It seems like people are downvoting a headline as they scroll. It was a very interesting article, not sure how I feel about this guy but it is an interesting piece.
Looks like he inherited it. Seems reasonable enough. Like hitting the lottery, you’re not the hypocrite unless you start reinvesting.
In fact, the article specifically notes he received the money in lieu of stock, aka, deinvestment.
In theory you could also do it with self publishing these days. Possibly a really juicy patent or number of patents, if you just license it for production, though that’s getting pretty iffy.
Eh, I don’t know, at least in regards to production. Why the hell should some corporate goons get to profit from your ideas? They sure as hell aren’t going to pass the savings to the actual workers.
I mean in the optics of worker owned production that doesn’t hold up… and even in the world as it is currently there’s a ton of domains, like public safety, healthcare, etc for which it’s incredibly toxic for society.
I don’t mind the concept as a goal to work towards, after the ⚒️ revolution ⚒️, but I just don’t consider it a viable option to empower the people in a capitalist reality.
A lot of the problems we currently have have less to do with IP protection and more to do with the physical means of production.
Bill Gates convinced the university to sell the IP of a publically funded vaccine to astra zeneca instead of making it public domain. India would have been more than capable of producing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of doses otherwise.
Case study two: Saw Stop. The guy who invented it has been holding the patent for over two decades. Table saws are one of leading causes of amputations in the US. Now they are lobbying the safety commission to make them mandatory. But they won’t release the patent. They’ve also sued Bosh for coming up with a similar technology. So not only have they contributed to countless amputations in the past two decades, they are now actively working on making a tool more expensive for working people.
Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Chambers’ wealth comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings, including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cox TV, the political site Axios, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With a fortune of some $26.8 billion, the Cox family, a powerful force in Atlanta philanthropy, made the second-largest contribution in 2022 toward the training facility, with their foundation providing $10 million of a planned $60 million in private funding. (Georgia taxpayers are putting up $31 million.)
In contrast, Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested.
While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’ October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me.
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