Let Them Eat Cake, In Venice.

Christine Merser, June 27, 2025

Big weekend. Bezos and what's her name getting married after renting Venice, Italy. Yes, the entire city. Click. Click. Click. All weekend, for everyone on every platform. They started arriving. The Kardashians. (Remember them? Famous because one of them had sex and filmed it on the internet and the rest is history?) Tom Brady. Remember him? Great ball player, but also the cheater. Couldn't win without making the ball just a little more inflated, or was it less. And, the list goes on. Even Oprah. Et tu Brute?

Do you really need to click even once on any of this? Seriously?

Let's delve a little into it all, ok? Billionaire alley.

Let’s start with the holy trinity of billionaire self-obsession, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. What binds them together isn’t just wealth. Self-centered doesn't do it justice. It’s the inability to see past their own reflections. These are men who built empires on the backs of everyday consumers, people who ordered paper towels from Amazon, posted wedding photos on Facebook, or bought a Tesla thinking it might help the planet. And what did these billionaires do with the fortune they amassed from the public?

They turned it inward.

Musk and Bezos launched themselves into space, literally. Their private rocket ventures aren’t humanitarian projects. They’re billion-dollar vanity mirrors aimed at the stars. Musk calls it “preserving humanity” by colonizing Mars. Bezos says Earth needs a break, so let’s move the dirty stuff off-planet. But let’s be honest. These aren’t solutions for our crumbling public transportation systems, our collapsing healthcare infrastructure, or the 40 million Americans living in poverty. These are science fiction side quests funded by real-world inequality.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, poured tens of billions into the metaverse, a virtual world nobody asked for and few want to live in, while Facebook (now Meta) became a breeding ground for disinformation, hate speech, and democratic erosion. When he does give, it’s carefully calculated, tightly controlled, and almost always wrapped in branding.

The common denominator?

They are obsessed with control, not contribution. Their philanthropy, when it exists, is either performative or proprietary. They invest in moonshots and avatars, while public schools beg for pencils. They hoard data, privatize breakthroughs, and fund the future only if they can own it.

These men were made billionaires by the masses. And yet, their vision of giving back is space tourism, virtual escapism, and public silence. Not hospitals. Not housing. Not hunger.

It’s not the wealth that’s the problem. It’s the failure of imagination in how to use it.

Let’s talk about the billionaires who aren’t just hoarding wealth, flying to space, or naming stadiums after themselves.

Let’s talk about the ones who are changing lives, quietly, effectively, and without demanding a plaque on a wall.

And, some things that were done in the past you might not know about because not everyone needs to herald their own good deeds.

During the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996, the city was encircled by Serbian forces who cut off electricity, gas, food, and access to clean water. With infrastructure bombed and sniper fire a daily threat, civilians were left to line up at known water sources, often in the open, where they were picked off by snipers while simply trying to survive. Children, the elderly, and entire families faced the prospect of dying not just from bullets, but from dehydration and disease. The United Nations and foreign governments offered aid, but their efforts were slow, bureaucratic, and ineffective. Trucks were stalled at checkpoints, infrastructure repairs were deemed too dangerous, and political gridlock left Sarajevo’s population increasingly desperate.

Into that vacuum stepped George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation funded what no government would, a rapid, large-scale repair of Sarajevo’s bombed-out infrastructure. He partnered with American disaster relief expert Fred Cuny, who led a team that designed and implemented a water filtration and delivery system inside the besieged city. With roughly $50 million in funding, they repaired broken water mains, installed filtration units, even airlifting some in through dangerous corridors, and built alternative systems that allowed water to be piped safely to civilians. Though some rumors persist that Soros bribed Serbian guards or filled the Olympic swimming pools with emergency water, I'm not sure about it, but I will say that I asked him once and he just smiled. What is documented is this: where governments and the UN failed, Soros and Cuny succeeded, quietly, urgently, and with the kind of precision that saved thousands of lives.

MacKenzie Scott is the blueprint for no-strings giving.

She didn’t just walk away from Jeff Bezos and his empire. She walked into her own and decided to give most of it away.

But here’s what sets her apart. She gives fast, she gives big, and she gives without making people jump through flaming hoops. No ten-part grant applications. No panels of gatekeepers. No three-year strategic delays. MacKenzie Scott’s team does the homework, vets the organizations, and then writes the check.

To date, she’s given away more than $17 billion to over 2,000 organizations, many of them small, local, and led by people of color or women, groups that traditional philanthropy often overlooks. She has revolutionized how money can move when it’s unburdened by ego and bureaucracy. And she’s done it with radical trust. She believes people know what to do with the money. And guess what? They do.

She doesn’t ask for naming rights. She rarely gives interviews. She just gives.

Melinda French Gates didn’t just leave the Gates Foundation. She pivoted. Quietly, forcefully, intentionally. Through her own fund, Pivotal Ventures, she put a billion dollars on the table to expand women’s power in the U.S. and beyond. Her focus isn’t celebrity or surface. It’s structural. Childcare. Paid leave. Reproductive rights. She invests in women on the front lines. Not from a pedestal. From the trenches. Her funding isn’t trickle-down. It’s ground-up. And she made it clear. She’s not here to build an empire. She’s here to hand people the tools to build their own.

And then there’s the part you probably missed. The part where the Gates Foundation quietly funded the Janicki Omni Processor, a machine that turns human waste into drinking water. Not someday. Now. It’s already operating in places like Senegal. It runs off sewage, powers itself, and makes clean water. Gates even drank a glass of it on camera. Not for show. For proof. That the world doesn’t need more abstract ideas. It needs solutions. And sometimes those solutions come from funding engineers and trusting science. It’s not about glory. It’s about toilets. And water. And saving lives.

Warren Buffett saw the writing on the wall. In 2006, he pledged the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. In 2024, he changed his mind. No more Gates money after he’s gone. Instead, he set up a trust run by his three children, each with their own foundation, each with their own mission. One funds women’s health and Nebraska schools. One digs into food security and post-conflict relief. One supports grassroots justice. The money’s not theirs to keep. They have ten years after he dies to give it all away. And they can’t act unless they all agree. It’s a philanthropic time bomb with a fuse of accountability. It’s Buffett saying, I raised you to think. Now think together. And fix something.

So no, I will not be clicking on the Bezos wedding this weekend. Not to see the dress, or the yacht, or which celebrity showed up wearing which designer. I won’t contribute even one pixel of attention to a grotesque display of wealth at a time when democracy is hanging by a thread, women are losing rights by the hour, and kids are sitting in immigration court with no parents, no lawyer, and no hope. When billionaires like Soros, Buffett and Scott and even Gates are using their money to try and fix what’s broken, the least we can do is stop celebrating the ones lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills.