Who is Your Hero, Gates or Jobs?

feranick writes "Wired and Ars Technica are both running articles comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not for their business/technological achievements but for their humanitarian involvement. I am curious to see what you are thinking about the issue. What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates? And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?"

Comments

Woz.

[heldlikesound]

He's very strange, but you can't deny that he was the brains behind Apple's beginnings.

Warren Buffett

[ahoehn]

This spring I had the opportunity to hear Warren Buffett give a talk in Omaha. At the outset I wasn't too excited; I'm not really into business, but I learned some things that impressed me.

The most interesting thing that I learned is that while Buffett isn't a well philanthropist, when he dies, something like 1% of his wealth will go to his children as an inheritance, and the other 99% (currently about $39.6 billion) will go to a charatable foundation. He's told the administrator of that foundation that he wants him to try and "do something huge" with the money, not just spread it out to lots of smaller causes.

His justification for doing it this way instead of giving to charity right now is that the more money he has, the more money he can make, and the more money he puts into the foundation before he dies.

Now, it could be easily argued that he just likes making money, and doesn't want to give it away, but his impressively simple lifestyle argues that he certainly doesn't like spending money on himself.

I imagine that if I had billions of dollars, it would be much more fun to see that money go to work helping people while I was around to see it, but Buffett's plan makes sense from a practical standpoint.

Re:Who is the bigger hero?

[XMilkProject]

The logic of "He has alot so it's no big deal for him to donate alot." is dumb as fuck.

I'm extremely disappointed to see the slashdot crowd almost entirely bashing Gates becuase they don't care for microsofts software. This assumption that somehow Jobs is a better person because you like his software more is stupid, the companies are run with the same goals, Apple just has a different marketing strategy and alot less brute force to throw behind their decisions. I'm quite confident that if Apple had 96% of the OS market, and Microsoft had 4%, then peoples opinions would be exactly the opposite as they are now. It's the same old "Hate the big guy!" attitude, and its not exactly novel or interesting anymore.

Gates has helped millions of people by donating more money than most large countries. This is a wonderful thing and I applaud him for it. Jobs may or may not be donating money, as the article says that no documentation of this could be verified, but It really doesn't matter to me, it is completely up to him what he does with his money. And now that my rant is over, I'll throw my opinion out there.... I was more than a little disappointed when Apple ran their marketing campaign a few years ago using pictures of many famous civil rights people and other people like Einstien. The exploitation of good people for making money seemed awfully sickening to me. But this is likely a result of a powerful marketing team and not really the fault of Jobs.