Mark Zuckerberg is only 33 years old but already he runs arguably the world’s most powerful company. Facebook has devastated rival media groups to stand dominant over the flow of information and news in the digital age, a technology behemoth with two billion monthly users around the planet. It has unparalleled access to data, influences elections and has even toyed with mood manipulation.
Like all the gods standing guard over the gates to this brave new world, Zuckerberg poses as a benevolent philanthropist in his jeans and grey T-shirt. Five of the world’s most valuable firms are technology firms, and their founders like to claim they are changing the world for the better, even as they crush rivals with cold-blooded ruthlessness. Google’s motto is famously ‘Don’t Be Evil.’
The Facebook boss celebrated the birth of his first child with claims he was giving $45 billion to charity. This led to a fresh crop of fawning headlines, although closer scrutiny found he had shifted stock into a tax-efficient limited liability company that he controls. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is hailed a hero for his oft-stated mission to save the world’s poor, telling countries to hit the United Nation’s silly target of giving away 0.7 percent of national income in aid as he sprays around his own cash.
These two tech gurus spend massive sums on their good deeds. Many of their fellow billionaires in Silicon Valley are doing the same – and it is laudable they are trying to help poorer people rather than frittering away their mountains of cash on cocaine and flash cars. Yet as Zuckerberg tours the United States, with growing talk he seeks to follow Donald Trump into the White House, let’s pause for a second before cheering on their seemingly selfless generosity.
For a frightening arrogance lies behind these plutocrats posing as latter-day saints. People such as Gates and Zuckerberg built up astonishing wealth by running firms that persistently refused to pay a fair share of tax to governments around the world. Having subverted Western democracies and weakened public services by abusing revenue-raising systems, they now claim to hold answers to our pressing problems.
This is gross hypocrisy. When Gates ran Microsoft the firm was even held up as a case study in the United States Senate for an inquiry into tax avoidance. By shifting mammoth earnings around smaller countries, it escaped paying an estimated £3bn a year. Last year, the firm was exposed for avoiding up to £100million a year in Britain alone by booking sales in Ireland under a secret deal with tax authorities.
Sure, he says he pays his personal taxes. But Gates became the world’s richest man off the back of massive corporate tax dodging. Yet because he is now giving away much of his money on his own terms rather than through the collective will of elected government, he thinks he has the right to tell the rest of us how to spend the taxes we do pay. He insists rich nations have moral duty to hit that risible aid target, despite growing evidence much of the money is wasted and, worse, backfires by fostering conflict and corruption.
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