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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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He's also not an enemy though. For an extremely wealthy person he's a decent guy imo. Then again, I don't know everything about him
Quite a lot of people thought Elon was a decent guy once upon a time.
I just think Gabe is a bit smarter in what he says and does publicly. Most extremely wealthy people seem to be higher in measures of narcissistic traits, self-entitlement, and egocentrism.
Elon had a full time PR team that was pushing that image since he wanted to be known and popular, then he started posting stuff himself and we all saw the mask fall off. I don't think Gabe has the same thing since he seems to try and stay out of the spotlight as much as possible.
Elon also had staff who described their actual job as essentially jangling keys in front of Elon, because he has a tendency to just randomly have an insane idea and decide everyone is doing that now.
So, they had to distract him from making too many stupid decisions, fucking up workflows and procesesses. He's just an idiot, who's probably mildly aspy/autistic, and that got PR transformed into 'quirky genius'. But look into what happened at PayPal, or Tesla, anything. He's incompetent at anything other than corporate ratfuckery, he's never coded or designed anything novel or useful.
This uh... was from Tesla, a decade ago. Now of course, its all sycophants.
Compare that to Valve's odd, flat-ish hierarchy, 'just work on something cool and be useful' work culture.
Gabe has been known to occasionally bring the hammer down, but the vast amount of Valve's style, intentionally created and maintained by Gabe is... hands off. Hire the actual best, they'll direct themselves, kind of thing.
Ain't perfect, but... probably a lot less of an insane tyrannical bastard than Elon.
Gabe has a very good PR team. Don't you remember all the "Gabe plays video games too" articles? Staying out of the spotlight isn't the same as being a good person.
If he was a good person, he would be using his wealth to help society instead of owning more than a billion worth of boats. If he was a good person tbh, he'd close the spigot a bit so more profit would go to devs but he takes his fat cut like all the other store owners.
I don't. Literally the first I'm hearing of it.
You see articles like these pop up every few months. The theme is usually along the lines of "he's not just any billionaire. He is filthy rich but he is also just like you". It's transparent pandering imo.
So we should hate him on the off chance he might one day be a douchebag?
Why take away a motivation to be a decent person by punishing them for it? I would say give them every opportunity to be decent human beings, dont pre-crime their ass because you have a prejudice against people in their social class.
Fair points. Let's hope he doesn't lose his marbles
I never thought Elon was a decent guy, but that's anecdotal.
I was telling people that Elon was what fascism looked like now in 2015. I AM VERY SMART
He was also (and still is) a massive fraudster.
Literally what capitalism rewards the most as they're the most willing to exploit.
Oh man you're about to get attacked for this one. I've been piled on massively for simply suggesting he was better than others.
I like Gabe to be clear but come on. Even if he just isn’t as shit as the others, the guy clearly knows to separate his public and private profiles. This guy knew that him simply hammering three times on something was going to be dissected by 1 million nerds and used to confirm a game that never came.
Let’s not forget that Valve essentially made a significant portion of their money selling gambling to kids. He’s “better than others” sure, that’s because the others are so subsumed by their narcissism, they’re doing Nazi salutes on podiums while gutting welfare and spouting stale memes. It’s not exactly a high bar to stumble over.
Was more than enough.
3/4 into my comment. My point is, there’s always going to be people here that downvote the guy. It’s like complaining about the weather. The “all billionaires are bad” types aren’t really interested in the one exception, if he can even be qualified as that. That’s all. Who cares, compliment him anyway and they can shit on billionaires. They aren’t even necessarily mutually exclusive imo.
Just gets annoying that people are ready to jump down your throat constantly because they are an extremist and they're mad you're not. Like I get why they say all billionaires are bad. Fine, but the world isn't black and white. Some bad things are less bad. People need to understand this. Instead of getting enraged and accusing you of defending someone for saying "they're not as bad as others" they could chill the fuck out about it at minimum. I've definitely blocked dozens of people for that kind of extremist behavior.
Sure I don’t disagree (and it’s a big problem for Lemmy) but it cuts both ways right? That’s the same as going “but I like cheeseburgers” in a vegan comm. Even if Gabe personally is good (I and a majority of people have no idea really) he still exist in a system where a select few are hoovering up disproportionate amounts of the wealth. That’s all, it doesn’t mean Gabe personally has to answer to capitalism. Just that unfortunately he exists in it and due to his position people aren’t gonna like him for it and I get that.
That said plenty of people claim to hate him for that but just hate him in general and would do so even if he wasn’t as wealthy, as an aside. I don’t think I saw many subs specifically for Linux hate on reddit when I was there but they exist here lol. Perks of the platform I guess.
No not really. Often what I'm talking about is someone asking why everyone hates Gabe then any explanation short of "he's billionaire scum" is offensive to the types of users who make this place less pleasant. Nothing about Lemmy is inherently supposed to be raging zealots. Leftists can and should be civil and measured in the way they apply their ideas to society. Even if one personally thinks some ultra socialist world is the only acceptable one, it doesn't help anyone to go around acting like everyone has to think just the same that regard.
I think we’re conflating some adjacent things here. There’s a good amount of people I can see in here calmly explaining the “he’s billionaire and that’s bad” angle which are all around Lemmy. Hence the quoted, although admittedly poor analogy. No problem blocking or muting the separate zealots as you mentioned before. I do it all the time. Unfortunately those you’re referring view those type of “civil” leftist as also the enemy. Its why I block some of the instances I do.
Right well the only issue I have with the calm people would be if there's like 5 of them all saying exactly the same thing. Definitely more focused on the ragers in my comments here
And on top of that, Steam is just better than its competitors. As a normal consumer who enjoys decent deals, Steam is pretty great.
Eh, decent guys don't need that many boats
The worst thing he seems to do so far is collecting the fastest and largest version of every type of vehicle. Obviously, there are always downsides, but could be tremendously worse.
All billionaires are the enemy. Valve is privately-owned, which means their evil is more long-term. You know the shit Sony's getting flack for right now? Valve's been doing it for over 20 years.
Valve pioneering into digital distribution in 2002 because they saw an opportunity to distribute in ways publishers hadn't considered is not the same thing as Sony choosing to end physical media distribution in 2026 to kill off used games sales and control pricing.
Steam was created specifically to kill any secondary sales of HL2.
It was made before HL2, and they supported physical console games (where pretty much all secondary sales were happening) for many years after (and including) HL2.
HL2 and Steam literally launched simultaneously.
The retail version of HL2 required you to log into Steam to activate it. It was a big deal at the time because lots of people's gaming PCs weren't hooked up to the internet at the time.
Lots of games of the time had verification processes along the lines of "look on page 48 of the manual, go down 6 lines and pick the 8th word" each time you started the game to verify that you had the disk and a copy of the manual - making piracy more inconvenient.
Games would even ship with red and black manuals that were more difficult to photocopy.
No, Steam existed for a while before HL2. It was used for Counter-Strike 1.5, over a year before HL2 came out. Its initial purpose was for anti-cheat and anti-piracy. There was no inclination to block secondary market sales there.
What you're describing there is anti-piracy mechanisms, not resale market blocking, which is indeed something Steam was built to tackle.
His wealth is stolen. He is the enemy.