image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
Do I need an answer to this specific question for “a couple thousand people shouldn’t hold more money than the bottom half of the whole planet” to make any sense? You also completely sidestepped the very point.
But hey, I’ll entertain answering your question regardless of what I think of its legitimacy. I’d guess the answer would lie somewhere between a livable wage and the literal $35k/day a hypothetical person holding a billion dollars at birth would have until their statistical death at 80.
Fucking hell, one could be doing literal miracles, would they really deserve more than the next thousand people’s yearly wage in less than a couple of days? More than they’ll ever see in a lifetime of savings and careful investments, in less than a couple months? How in hell this became anywhere remotely controversial will always elude me. Who has anything to gain from holding this position, outside those couple thousand people holding those oversized purses?