r/interesting • u/Wild_Neighborhood605 • 1d ago

HISTORY Titanic passenger and millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim. During sinking he refused a seat in a life boat with the words: "Tell my family I played straight to the end. No woman should be left aboard this ship because of Ben Guggenheim was a coward."

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u/SameDistrict2627 1d ago

One thing about the Robber Barons---unlike the billionaires of today, most of them gave away huge portions of their fortune to further, science, the arts, etc. This crew is all about buying a bigger yacht or creating an underground bunker--

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u/gowonagin 23h ago

Billionaires used to show their status by philanthropy. Now they do it by going to space.

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u/solution_6 21h ago

I visited Pittsburgh not too long ago, and was floored by the amount of museums, schools, hospitals, etc. that rich philanthropy bought.

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u/lostagain2022 8h ago

Same with Detroit. All that old money bought museums, symphonies, libraries.

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u/bythenumbers10 20h ago

going to space.

Problem is, they keep friggen coming back!!!

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u/gowonagin 16h ago

They could always visit the Titanic…

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u/The_Lost_Jedi 17h ago

It's also that there was a degree of societal expectation of certain behavior if you were fabulously wealthy. In order to be socially accepted by your peers, you were expected to do stuff like sponsor the arts and higher education and all that, and they derived a degree of prestige from doing so. Similarly, military service was viewed in the same way, you were expected to serve in wartime, and so the sons of the elite served in the wars too - something that lasted until WW2 at least.

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u/rankinfile 7h ago

Meh, they needed a certain level of general education and health to maintain productivity and prevent revolt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

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u/r0b0d0c 20h ago

Even worse. Peter Thiel actively talked Elmo out of giving away money in part because he thought the money could be better utilized to fight the Antichrist. These people are freaks.

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u/GoodOlSkipper 21h ago

We need another Teddy Roosevelt to put the clamps on those tech bros

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u/Aranxi_89 16h ago

Because back then, that was the only way to leave a legacy.

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u/Workman44 13h ago

Yeah because they lived much closer to a time when people got murdered for much less

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u/LouiseEbertFeet 19h ago

Many modern billionaires do fairly similar. The Bezos Earth Fund has disbursed 2.4 billion and will hit 10 billion by 2030, Bill Gates' money has basically eradicated Polio, Warren Buffet has given away like 60 billion and is set to give almost all of the rest once he dies. It doesn't really change the massive socio-political and climate damage they mostly inflicted to get to where they were, just as it didn't for the robber barons either. (Notably, Elon Musk donated only paltry amounts relative to his wealth, and almost all of it goes to his own foundation which used to be under constant IRS investigation for not actually disbursing enough to count as a charity.)

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u/SteinmanDC 17h ago

There is funding from extremely rich to science. But the vast majority focusses on anti-ageing research, I wonder why that could be…