A Simple Plan

A lot of people are predicting that Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse will be kind of boring, and fail. They could be right, I don’t know, but a lot of it sounds like wishful thinking. They are hoping it will fail, which is strange, because if it succeeds it will be because it’s a cool, new thing, and the world can always do with a cool, new thing. I suspect the reason people are hoping it will fail is because they hate Mark Zuckerberg. Sort of the way I chime in when Biden flops, or the Alec Baldwin haters (oh, yes, they are a thing) laughed when he accidentally (was it, really? we will never know) shot that woman, whose name I (and most other people, I’m sure) have already forgotten, or the anti-anti-vaxxers laugh, and laugh, and laugh whenever an anti-vaxxer dies a slow, lingering death from Covid, which happens fairly frequently lately.
Why does everybody hate Mark Zuckerberg? Well, it might be because they think Facebook is a pernicious social force, or maybe they don’t like the way he’s rigged the algorithms to promote hate and division, or maybe it’s because he has more money that the rest of us. Way more money.
I suspect it’s that last one. There are, according to Forbes Magazine, 2,775 billionaires in the world, and more joining the club every day. All of them, guaranteed, are hated by some, and some of them by almost all. Bill Gates, who is the 4th richest man in the world, one slot ahead of Zuckerberg, seems to get a pass from a lot of people. That’s because of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He donates a tiny percentage (i.e. a very impressive sounding amount) of his wealth to worthy causes, vaccinations in India and easing hunger (i.e. pushing Monsanto’s GMO products) in Africa. I remember before he did that, he was known as a chintzy bastard who gave nothing to charity and didn’t even tip well. He once actually said “Why should I donate to charity? It’s not a requirement.” I guess at some point after that, Melinda got tired of everybody in the world hating them and thought “What do we need to do (i.e. how much do we need to spend?) for people to love us? and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was born.
Which gives me an idea. Let us divide the world’s problems up into 2,755 units, ranked large to small, and assign a billionaire to actually solve each problem. Of course, the biggest billionaires would be assigned the biggest problems. Like Jeff Bezos could be tasked with ending homelessness (which he could probably do and figure out how to make money on it), Elon Musk could be tasked with ending world hunger, and so on, until you get down to the people who only have a paltry couple of billion, who could be tasked with renovating a neighborhood, or setting up a couple of dozen organic farms, or rescuing the bees like Morgan Freeman, who I don’t think is even a billionaire.
We could solve all of the world’s problems and everyone would love the world’s billionaires. Wouldn’t that be nice?