That's a very naive, but common, viewpoint of wealth. "Worth" 1.3 billion does not mean "has 1.3 billion lying around in liquid cash". Net worth is tied up usually in many bank accounts across multiple banks, securities, real estate, trusts, etc. And that's all excluding capital tied up in corporations/orgs. Freeing up and giving away half of a billion dollar net worth is a difficult and time consuming thing, one which requires effort to do.

It's even easier to give away money when you don't have it.

It's easy for some to give away money if they have it, but it's hard to accumulate that much money if you're one of those people.

Newmark maybe representing the occasional exception, most people who accumulate great wealth through their effort and ideas are afflicted with an addiction problem and have a hard time saying "this is enough for me". They become attached to how much more wealth they might be able to gather and recognize how the wealth they already hold plays a role in making the most of that.

Even if they somehow imagine themselves as philanthropists or minimalists, they tend to put off giving away too much too soon under the rationale that they'll be able to eventually share more if they hold out and use it more practically.

And if you don't have that kind of mindset, you're probably just not going to climb your way into the level of riches we're discussing here. You might still do quite well as far as most people are concerned, but that billionaire milestone is hard to catch without some propensity for wealth addiction.

It is empirically not easy.

I'd be okay with someone who has it giving it to poor old me who has not

t's also really easy to get greedy or ambitious/selfish.

You would not, tho. The people that think they need to get rich first before giving away won't ever give away. They always want more.

> it's easy to give away money if you have it.

You'd think that, and yet so few of them give anything significant away (unless you count political donations).

For every one Newmark or MacKenzie Scott who does give there are hundreds who only use charitable trusts as a tax haven, if at all.

So when one of them manages to avoid the extreme-wealth-to-meanness pipeline theorized by Paul Piff (et al) I'm happy to recognize the good they are doing in the world when so many of their peers are going so hard in the other direction.

I find that the people complaining the most about billionaires, don't put much effort into help others.

You can always give away labor, in the form of volunteering.

Giving away money is stupid. With that much money I would rather fund companies that push the frontier on something. If it fails no biggie, if it succeeds it will probably end up employing people and giving them a source of income for life while simultaneously contributing to human progress.