Can the Truly Moral Billionaire Please Stand Up?

When I read about Steve Jobs’s life, I can’t help but feel a little sick. Of all our tech luminaries over the last 50 years, he is the one I relate to the most. His sense of product, his love of the humanities, his obsession with quality—it’s all part of an ethos by which I’ve tried to conduct my own life. 

What makes me sick about Jobs is that he was also objectively cruel. Time and time again, he demonstrated a capacity for brutal coldness that is hard to stomach. He abandoned his daughter and casually discarded the people he once regarded as friends. It is hard to reconcile the extremes of his life.

Jobs isn’t the only complicated billionaire. In my studies of famous tech founders, I have found people who did great things at terrible costs. This disparity gave me an urgent need to find someone who had obviously led an exemplary life by the standards I think are important: marriage, children, moral quality, and career. So I did what every fool and drunkard has done before me: I tweeted a loaded question.

Evan Armstrong 📧@itsurboyevan

I've been looking for an example of this for a year and I'm pretty sure they don't exist:

- Worth 1B+
- Married to original spouse
- Outstanding moral virtue
- Kids are all relatively successful
- Kids have a good relationship with parents

Any idea? cc @FoundersPodcast

April 2nd 2024, 8:51am EST

67 Retweets1k Likes

Source: X/Evan Armstrong.

Dear reader: Many, many people had ideas. 

I got hundreds of DMs. The thread drove 1.5 million impressions. I was called a capitalist pig and a communist bastard. And, perhaps surprisingly for internet discourse, I got lots of useful feedback.

Many folks were eager to share the stories of billionaires who struck them as good people. I’ve spent the last week going through these names, fact-checking sources, and trying to build a final list.

Along the way, I struggled with deciding on a metric that would help me define morality. People get divorced for good reasons, have ungrateful kids, or face other unforeseen difficulties in life. Maybe Jobs was just afflicted with bad personal relationships, and maybe he’s forgivable. But as the wealthiest people in our society, billionaires, more than anyone else, have the power that comes with access to tremendous amounts of capital. The unreasonably powerful should be held to unreasonably high moral standards, too.

While my initial goal was to find people who obviously cleared the bar on all five metrics, I became more flexible during my research, as it was almost impossible to accurately analyze and judge each billionaire. The good news is there is at least one person who I think deserves this title. The rest, depending on the gradients of your moral compass, might get filtered out.

Marc Andreessen is the startup savior and liberal boogeyman (the purity problem)

One of the more surprisingly frequent names raised was Marc Andreessen, with 13 mentions. If you’re unfamiliar, the always-controversial venture capitalist is notorious for his political activism, scathing opinions, and absolute commitment to doing what he thinks is right. For those who voted in favor of tech’s favorite egghead, a remarkable number had a financial incentive to keep him happy. They were co-investors or founders who had received capital from his firm—that sort of thing.

To be fair, I can see their argument! Andreessen is a billionaire, married to his original spouse, and has young kids who I’m sure are delightful. Depending on which philosophy you, as a reader, ascribe to, you might take issue with his politics. But it feels presumptuous to say that people with different political opinions than me aren’t moral people. That was what these sources argued to me in their DMs: His financial commitment to the path laid out by his philosophy—even if some people find his ideas distasteful—is the mark of a moral man. 

This holds true for all of these billionaires. Either in the way they made their wealth or that they chose to deploy it, morality is relative, which makes universal agreement on a person as good nearly impossible. Most people argue that the only moral use of a billionaire’s wealth is if they give it away. While I may tend to agree, this feels a little prescriptive for my taste. (Forbes compiles an excellent database where you can track billionaires’ charity work.) 

So, while there were many people who would’ve qualified if I were the sole moral arbiter, there are questions as to whether they are universally approved. The more political someone was, the more complicated their career’s legacy, the less likely they are to be spotless. Take, for example, the Kushner brothers: one (Josh) a liberal technology investor who pours money into startups and has a sterling reputation in the tech community; the other (Jared) a real estate investor mostly remembered for his time in the Trump administration. Which one is the good billionaire? Whose political philosophy is moral?