Technology

I don't know much about the other guys you named, but close friend of Jeffry Epstein, Bill Gates is a demon with good PR. A lot of his outreach consists of privatizing schools in Africa and America, testing vaccines on tribal girls in India without consent, and demanding Oxford sell their covid vaccine instead of releasing it free..

But if you google anything about Bill Gates medical activities, they get drowned out by puff pieces and fact checks about microchips in vaccines instead of the.

The information technology industry in the US has always had a thread of Ayn Rand's philosophy running through it. Some of the people who were part of the computer revolution in the 70s and 80s knew her personally, and thought of themselves as Randian heroes (which is to say, they were narcissists). This is sort of a foundational aspect of the culture of Silicon Valley, so it's always been there.

I highly recommend the documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis.

Perfect human beings don't exist. Apparently there's a religion positing there was one perfect human, but we nailed him to a cross for interfering with business.

Here's a thought. If you were able to get away with Almost Anything (TM) and were surrounded by people praising your genius, dashing good looks and boundless generosity towards their persons, how long would it take for you to lose your moral compass, you think? You would pretty soon lose your frame of reference to the normal people, and your empathy would follow. And that's assuming you're not 2nd or 3rd generation ultra rich, in which case you never had it to begin with.

Succession is a very good TV series exploring the mindset of such people, if you want to see it in action. Otherwise, history is full of examples - such as Nero, the greatest poet to ever set fire to Rome.

I know there are exceptions, like everywhere else in life. But those tend to cultivate humility as a habit, like other people go to the gym.

I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable

Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:

• Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
• Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
• Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.

Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.

Capital demands growth. It doesn't care how you do it. It doesn't track or reward whether you did it by making the world better or by creating death squads and working with the CIA to kill thousands of people and overthrow a government that wanted to charge you taxes and limit the amount of land you could have.

It's been this way, and worse, for a long time. But bear in mind that Twitter gave us the ability to see how billionaires think. Modern media made them more accessible. They didn't change, our knowledge of them did.

You listed a bunch of people who were "good", but honestly, none of them were. You just weren't necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.

Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it's just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.

I generally think Satya is a fairly decent guy.

Microsoft is still a fucking shit show, but still.

Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today, and Jobs was an abusive narcissist shitcunt on a surface level.

Tom and Zuckerberg both came from the same time. Zuck was shit since day 1, today has nothing to do with it.

I think you just have some very rose tinted glasses.

I don't ever remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs being good people. Or Jeff Bezos, trying to kill bookstores.

The guys behind Google seemed okay at first and I think they really wanted to do good. But the way the company culture was built was toxic.

But in the end it's all about the greed. As soon as a company becomes public and whose stocks become available on the market, it turns to shit.

Look at how Steam is going well and actually helping personal computing progress. Gabe Newell is doing a great job because he loves that he does and ensures the people who work for him do too.

Money

It was a lot easier to pretend to be a good person when every moral failure you make wasn't broadcast around the world the moment it was discovered. Case and point, look into Bill Gates more. He wasn't always a respectful guy, got caught up in the whole "filthy communists" schtick when the government was investigating his company, advocates for more restrictive control of aid distribution favoring manufacturers more than those he's trying to help, conflicts of interest in his charity, opposing twitters ban of Trump after the insurrection, etc.

Because being an industry leader is more about controlling people rather than whatever it is that your industry produces.

"Leaders"

They were always bad people but media shilled them as good guys... Buffet is similar example. We all LARPed it. Now we are learning the hard truth.

These people a part of the owner class and control key portions of us and global economy.

They are not the same as the rest of us. They know it and they act upon it.

When you step on an ant do you even notice?

They don't either peasant, now get back to fucking cucking and making daddy some mother fucking money, boy

The link below isn't the fundamental reason, but I think it helps to explain the shift in mindset. With the best of intentions and a desire to innovate and help people live better...the ersartz movement became corrupted by conspicuous consumption and a "disruptor" capitalist mindset:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

Greed. A sane person will walk away from working once they have enough saved to comfortably retire.

$100 million can let you live comfortably forever, but there are plenty of people who want that much every year.

Those are the folks who become 'leaders.'

lack of "social intelligence". They mostly rose through the ranks because their technical (or business) skill. They never had to act for benefit of others to advanve

Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.

Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of "human" in the company's choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be "good", or they leave.

My thought is that these people think that their smarter than everyone else therefore they are justified doing anything they do. On the other hand, anyone with a billion dollars got it by making a whole lot of other people poorer. And they ate neither actually geniuses nor benevolent in any other way.

The Phillip Morris CEO makes money by hooking people onto something that isn't good for them. Tech CEOs are very seldom any different. Anyone who says otherwise usually has a financial interest in making you believe them.

Power corrupts people. On top of that, the capitalist machine isn't satisfied with "just okay" performance. It's infinite growth, or nothing. Once you hit the upper limit of what you can deliver, you start delivering the same, but with a lot of cut corners

when I was growing up

This is really the key. We're all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we're kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn't realize the extent of what was happening.

Edit: The evolution of social media also adds a lot to this. We are both more connected to each other and society, and therefore more aware of BS think it's pulled by corporations. Then, of course, you have folks like Elon Musk who seem to make a point of making sure everyone knows how big of a piece of shit they are, and how proud of it they are.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton