EA - Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires by NunoSempere

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires, published by NunoSempere on October 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. As part of my work with the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, I am experimenting with speculative evaluations that could be potentially scalable. Billionaires were an interesting evaluation target because there are a fair number of them, and at least some ate nominally aiming to do good. For now, for each top 10 billionaire, I have tried to get an idea of: How much value have they created through their business activities? How much impact have they created through their philanthropic activities I then assigned a subjective score based on my understanding of the answers to the above questions. Elon Musk (B) Elon Musk changes the world through: His businesses: Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink. Tesla makes better cars, SpaceX advances interplanetary expansion. His cultural influence: Twitter shitposting, conceiving and pushing for brighter futures, etc. His philanthropy: Little of it is publicly known so far. He will probably end up buying Twitter, partially with the intention of making it a better public good. OpenAI, which he helped found, might end up having greatly positive or greatly negative impact. Overall Musk seems like has produced large amounts of value, and might produce even more through SpaceX. But he also seems to be oddly nonstrategic at times. Bernard Arnault (D-) I see myself as an ambassador of French heritage and French culture. What we create is emblematic. It's linked to Versailles, to Marie Antoinette. -- Bernard Arnault, as quoted in Forbes His business produces little counterfactual value, and instead serves as a vehicle for conspicuous consumption. That is, if his luxury brands didn't exist, his customers would simply buy from the others, and the world would look extremely similar. His company describes its philanthropy as "an ideal expression of financial success", and supports art installations, or students attending concerts. Thus his philanthropy seems non-strategic, aimed at the display of wealth rather than at the firm pursuit of improving and fortifying French culture. He also donated $200M to restore the Notre Dame, which probably saved French tax-payers a similar amount. Jeff Bezos (B) The market value of Amazon is circa $1T, meaning that it has managed to capture at least that much value, and likely produced much more consumer surplus. His other ventures, like Blue Origin, are as of yet nowhere as valuable. Gautam Adani (B?) Adani seems to be a skilled manager, administrator, and deal-maker who, working in a developing country, has unlocked heaps of value. He has ties to Narenda Modi, and their fortunes have risen together. From the outside, it's hard to say to what extent he has created his wealth: The governor of Gujarat announced managerial outsourcing of the Mundra Port in 1994, and Adani got the contract in 1995, after which he set up the first jetty, which was originally run by Mundra Port & Special Economic Zone but was later transferred to Adani Ports and SEZ (APSEZ). Adani decided to turn it into a commercial port, building rail and road links to it by individually negotiating with over 50 0 landowners across India to create the largest port in India. or simply aquired it: Mr Adani’s friendship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi is time-tested. Their friendship goes back to 2003, when none of the country’s leading businessmen publicly stood by Modi’s side because of the handling of the Gujarat riots. But Adani broke ranks with the old business elite, potentially risking his future. And this gamble paid off. Gautam Adani is today one of the most visible tycoons in the country, whose prominence has accelerated in the years since Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014. Since Mo...