This week, it was reported that Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff has been quietly buying up rural land in Hawaii, for reasons that remain a mystery. While Benioff has donated millions to the surrounding community and elsewhere (Forbes has called him "San Francisco's Giant of Generosity"), locals say they fear higher housing costs and displacement, complicating his magnanimous public persona.
For WIRED's January 2020 issue, features writer Chris Colin also challenged the concept of the billionaire savior. In "The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff," he starts by painting a picture of a man and an organization so enthusiastic about fixing society's ills that it genuinely warms the heart: millions and billions of dollars to playgrounds, and ocean cleanup, and the guns epidemic, and LGBTQ+ rights, and computers for schools, and children's hospitals, and San Francisco's unhoused. And and and. But the reality is far more complex. Colin expertly captures the tension of wealth and benevolence within one man, and sets out to dismantle the narrative that he and his ilk have built.
Despite all the hospital donations and speeches calling for greater tax obligations, Salesforce paid zero federal income tax in 2018. Thus, Colin's article tackles an age-old question: Why should economic policy favor the accumulation of billions in a single pocket over wealth distribution and social services? He sees a reckoning approaching, one in which we mortals begin to prod deeper, to ask why the whims of several incomprehensibly wealthy men matter more than the will of the electorate. Why, Colin compels us to ask, do we allow billionaires to wrap themselves in the glory of giving and distract us from the fact that their very existence is itself the problem? In this way, he dissembles the notion of the generous billionaire, and of Benioff himself.
But Colin isn't vilifying Benioff so much as positioning him as a "clarifying agent of our times." So, this week, I'm asking a question that has prompted heated debates, if not full-blown arguments, at many a dinner table (including, possibly, my own). Must we continue to look to Hawaiian-island-owning, Silicon-Valley-based billionaires to alleviate the symptoms of systemic social problems? Given the fact that our government, and many others across the world, are at best slow-moving, could a philanthropic system be a better option? Let me know in the comments below the story or email me at samantha_spengler@wired.com.
See you next weekend.
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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