The above post seemed to be saying that:

1. Bill Gates pays less taxes as he donates to a charity

2. Bill Gates runs that charity

3. Bill Gates then gets to decide how that charity spends his donated money

This then means that he can use what should have been tax to:

4. Pay himself with the charities money, as he is an employee of the charity

5. Lobby politicians using the charity's money

6. Otherwise direct the charity to work in his best interests

Which part are you disagreeing with? I guess he doesn't "make money" in the strictest sense, but it sure seems like he's exploiting the system to keep more of it

I've come to the same conclusion. Every time there's a corporation or billionaire either scrapping something or giving something away, then it's "for the tax breaks".

The 0.37 you get back is the tax you paid on the income. The exercise is more about controlling where your money goes and what it goes to.

Instead of giving the money to the government, who you may not agree with, you're giving it to a cause that either directly or indirectly can benefit you, whether that cause is a direct benefit in the form of helping with a problem that is causing you trouble, or simply as a good PR move.

You spend money to get there, but now often than not you're getting a benefit from the transaction.

Billionaires and their mentality and interests are fairly well known, for the most part. Bill is a co-chair of the foundation and likely recieves many benefits from holding that position, including a salary. He can also, as chair, influence who is hired, providing stable employment for people who are in his favor, while also getting a massive boost to his public image, all while paying himself a salary. He can also direct the funds that would normally go to the government as tax, who may spend it on things he doesn't want to happen, and redirect those funds to something he would like to see happen, such as R&D into technologies (which is a nontrivial part of what the foundation funds).

For Bill, the charitable foundation is a win all the way around, except to his billion dollar bank account, which I'm certain is providing plenty of income on its own.

Quite literally he's taking money out of the hands of the government and making sure money is being funneled into things that he thinks should happen. It looks very selfless on the surface but gates is a business man, this is just his most recent endeavor.

I suppose if you mean traditional income, but he gets tens of billions of dollars per year in capital gains. I remember a few years ago he said "sure, I paid three billion dollars in taxes last year, but I should have paid more". I read about ten years ago that he donated $10 billion dollars to charity and his net worth still went up $9 billion. His financial holdings are so enormous that his net worth still increases regardless of giving away ridiculous sums of money. I remember Chris Rock talking about Gates a couple decades ago and he said "you can't get rid of that much money. You can't give it away fast enough to lose it", and that's a pretty accurate statement.

The number of people who don't understand the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit is too damn high.

I'm not sure what you mean, since money you donate to charity is exempt from income tax. The taxes you would otherwise pay on income that you donate is refunded to you.

People who look at a billionaire and think "I need to kill him". Anything anyone with that kind of money does, is treated as the greatest evil in the entire world.

Isn't he the sole reason that the covid vaccine (that was funded by 97% publlic funding) was sold for a profit?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastrazeneca-covid-vaccine-research-was-97-publicly-funded

They could use their money and influence to lobby the government in a positive direction, such as making sure taxes go toward social programs instead of killing brown people, and then simultaneously help fund that by filing their taxes fairly and paying their intended share rather than do this arcane skullfuckery to pay as little as possible. A great next step would be to lobby for tax code reform to close the arcane loopholes (and ofc massively raise taxes on anyone with an income north if $1M/yr) so that other, less charitably minded billionaires can start paying their fair share too, whether they want to or not.

So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?

I'd say the answer to that, is that they should simply give significantly more than what they're currently giving. We're talking of people who could easily give away 99% of their wealth with 0 personal sacrifices. If they're giving less than 0.1%¹ instead, I just want to know why?

I found this webpage extremely helpful for putting into perspective just how much good they could be doing: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

¹) That number probably needs to be a lot smaller, but I don't want to make any claims.

See also early-1900s philanthropists who felt there was no point having a lot of money if you did not intend to spend every last cent. Liquor was illegal and the blowjob hadn't been invented yet, so hell, why not build a bunch of pools and libraries?

Human beings can be complex enough to acquire money through evil means and still want to do good things with it. Sometimes even for good reasons! They're not robots and they're not monsters. They're just assholes.