Am I just deceived? I think I might love him?
This is really simple. If you have more than a 1000 million dollars. Every day you decide to keep it instead of saving lives and helping people. It will never be moral
I’d give all the billionaires the same choice:
(a) Give away everything except, say, 25 million.
(b) Guillotine.
Does that include the Kelley Blue Book of my boats or are we talking purely liquid (heh) assets?
Oh, everything.
Got a $20m yacht? Sell it. Oh, youcre forced to sell it for $50k because nobody will give you more? That’s just the free market, clearly it’s only worth $50k.
Paid $75m to build your house? Well someone is offering you $175k and you’d better take it.
And you own a company worth $100m? No you don’t, it was already taken from you and turned into a worker-owned co-op.
After all the sales and seizures, you’ve got $23.1m in cash, and just 1m more in the bank? OK, dude, we cool.
I sure hope Gabe goes for that or my cheeks will be red.
Only if they’re underwater.
We shouldn’t eat them. I don’t want prion disease.
ABAB. All billionaires are bad.
Valve makes tonnes of money from loot boxes or whatever they’re called. Basically a form of gambling.
It also just so happens that a great way of making a shit load of money is making it super easy for people to buy from you. Valves big competitive advantage is just… not fucking that up. A surprising number of companies fuck that up.
And as someone else said, Gabe doesn’t have to be a billionaire. He could use his phenomenal wealth to build hospitals and help the poor, rather than building his own little private navy.
Valve is doing a lot that will make people like them, but they’re still a huge corporation, and Gabe is still a billionaire.
If he continues to be a billionaire, yes.
Amassing that level of wealth is not an accident, it’s by choice.
I agree with this sentiment, but given a choice, I believe Gabe would make the right one and spend his wealth to lose billionaire status.
His supposed exploitation was not by his own design, but rather by luck - the sheer benefit of riding a privately owned and benevelontly steered surfboard on top of the waves of a collapsing capitalist society.
Basically, there’s a meme about all other companies shooting themselves in the foot so Gabe always benefits, and part of that is in the way those companies fucked and manipulated their control of capital and markets. Gabe benefits just by being one of the few that can afford to participate in that system others rigged.
So he simply rigs it the least, and wins by providing the platform with the least greedy problems. Far far less than he could given his position.
IMHO, despite all controversies, Steams cut of profits from providing equal access to game visibility despite creator, nationality, background, etc, has legitimately opened the door for nearly anyone to be successful on their platform. For all the tools and services they provide, they ask for literally the smallest cut compared to any other publishing platform.
Gabe could destroy that to his benefit on a whim, and instead he over designs it to make it possible for nearly anyone to try game dev if they do the work needed to develop for them.
To hold so much capital simply for providing some form of equality to access the same in a system that overwhelming benefits others with more resources is in no way greedy imo. It’s being the person with the only fire extinguisher who knows how to use it in a burning building: popular.
A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can’t sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he’s rolling in other assets and cash, too
Valve doesn’t have stocks
It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private
companycorporation (which isn’t relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.
The dispicableness of billionaires is measured by their actions not their worth. And despite being of high worth, Gabes actions are unquestionably not greedy. He’s doing almost everything he can to minimize his wealth in favor of equality to access Steam as a game dev.
If he wanted to, he could charge far more than $100 to develop for them, and buy several more yachts.
But he hasn’t.
Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.
His yachts aren’t indicative of his greed, but his benevolence in the face of it.
Show me a single other company the size of Valve that has chosen to forgo profit over access to something like Steam to make money yourself. That’s basically non existent in the year 2025 aside from Valve. I’m not going to judge Gabe as a bad person for profiting from that. He could be profiting much much more and is choosing access for nearly everyone else instead.
Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.
Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you’ll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren’t also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don’t realise people won’t want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.
There’s obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.
I see granting access for anyone to make games for Steam as a good cause.
The opportunity cost for what profit could be made by closing that is multitudes of yachts worth.
Just because you do not value this as a good cause does not mean it is not.
Does Gabe have more yachts than are needed? Yes. But again, you can’t just say he’s greedy because he has them. That’s being incredibly biased.
Instead, how about you tell me what actions of his has made him greedy that don’t involve his assets?
I can name hundreds of ways Musk should be drawn and quartered based on his actions that have nothing to do with his wealth, but rather his actual documented choices.
