instead of just moaning about Trump, I thought it would be interesting to come up with some suggestions for Billionaire celebrities that might actually make good leaders.
For President of the US:
Bill Gates: while I am not a fan of Microsoft, Bill Gate’s philanthropy since he left Microsoft has been spot on. He’s a house hold name, and seems genuinely thoughtful. He’s only 59 so a good age to run, presumably as a Democrat.
Would have preferred Elon Musk, but there’s that whole “natural born citizen” requirement so no go.
For Prime Minister of the UK:
Richard Branson: while he occasionally says some stupid stuff, he’s got genuine vision and a knack for self promotion without coming across as an asshole (unlike Trump). Also well known enough that he would probably be a vote magnet.
I wanted to come up with a suggestion for Australia, but all our famous billionaires are assholes. Murdoch, Packer and Rinehart… ugh.
I believe he is Republican. However, why not Frick or J. P. Morgan Sr. back in the day ? Trump may have his faults but he’s a saint compared to Gates: America has rarely elected outright crooks to office, even for dog-catcher.
Cite? How is Bill Gates a crook? Microsoft may have violated some anti-trust laws but apart from that I can’t find any allegations against him. There’s a few wacky vaccination websites claiming crazy stuff against his foundation… thats it.
“I wanted to come up with a suggestion for Australia, but all our famous billionaires are assholes. Murdoch, Packer and Rinehart… ugh.”
Can we not give Clive Palmer a wild card entry? I certainly didn’t vote for the guy but the legislation he passed in the senate is pretty much consistent with what Abbot promised pre election.
Abolish the Carbon Tax but support Emissions trading, instead of doing nothing or taxing Australians as we mine every increasing amounts of fossil fuels.
Keep the welfare system intact instead of reducing welfare and importing cheap workers from overseas.
I’m not spending time looking at Microsoft financials online; but it was common knowledge that by 2005 over 25 years Microsoft had spent over $5 billion in compensation to companies and people, court fines and anti-trust suits. Not counting the costs of their own legal teams. And that was before the EU got stuck into them ( and Google ).
This is not the behaviour of a normal, let alone honest, company.
A tangential glance at that is here, from TechNews 2005
Microsoft has paid settlement money to a number of other companies, too, since it got an unfavorable judgment in 2000. After it lost that case, it appealed, engaging in a two-year battle to claw its way back from a position in which it might have been forcefully broken up. In the end Microsoft did okay. It’s had to pay out nearly $4 billion dollars as a result of the illegal activities it was willing to concede. In the end, Microsoft could fork over a lot more dough, as there are still claims pending again it, and some observers believe the total could exceed $5 billion when legal costs are figured in. Still, despite these costs, Microsoft remains fabulously successful. It piles up cash so fast it sometimes seems as if it has no idea what to do with the money.
and more recent reading in Wiki: Microsoft litigation
However, it’s not it’s brutal piratical rascality so much, as it’s dedicated meanness and dirty tricks in stifling competition. From co-opting ‘standards’ to only mean their own definitions — excluding those competitors who adhered to the originals — to it’s sponsoring of SCO, to it’s manipulation of Open Documents and bribery of countries in the ISO dispute ( and getting a civil servant resigned in Massachusetts for proposing non-proprietary documents ), to a host of small companies who were partnered with them and them had their products turned into Microsoft products whilst they were left shattered, the list is long The nastiest being that of Spyglass which gave over what became Internet Explorer in return for a promise of a return on each one sold; Microsoft for it’s own reasons [ to crush the browser competition ] gave it away free, so no payments. They had to pay $8 million in court for that one
And the odd thing is that while Microsoft is no paragon today, all these underhanded tricks and vile behaviour seemed to stop along with Billy Boy’s retirement as CEO.
His old friend Steve Ballmer got a lot of criticism taking over, but he was more honest. Although he and Billy were overheard by co-founder Paul Allen plotting to wrest away the latter’s shares when they all thought he was dying of cancer.
Yeah, Bill Gates swindled his way to the top. I don’t know what a guy like that would do with the Presidency, and presumably he doesn’t see any point in it. Actually, a political campaign would be dangerous to someone that ethically deficient. Skeletons would come out, there would be lawsuits and scandals!
I expect Warren Buffett would hate the very idea with every cell of his being. State dinners? Having to deal with sudden crises at all hours? Work? Not his idea of a good time.
