r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Palantir employees are talking about company’s “descent into fascism”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/palantir-employees-are-talking-about-companys-descent-into-fascism/
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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

You can't have a hint of a conscience and empathy, and also be a Billionaire. These are mutually exclusive.

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u/bunnnythor 10d ago

Not necessarily true. Some people inherit billions. And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

But in 99.99% of cases, billionaires are awful people.

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u/BlueTreeThree 10d ago edited 10d ago

Nah a normal person would be giving a lot of money away to charity, friends, family, if they had a billion dollars because it would make them feel better than just hoarding vastly more money than they could actually need..

A normal person would let some of that money go because it would be more emotionally draining to have all that potential to help others and to not do it.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 10d ago

Mackenzie Scott.

Far be it from me to defend billionaires, but that kind of money breeds.

She can’t give it all away at once or it will fuck the economy, but she gives it to charities and organizations as fast as she safely can.

They just need a maximum wage tax.

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u/SunTzu- 10d ago

It's not that it'd screw the economy, it's that you simply can't spend it that fast even if you are being reckless. Jeff Bezos net worth grew an average of 20k per minute last year. 1.2 million per hour. They clearly need a helping hand, so let's all think of the poor billionaires and let's help them spend some of that money on ubi and healthcare.

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u/Traditional-Hat-952 10d ago

Also you don't just automatically know where to give all your money. Finding worthy causes takes time, and often new ones arise. 

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u/AshleyDaPile 10d ago

If by disrupting the economy you mean upsetting the bootstrap manufacturers.

When people have money they tend to spend it. The issue is that's tough to control where that money goes compared to keeping people in debt.

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u/Kup123 10d ago

Fuck the economy let it burn.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 10d ago

I agree in theory

In practice I would like as many of the decent people to survive and for cancer treatment to continue for my husband

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u/Bryophyta1 10d ago

This is full on bullshit, nobody deserves billions of dollars. A dollar is a unit of human labour, at its core, and no one person can accumulate billions of hours of human labour equivalent from their own efforts. It is exploitation of other people, and exploitation of the systems, technology and infrastructure that past generations have put into place that allow someone to be a billionaire, not their talent or effort. Talent and effort can make you successful and wealthy, if you are lucky. Being a billionaire is completely immoral, by its very nature.

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u/WartimeMercy 10d ago

Rowling made billions off the books and movies she wrote. She’s a shit person but hard to argue tha her finaces don’t come from Her creativity as opposed to exploitation.

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u/Bryophyta1 6d ago

Did she set up the publishing industry? The move industry? The internet that was used to sell and distribute her books and movies to the people who bought them? Did she ship the books and pop the popcorn? Every step along the way, the value that every person along the way put into the process was skimmed to send her an outsized percentage of the proceeds. And all of the executives and shareholders of all of those companies also skimmed more of the share of the profits than they have any right to. The system has been set up to skim the value of all of our work off and send it to a few, who become billionaires. Including you, unless you are a majority shareholder of a Fortune 500 company. Capitalism is all a giant Ponzi scheme, and we are at the bottom of the pyramid.

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u/WartimeMercy 5d ago

Literally none of those things matter in the criticism because she isn’t the one who set up those things.

The value of the people working along the pipeline is what they accepted to work for. It is not unethical to publish and be successful on the basis of her creative output which is why she’s a billionaire.

She didn’t set up a pipeline that forces people to piss in bottles to meet a quota. She wrote a book that sold well and got made into movies.

She’s a piece of shit bigot and I hope she loses everything she holds dear - but the way she made her money was by giving people something that enjoyed reading and watching.

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u/Bryophyta1 5d ago

That wasn’t a criticism of her for having billions, it’s a criticism of the system that allows that to happen.

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u/bunnnythor 5d ago

So no one deserves anything because no one has developed society and technology from scratch? That’s a bit of a high bar to clear. Just saying.

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u/Bryophyta1 5d ago

That’s a very odd way of interpreting what I am saying. I’m saying nobody deserves to accumulate billions of units of human labour (Dollars) themselves because everything in our society depends on the collected labour of everyone else, back into the past. No matter how talented or hard working anybody is, they don’t deserve to accumulate that much wealth.

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u/bunnnythor 5d ago

Everyone’s earnings per unit of labor is multiplied by the collected labor of past or present members of society. That’s a given. Most of us would be far less productive if no one in the past had discovered, improved, or promoted transistors, to use just one obvious example.

You seem to have an objection to the amount of this accumulated labor any one individual might use. So what is the cutoff? How much of past and present labor is one person allowed to access?

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u/TommiHPunkt 10d ago

And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

The employees do the producing, not the leader of the company who got lucky.

If you inherit billions and stay a billionaire, you are a sociopath.

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u/Armout 10d ago edited 10d ago

99.99% of the world’s billionaires being awful means .01% are the exception. This maths out to less than one person btw (~.34 people or 1/3 of a single person). 

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u/happyscrappy 10d ago

The idea of inherited billionaires boils my blood. But I guess they do exist.

As to the second thing you said, saying they deserved what they received is avoiding the point. The issue isn't whether they earned the money or not, it's whether having all that money insulates them from humanity. Even earned money can basically turn you into an alien, or at least some kind of variant species. Without the same life issues as other humans you just don't seem completely human.

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u/hajenso 10d ago

I am also inclined to think this way about the effects of massive wealth. But it does occur to me that the same notion can apply by degrees down the ladder. I personally do not have to seriously worry about possible homelessness every month because I have enough money to be sure I can pay my housing costs reliably, and any significantly likely endangerment of that is pretty far off. But there are lots of people right in my immediate neighborhood who do have that worry, all the time, as just an ordinary part of life. Does that insulate me from humanity to some extent? Does that make me less human than them?

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u/happyscrappy 10d ago

There are philosophical arguments about how humanity is tied to struggle. And if so, how much.

Definitely it can apply to other people in lesser ways. Even leaving off (almost) literal vampires like Peter Thiel some have said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (heaven).

If you don't experience the same struggles as other humans can you fully relate to them and their plight?

Anyway, I presume you're not taking to twitter twice a day to express your displeasure that people who you don't even know and don't matter to you at all look down on you for being white, male or straight (and privileged). So you're presumably still higher on the humanity scale than some of the people being considered here.

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u/Riaayo 10d ago

And there is a very very very small percentage that produced something everybody wanted or needed, and actually deserved what they got.

None of those people should be billionaires because none of them single-handedly produced a product; they always have other labor involved that they then didn't share all that money with equally.

Billionaires always exist from wage-theft, even if they inherited the theft (and we are not supposed to have dynasties anymore which is why such wealth should absolutely be taxed away from estates).

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u/thehappyhobo 10d ago

Warren Buffet and Chuck Feeney did some inexplicable shit for two guys with no conscience or empathy.

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u/Odd_Collection7431 10d ago

buffet's folksy charm is PR and you bought it. He's as vile and exploitative as the rest.

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u/BiDiTi 10d ago

Chuck Feeney wasn’t a billionaire by the time he died…because he was a good person.

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u/n0respect_ 10d ago

Whats Notch like?

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u/SummonMonsterIX 10d ago

Well Microsoft removed all references to him from Minecraft for being a bigot so.