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Why are so many leaders in tech evil?

I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…

Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he’s been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He’s basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That’s what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him

Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it’s success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone’s life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.

Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude’s entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force

Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday

Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@quokk.au avatar

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.

TachyonTele ,

Going back even further is assholes like Edison and Ford.

wintermute_oregon ,

I think it’s easier to name the people who have been decent in tech. Woz seems like a decent guy.

Ted Waite all in all was decent. Not perfect but decent.

Omniraptor ,

Stallman was right about everything

wintermute_oregon ,

Stallman is a notable figure in the industry but he was never the leader of a large tech company. That’s probably why he’s a decent guy

schnurrito ,

The FSF isn’t exactly what you think of when you hear the words “large tech company”… but you could argue that in some ways it is one couldn’t you… 😁😛

wintermute_oregon ,

You could, but the OP is talking about the people who became filthy rich or at least notable. I don’t know if Tom ever made any real money. Almost all of the people listed used their corporate power to smash competition and dominate the market.

If anything, Stallman is the antithesis of most of these people.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

he was never the leader of a large tech company. That’s probably why he’s a decent guy

I think you have that backwards.

TheGrandNagus ,

He was a big defender of paedophilia, necrophilia, incest, and bestiality. He thinks people should have the right to fuck their pets or their children. Not to mention the reports on his creepy behaviour with women.

Stallman is an incredible steward of FOSS, but he is not a decent guy overall.

wintermute_oregon ,

I had never heard that about him. That’s disappointing.

TheGrandNagus ,

Yeah, for me too. Because I love practically everything he says when it comes to software.

“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”

RMS on June 28th, 2003

“I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”

RMS on June 5th, 2006

"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

RMS on Jan 4th, 2013

In the interest of fairness, he did claim to have changed his mind on some of this, although that only happened 2 days after his job became on the line after making strange comments about Epstein.

For me, suddenly having a change of heart on a decades-held (and publicly-championed) opinion, only to suddenly change your mind the second it threatens your job seems a bit too convenient, so I’m unwilling to believe it.

jollyrogue ,

While at the sametime being a gross person.

ramble81 ,

Gabe too.

Kecessa ,

There are no good billionaires

David_Eight ,

You don’t even know whether Gabe is or isn’t a billionaire.

roofuskit ,

It’s hard to beat ignoring doctors and not treating your very treatable form of cancer, then using your wealth to get a liver transplant and then dying anyway. Dude committed manslaughter because of his own arrogance.

TheBat ,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

Bill Gates was a huge piece of shit in his heyday, rivalling the Zuckerberg and Musks of today,

Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman destroying competition but as far as I know he didn’t support fascists or facilitate pogroms.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter has done far more harm to our societies than whatever shady tactics Bill Gates used.

partial_accumen ,

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.

kfchan ,

Steve Jobs decided to kill himself by being an idiot.

So...there was a redemption arc there.

MagicShel ,

I’m not a fan of Hitler Steve Jobs, but I am a big fan of the guy who killed Hitler Steve Jobs.

cheese_greater ,

That man’s killer’s name?

Steve Jobs 🔔

roofuskit ,

Yes but Steve Jobs also bought himself a pointless liver transplant that someone else didn’t get. One he would have never needed if he had listened to doctors instead of trying to treat a very treatable kind of cancer with a diet. So while he did the world a favor, he also took someone with him on the way out.

mle86 ,

Larry Ellisons Oracle gobbled up many great companies and open source projects and sucked the life out of them, such as Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice, MySQL to name just a few

cyborganism ,

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.

Ashtear ,

Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).

There are no saints at this level.

MagicShel ,

You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.

beejjorgensen ,
@beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

And in politics, too!

GiveMemes ,

I mean their unwillingness to do anything about the market abuse and rampant child-gambling aside, the lootboxes for purely cosmetic items are one of the least predatory ways to do microtransactions. It’s not like EA where the only way to unlock entire characters in some games is to grind for hundreds of hours or pay, or like COD where they took the lootbox idea and made it actually affect (multiplayer) gameplay

grue ,

the least predatory ways to do microtransactions

Damning with faint praise.

