image transcription:

big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):

  • Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
  • Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
  • David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
  • Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
  • Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
  • Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
  • Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
  • Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
  • Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.

on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”

    • Rozaŭtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire

      And to STAY a billionaire. If you have immense power to do good, and every single morning you wake and choose not to, you are an evil ghoul driven by greed, period.

      • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I love how so many of them demand love and acclaim for claiming they will give their money away… when they die.

        You want me to sing your praises because you won’t use the money you made exploiting countless laborers and lobbying government to benefit yourself above society to anoint a handful of nepo babies to wield that power after you as some part of a new nepo dynasty? Gee thanks?

        Its like a serial killer promising not to train his children in the family business. Its not doing good, just doing slightly less bad. Except billionaires cause damage on a far greater scale.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire.

      Jeffrey Epstein supporter and pedophile Richard Stallman would qualify then?

        • s_s@lemmy.one
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          11 months ago

          All libertarians start and end at the same place.

          At least Stallman championed other liberties, too.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Probably the same people who claim that Threads is going to be toxic for the fediverse…

      • Dojan@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        If he’s willing to trample all over people, exploit them, and have them die for his sake, then absolutely.

        Billionaires don’t care about people. They don’t view others as human. To them workers are robots, a statistical means to an end. Who cares if someone dies in some factory/warehouse somewhere? There’ll be another to replace them before the end of the day.

        A billionaire gladly takes the effort of others and claims it as their own. They go out of their way to do it.

        That’s not to say that every evil person acting like this will automatically become a billionaire, but you need to be OK with doing these things in order to get there. A billion USD is such an insane sum you cannot legitimately accumulate that without hurting people in the process. Like there’s no logical way of actually earning that amount of money. That’s money you take.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Billionaires don’t care about people. They don’t view others as human.

          Whereas peophiles and forces sex labor apologists are super empathetic.

    • BestBouclettes
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      11 months ago

      Or divorcing Jeff Bezos.

      Joke aside, apparently she has a hard time spending enough money to lower her net worth (currently at $40B). Which is an absolutely bonkers amount of money, no one ever should have that much.

        • BestBouclettes
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          11 months ago

          She married him in 1993 way before Amazon happened, maybe he wasn’t a gigantic ass back then. I don’t know much about her, but she seems decent from what I can see, she has donated massive amounts of money to charitable causes.