He’s more about self-promotion and money manipulation than the long hard slog of actually dealing with the kind of detailed problems he’d rather not have and which (in business) he could walk away from. Besides which, the system in the UK is set up so that up so that a prospective PM has to go through the long hard slog of on-the-ground politics as a constituency MP and parliamentary spokesperson. The system doesn’t take kindly to parachuting someone in from outside and expecting them to run the show. The soon to be ex-Mayor of London, who got himself back into Parliament at the last election, is finding that his apparently voter-friendly “what a card” shtick isn’t working so well on the fellow MPs whose support he’d need to stand a chance of becoming PM (which he pretty transparently wants to be) - and this is a more or less professional politico. Someone from an entirely different world would have it much tougher.
I come back to the point that if you’re in business you can, in the end, walk away from things that turn out not to be profitable or just ignore problems that aren’t part of your business objectives - in government you have to deal with them.
Being an appealing candidate is only the beginning.
At that time, Microsoft was, by no means, a normal company.
IIRC, for years before the anti-trust suit by the gov., no Constitutional lawyer thought that MS had done anything wrong. Then, after the Sun(n?) founder kept up pressuring the government, relentlessly, the Clinton administration saw that it was a cash cow, and had public support because of jealousy over Gates’ wealth, and started action against them. In one of his SOTU speeches, he was going on about how MS would be paying something like 25 billion into the economy, which got the audience going wild.
Any prosecutions against MS weren’t because they did anything illegal, but, because the government’s massive weight came against them. Once you get that kind of pressure, you realize that the government can put a lien against everything that you own; that will get you making ‘concessions’.
The $5 billion paid through the courts and in outside settlements for the first 25 years of swindling was not composed of sanctions from the 1995 Anti-Trust case. See the Wiki link above.
The judge ordered Microsoft to split into different companies: the judge was so replaced by a judge more sympathetic to Microsoft for bias against Microsoft after listening to Microsoft executives *, and then the new Bush administration basically dropped the charges in return for Microsoft sharing it’s APIs with others ( so the latter could make compatible products ) for 5 years.
Microsoft which had monopoly power in the consumer OS market was in the habit of breaking the working of competitors’ products on it’s system.
United States v Microsoft
The Sun court battle against Microsoft ( in any case jealous of Java as a product being invented ) for including a bastardised Java machine with ‘Windows Extensions’ to make it non-compatible with others was entirely separate ( although noted by the judge in the government case. ) Larry Ellison did not own Sun at that period.
In the end, Microsoft paid $1.6 billion to Sun in 2004.
“I think there’s nothing in this – nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing – that will do anything other than delight customers,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, displaying his typically emphatic style. “I don’t think there’s any downside.”
So the Anti-Trust case neither got money nor concessions from Microsoft, to the government nor in any of the other 1000s of cases — some serious, some frivolous — people brought against Microsoft.
Microsoft executives had, according to him, “proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. … Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.” Judge Jackson
Bill Gates might be the most evil, mustache-twirling, capitalist arch-villian ever, but if he really is a republican (I doubt it), then I’d take him over any of the current candidates.
Some of the dotcom guys (NOT the MS guys) might be less sociopathic, at least. That doesn’t mean they’d be competent. Writing good code doesn’t often coexist with being good at macroeconomics.
Elon Musk seems like a decent sort, but as others have pointed out, he seems suited to being a technological superhero, not a political chief executive.
He has political experience and is immersed in policy. He’s qualified, barely. Gates is bright enough and is familiar with some of the policy space. Whether he has the social skill set is unclear. I understand he used to meet with team leaders about once a year and yell at them to keep them motivated. It worked at MS, sort of, but that wouldn’t fly at the Presidential level.
Bloomberg is the only plausible billionaire candidate that I can think of.
Mark Krikorian is a foe of illegal immigration, so you might think he would be a fan of Trump. Think otherwise: “Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong. It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy.” You really should be a policy guy at least a little to be President, GW Bush notwithstanding.
That’s why my retirement plan consists of making myself eligible for the MegaMillions and Powerball jackpots.* A fortune that falls into my lap virtually through happenstance is a fortune that I can accept with my head held high.
*FTR, I do maintain a Thrift Savings Plan account with my job. But I don’t believe that a retirement level of income will ever be enough for me and my wife to live on.
ETA: Also, you missed the one from Balzac (Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.)
He also implemented the Stack-Ranking System to motivate Microsoft employees, now abolished:
". . . a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.” Forbes
Whilst fun to imagine, as a governance tool, it would be too reminiscent of Hitler’s remarkably inefficient social-darwinist competing departments management method.
I am not comparing MS to the nazis — just that technique. And there have been much wickeder corporations than Microsoft: but none so crooked.