What choices / actions / or anything of actual greed has Gabe done that you can point to?
It’s like saying anything with a swastika on it is for Nazis without realizing Hindus have been using a right oriented Swastika to represent good fortune for hundreds of years.
Gabe Newall has done the following with his 11 Billion fortune:
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Co-founded “The Heart of Racing” car racing team that raises money for Children’s charity.
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Donates heavily to the Seattle Children’s Hospital and several others around the world.
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Founded Foundry10, a non profit education company that helps neuro divergent kids learn through new methods of education
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Started InkFish to expand the scientific study of our oceans and is now the second highest individual donor towards marine research on the planet.
https://80.lv/articles/gabe-newell-reportedly-plans-to-invest-usd300-million-to-marine-research
That’s why he has those yachts.
Same reason Hindus have their swastikas.
Their actions speak louder than the symbols they use suggest. Even when those symbols are Yachts.
He has 11 Billion. Everyone else even close to his level of market control has several magnitudes more. Why does he have so little when he owns a virtual monopoly on digital distribution?
Because he’s not in it for maximizing his bank account.
The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn’t mean that he’s not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.
Fundamentally, I don’t think we’re going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there’s an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it’s much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he’s given anything away that he wasn’t legally required to means that he’s not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can’t be reconciled, it’s not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.
The reason I’ve been replying at all is that some of the things you’ve stated to be facts are untrue, not that I’m trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.
What have I said that isn’t true?
https://robbreport.com/motors/marine/billionaire-gabe-newell-oceanco-gigayacht-leviathan-1237360429/
The 364-foot Leviathan was designed for billionaire gaming visionary Gabe Newell, who acquired the Dutch shipyard this past April.
Leviathan is the latest addition to Newell’s Inkfish fleet and will be used to further scientific research in the marine sector. Occupying the place of the standard beach club is a fully equipped dive center, laboratory, and a hospital. There’s even a 3-D printing workshop where the crew can create spare or replacement parts. “Yachts have great potential to serve as platforms for scientific research,” adds Newell. “It’s about recognizing that you’re part of a broader community and ensuring the yacht’s presence adds value to the communities around it.”
You are just continuing to make assumptions based entirely on the assets he owns instead of his behaviour.
Something I keep pointing out, and is why I have also been responding.
I am completely on your side and feel that anyone with over a billion is an ethical and moral burden. However, I’m also wise enough to recognize that as a goal to strive towards not a destination to judge against. So I’m not going to chastise those actively working towards that goal, even if they are a billionaire.
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But he loves us, no?
In my opinion if anyone has billions of dollars and hasn’t given a majority of it away to charity or those in need, that person is on some level at least somewhat an evil person.
Sure, much of it would be tied up in stocks and stuff that legally can’t be sold for specific purposes or timeframes, but if you have net worth in the billions and any stocks that could be sold for cash and then donated it should be. Or if you have an annual income that’s much more than you need to live an extremely comfortable life and then you just spend and invest the excess instead of donate.
A billionaire who gives away 99% of their wealth to the poorest, first and exclusively, isn’t a billionaire, and still has enough money (maybe more!) for the rest of time.
He can buy his freedom by using his wealth to finally release hl3
Why eat them? You better turn them to compost, so they can actually help something grow.
I’m not eating Elon Musk. That’s like dumpster diving behind a cracker barrel.
I’ll let the normies keep swift if we can keep gabe
They are both part of the problem.
In ten years people will talking about the GabeCube killing PC modularity like they always saw it coming
We can save him for desert.
“Billionaire” is a convenient modern buzzword. It used to be “millionaire”. The classic joke from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil demands money is a good example. It’s just inflation.
Plus, a lot of “billionaires” are only considers such because they own shares in their corporations. It’s a “theoretically if they could find a way to sell all of those shares at the current price without tanking the market value of those shares in the process, they could get $X billion from that”.
If there were a theoretical global revolution, on of the the first steps of eating the rich is to seize and nationalize those businesses. Later, land reform will seize the extra mansions they own. They will still be left with adequate personal property to live quite comfortably. Finally, the justice system will need to evaluate what labor laws (or other laws) they may have been violating for years and using their wealth to get away with.
Start with the biggest fish and watch as the rest start to downsize voluntarily and cut deals to avoid jail.
I don’t expect to see any of this in my lifetime. Not in any major country, and certainly not globally.
