Tech billionaires who donate millions are just “bribing society at large,” Anand Giridharadas says
Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates shouldn’t have an outsize say in how we run our country, Giridharadas says on the latest episode of Recode Decode.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and other billionaires have figured out a pretty sweet deal, Anand Giridharadas says: They make gigantic piles of money, and have tricked politicians and the media into giving them an exceptionally loud voice in policy discussions. What’s their secret? Just give away a little bit of that money through philanthropic organizations that they control.
“This is a refeudalization,” Giridharadas said. “If you watch Downton Abbey, you understand the idea. There’s a guy in a castle, and then no one else owns land in the show.
“[Zuckerberg is] trying to get rid of all the world’s diseases, as if public education wasn’t a hard enough problem,” he added. “We have doctors. We have an entire public health infrastructure. We have the Centers for Disease Control. We have the NIH. But no, Mark is going to get rid of all the diseases, even though his own company is a plague, by any stretch of the imagination.”
On the new podcast, Giridharadas characterized the power of Zuckerberg and his peers in policy discussions as the result of a “40-year war on the idea of government.” It’s fine for billionaires to have opinions on things like medicine and education — but, he asked, why should they be treated as sagacious experts when they come from a completely different arena?
“Why do we actually bother, fuss so much about voting rights?” he asked. “Why is it so important that a relatively small number of people not get turned away at the polls, right? Why was it important to fight for women’s suffrage? If we create this entire system where the choices about our biggest shared problems are made by us, but then we create this other door to the nightclub of democracy where only people with a billion dollars can come in, they can just also sort of overrule us on a bunch of things.”
You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast.
Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Anand. CONTINUE READING: Anand Giridharadas on Kara Swisher podcast Recode Decode - Vox