Bill Gates is a really interesting character. Upon becoming the richest man in the world, with the power, money, connections and talent to do whatever he wanted, he dedicated a large part of his life to saving the lives of children he'd never meet on another continent.

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We've heard this story so many times that we've become used to it. But it's worth taking a step back to think about how surprising it is in the context of history.

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The Bill Gates of 2000 years ago was Crassus, the richest man in Rome during Caesar's rise to power. He was quite different from Gates. Born into a poorer branch of a once-great family, he made the first part of his fortune through cronyism, when his friend Sulla won a civil war with Crassus’ support and proceeded to sell the property of his enemies at knockoff prices. Not satisfied with that, Crassus continued to build his wealth through more conventional trades, such as slave trafficking, before later becoming famous throughout Rome for defeating Spartacus and his army of rebels, proving that he was just as good at killing slaves as he was at trafficking them. In fact he was so good at killing that he didn’t limit himself to just killing to the other side: bringing back the ancient practice of decimation and killing 1 in every 10 of his own men who had shown cowardice in the battle.

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He was more brutal still in his treatment of the surviving rebels. Rather than take them back into slavery or execute them on the spot, Crassus crucified them at intervals all the way along the road back to Rome, leaving their bodies rotting as a warning to any other slave considering a bid for freedom.

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Later in his career, having reached the same heights of wealth, power and fame as Gates, he branched out in a new direction, this time creating Rome's first fire brigade. Unlike Gates’ later projects however, this wasn't an altruistic move. His men would rush to any building on fire, but instead of putting it out they'd offer to buy the property from the owner at a fraction of its previous price. They'd only put the fire out after the deal was done. If the owner didn't agree to sell they'd simply let it burn.

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To cap it all, Plutarch even described him deliberately hanging around in private with his cousin Licinia, a vestal virgin, to have her accused and prosecuted for incest, so he could buy her villa at a reduced price.

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Like Gates, Crassus was a man with the power, money, connections and talent to do pretty much whatever he wanted. But unlike Gates he used all of this to continue to bring himself more wealth and glory, at horrific cost to others.

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Apparently Gates was quite grumpy early in his career, could be a pain to work with and would expect Microsoft employees to work long hours. And of course there was the unfortunate business with the microchips in the COVID vaccines. But he's certainly no Crassus. [1]

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It's Not Just Gates and Crassus

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I don’t think these are isolated examples. These two men illustrate an interesting change in how modern billionaires behave compared to their counterparts from almost any other time in history.

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The idea of a feudal lord giving away his fortune to help peasants on the other side of the world would be laughable. The same goes for a pharaoh sending excess food to poorer neighbouring countries. But four out of the ten richest people in the world today have signed Gates' Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half their fortunes to charity before they die. A new wave, led by FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, who's currently the 60th richest person in the world and climbing fast, go even further. His plan to donate 99% of his wealth before he dies makes Gates' generation look almost miserly. [2]

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Others, like Sam Altman, focus less on earning to give, and instead work to have a direct positive impact. As the CEO of OpenAI, he works directly on the various risks associated with the development of AI, has developed one of the best natural language AIs in the world and made it open source so anyone can use it. One of his main focuses is working on the question of how to provide for the increasing percentage of people who will lose their jobs to AI over the coming years, to which he suggests a form of universal basic income as a solution. [3]

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It's hard to imagine what Crassus, Rameses II or John Hawkins would have done if they'd discovered AI but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have made it open source and started asking how it could be used to provide an income for everyone.

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Why Is This?

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So why is this? Why are the billionaires of this era such a better group of people than their historical equivalents?

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Let’s have a look at a few potential explanations and see if they stack up:

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1 - There's strong social pressure on modern billionaires to be altruists.

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Modern media means billionaires and their behaviour are much more visible to everyone now than at any other point in history. There is also a strong modern culture that makes it desirable to be seen as an altruist. Billionaires that don't give away a lot of their fortune are viewed poorly so the desire to be well-regarded drives modern billionaire philanthropy.

