Charity

Should rich people donate to charity. The answer is, depends. Sam Waltons children own 3.6 billion shares of Walmart stock that pays 88 cents per share so their annual income is $3.2 billion. They give $500 million to charity and invest the rest in other businesses. Elon Musk invested $100 million dollars of his own money in Space X in 2002. Today the company employees 13,000 mostly high paid tech people. The economic impact is in the tens of billions and projected to be trillions by 2030. To answer the question, yes people like the Waltons should donate to charity but people like Musk should innovate. The Waltons are giving a man a fish but Musk is teaching him how to fish. People like Musk and Steve Jobs should use their abilities and their money to create new industries. Of course, most rich people do both innovate and donate. 31 years ago, Jeff Bezos borrowed $300,000 from his parents and started Amazon in a garage with the idea of selling books on line. For the first ten years all profits were reinvested in the company and then over the next 20 years it grew into a trillion-dollar company employing 1.5 million people. He could have given the early profits to charity and kept the company just selling books.