TachyonTele ,

Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC

TheBat ,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

TBF to Valve, their lootboxes were limited to cosmetic items in a free to play multiplayer games. You can ignore those and it wouldn’t change the gameplay at all.

JackDark , (edited )

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.

Donkter ,

Yeah we’re baffled about how kids get sucked into worshipping Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I remember a brief time in my life when I thought Steve Jobs was the greatest and that he singlehandedly invented the iPhone with a rusty pair of pliers and gumption.

Adanisi ,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Gates was always a dirtbag.

He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.

ginza ,

Maybe a hot take or I’m not education on him enough. Seems like Gates is a great guy personally with his fundraisers and charitable programs. But as a business man he is awful because of the reasons you mentioned.

finestnothing ,

Donations and fundraisers are tax deductible, it doesn’t actually cost the rich anything to donate to them

njaard ,

That’s not how tax deductions work.

Gates is a dirtbag though.

CosmicTurtle0 ,

Gates has good PR.

Duamerthrax ,

He was instrument in keeping the covid vaccine he promoted private. He wants to solve the world’s problems, but he also wants to own the solution and profit from it. Problem is, that model will always favor the rich.

slacktoid ,
@slacktoid@lemmy.ml avatar

Dude was friends with Epstein after his first conviction for pedophilia. Had sleepovers at his mansions and shit.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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

Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world?

Nothing happened to the world. You just grew up.

sunzu2 ,

yes

Dagwood222 ,

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.’

DontMakeMoreBabies ,

And they should be eaten.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Bill Gates admirable? Did we grow up in the 90s in the same dimension? Him and Windows were the butt of almost every IT joke, and there was his whole thing of never doing anything original or innovative except gobbling up companies and tech who were. Then the court battles. Those were a pretty big thing, even as a teen I followed the progress of it on the news. Then holding the whole web back for almost a decade as we had to deal with the monopoly of IE.

Reyali ,

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

schnurrito ,

If you think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were good for the world then I don’t know what to tell you.

boyi ,

Bill Gates during the early years, yes. But now, I thought he’s turned 180°.

MindTraveller ,

He’s always been a ruthless capitalist scumbag.

en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor….

en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

reddit.com/…/the_sordid_history_of_microsoft_or_a…

TheGrandNagus ,

Bill Gates pressured the group at Oxford University not to open source their Covid vaccine, as it would undermine his investments in pharma companies.

(The team had originally secured funding from the UK gov with the intention of making it open source so that it would be more accessible to poorer countries.)

Imagine lobbying against that. Imagine knowingly making life saving medicine more expensive and less accessible, particularly to the poor.

The guy is a dick. He just spends money on good PR so people can remember him as a good guy.

Sterile_Technique ,
@Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world avatar

It’s not just tech, but leadership positions in general.

Short answer is that the traits you need to climb the ladder have significant overlap with the traits of legit psychopathy.

psychologytoday.com/…/the-disturbing-link-between…

Bacano ,

To add to this, there’s been evidence that as an individual accrues more wealth, their empathy response lessens over time.

My arm chair psychologist hypothesis is that: as the individual sees their quality of life increase, they look at other human beings in deplorable conditions, and their empathy response atrophies in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.

There’s a concept in the study of wealthy individuals which goes over their desire to hide impoverishment from their view.

AlecSadler ,

Any good books or other articles on this? I’d be legitimately interested.

The more money I make or the better off I am, I actually just end up feeling more guilty and giving more away. Frankly, one only needs so much, after that if you can improve the quality of life of those around you it makes everything better.

alcoholicorn ,

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.

masquenox ,

I remember when I was growing up,

You remember propaganda (when corporations do it, it’s called “Public Relations”).

That’s what you remember. Now, thanks to the internet democratizign information somewhat, they don’t just get to feed us their “public relations” anymore. Now people can counter that shit, and people see them for what they really are - parasites.

It’s capitalism, baby. Welcome to the real world.

originalucifer ,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

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

sp3tr4l ,

And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.

There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.

Artemis ,

Tom from MySpace really is the nicest guy on this list…he was my first friend on there! 😎

Curious_Canid ,
@Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca avatar

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.

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