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This argument makes a bit of sense but I don't think it explains it all. If Gates were optimising to be seen as a great altruist, rather than for actually being a great altruist, he probably wouldn't have spent as much time building complex and efficient organisations to save as many lives per dollar as possible. It would have been enough to throw lots of money at relatively well known, but less effective charities.

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2 - Modern billionaires would in fact like to behave like Crassus but they can't because of the rule of law.

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If he wouldn't be arrested for it, Bill Gates would in fact like to become much more wealthy by running various frauds and scams, or by human trafficking.

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It's hard to imagine Bill Gates at the head of a plundering army but maybe that's what he dreams about. One argument is that we know of at least several billionaires, such as Jeffrey Epstein, who have behaved quite like a modern Crassus despite the risk of being caught, so we should assume there are more, close to the margin, who would like to behave this way but who are dissuaded by the law. I'm not sure how to get a handle on the actual number but I'd imagine it's low.

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3 - Herd behaviour.

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All of us tend to exhibit some degree of herd behaviour and billionaires are no different. When they're thinking about what to do, having made their money, they just follow the well-trodden path into philanthropy laid out by Gates and his contemporaries.

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Again, it's hard to get a handle on how big an effect this might have, but I'd imagine there's probably some. This is also an interesting case of a broader point: we often underestimate the degree to which people we don't know, and particularly powerful and successful people, are subject to the same human biases and drivers as the rest of us. [4]

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4 - The premise is just wrong.

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Either (A) there are far more awful modern billionaires like Epstein, but we just don't hear about them because we only know about the relative few who are caught, or (B) there were many more philanthropic rich people in history.

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Part of my reason for writing this essay was to ask this question to a broader audience - I'm pretty convinced that the billionaires of history were far more evil on average than their modern equivalents, but if I'm wrong then I really want to know about it! If you think the premise is wrong then please let me know.

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5 - We're all much less evil today.

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This isn't some trend that's particular to billionaires: it's simply the case that on average everyone is much nicer today. The difference between Gates and Crassus is about the same as the difference between the average person today and the average person in 60 BC.

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There's a crucial point here, which is that people are probably far nicer to each other in developed parts of the world with strong rule of law. But there are certainly lots of parts of the modern world where you'll find people who are far far worse than Crassus, and where the average is probably quite close to the average Roman citizen. So the question then becomes why do so few of these people become as rich as Crassus?

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6 - The ways in which people become rich today selects for a much better person.

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In Crassus' time the dominant ways to become rich included trading slaves, winning wars, plundering provinces, fraud, protection rackets, rent seeking and extortion. In short, becoming rich involved winning zero sum games: making other people worse off, sometimes in utterly brutal ways, so you could be better off.

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In the modern developed world the dominant ways to become rich involve creating value for other people and asking them to pay you for part of that value. Bill Gates became rich by building products and software that people wanted and creating the organisation to do that at scale. In short, becoming rich now generally involves positive sum games, where you are rewarded based on your ability to provide value to other people. [5]

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We should expect people who win these zero sum games to look more like Crassus and people who win these positive sum games to look more like Gates. [6]

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I find this argument quite convincing. In particular it answers the question above: modern Crassuses don't become wealthy because while their skills would have helped them make money 2000 years ago, those same skills are poorly suited for making money in the modern world.

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This argument is also consistent with the behaviour of rich people in different parts of the world today. There are still parts of the world where it's easier to become quite wealthy in Crassus-esque ways and in these places you see Crassus-like behaviour among some of the richest people. Congolese warlords, Libyan slave traders and Singaporean human traffickers are every bit as bad as Ancient Roman magnates, but while they become quite rich, it's very difficult for them to reach 'richest person in the world' levels of wealth.

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I think a combination of arguments 5 and 6 is most persuasive. People in modern developed countries with a strong rule of law are much nicer than the average Roman citizen (they don't own slaves, and they don't go to the games to watch people get eaten by lions). These countries spin off many more billionaires per capita than other parts of the world, or any other point in history. And those billionaires are generally selected for their ability to win positive sum games, rather than zero sum games. Therefore the result of this process is, on average, Gates rather than Crassus. Many people like Crassus might still exist, but their tactics are much less effective compared to Gates'.

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So What?

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If this is true then we should be optimistic: it implies that more power will end up in the hands of the kinds of people we'd want to have it.

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There are two broad kinds of power that come with wealth. There's the direct power of being able to spend money to have a direct effect. You can hire mercenaries to wage a private war and kill people or you can give money to malaria charities to save lives. And there's the indirect power of being able to use money to fund political candidates, support campaigns and have various forms of media influence. [7]

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So if the above is correct then we should be happy because we should expect more power to end up in the hands of people like Gates, and less in the hands of people like Crassus. [8]

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To be very clear, that's not to say that modern billionaires are the best possible people to have lots of power. There might certainly be better people in some other group. And it's not saying that there are no bad billionaires who you'd rather take power away from. There definitely are. It's simply saying that if power continues to cluster with wealth, then the general trend away from Crassus and towards Gates is, on average, a good thing.

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Afterword

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That conclusion is only true if the argument that leads up to it is true, so please help me work out if it is or not! In particular let me know if you think I've got the premise wrong or if you think there are any other reasons that could explain the trend that I've missed. I'll update this over time to include anything good that I've missed in the first version.

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Thanks to Lydia Field, Dwarkesh Patel, Lawrence Newport, Jamie Strachan and Jack Millar for comments.

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Notes

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1 - Writing this made me wonder if that conspiracy theory got traction because we tend to assume that rich people are evil, based on the fact they probably were for most of history. Thanks to Dwarkersh Patel for flagging this essay to me, which suggests a few other potential explanations.

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2 - Bankman-Fried is part of an interesting new wave of intentional effective altruist billionaires. Unlike Gates who became rich, then decided what to do with some of the money and settled on altruism, Bankman-Fried set out from the age of 21 to make as much money as possible for the single purpose of giving it away.

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Interestingly we might expect them to be more motivated to continue making money beyond their first few billion because of this. There are diminishing marginal returns to spending to improve your own happiness - your 10th Ferrari makes you less happy than your first. But in altruism each additional $4,000 will give you another life saved. Therefore if strength of motivation is an important factor in becoming very wealthy, we might expect to see many more such billionaires in the wave behind Bankman-Fried over the coming years.

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3 - Another of OpenAI's focuses is solving the alignment problem - making sure AI systems actually do what their programmers want them to do, which is harder than it sounds. Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence is a great starting point to get into the ideas behind the field.

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4 - One of the best people talking about these kinds of ideas is Michael Story - a great Twitter follow here.

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5 - Most people will accept this argument about Gates but might find it less intuitive in other cases. I'm writing a separate essay on this but in the meantime these are some interesting people making similar arguments: here and here (in the second one start from the subheading 'Money Is Not Wealth').

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6 - There’s a second-order effect here. The fact that it’s now possible to become very wealthy in an ethical way by winning positive sum games means that the class of effective altruist billionaire like Sam Bankman-Fried is now possible. It wouldn’t have made sense to make lots of money with the intention of giving it to charity if you had to do so by following the Crassus playbook: you’d have done more harm making the money than you’d have done in good by giving it away. But that’s not the case anymore.

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7 - There’s an interesting school of thought that it’s actually a lot harder to turn money into power than most people imagine. Samo Burja’s work is a great starting point on this.

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8 - Lots of people argue that we should try to reduce the second type of power that money can exert but that's a separate argument. All we’re doing here is, assuming that that kind of power does exist, asking who we'd prefer to have it.