Joy Lo Dico: Some problems are better solved by billionaires

Largesse: Mark Zuckerberg wants to 'rid the world of all disease'
AP
Joy Lo Dico22 September 2016
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Great big thundering donations and great big aims: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have just put $3 billion on the table — must be a pretty big table — with the high-flown ideal of “ridding the world of all disease”. Bill and Melinda Gates have long been working on malaria and George Soros has pledged to give $500 million to help refugees in Europe and businesses in their host countries get on their feet.

These super-size cheques coming out of the US are acts of showmanship. That’s no bad thing when the aims are lofty.

A cynic might say that, were it not for Facebook’s very-clever tax- efficiency systems across the world, Zuckerberg might not have a $50 billion fortune with which to be so generous. Those with long memories will also remember that Soros, now investing in Europe, made a large part of his fortune in 1992, the year he broke the British pound by betting against it and forcing us out of the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism.

That though, in a sense, is business. And what business can do, by pointing hard cash in the direction of its motivation, is succeed where others have failed.

Compare, for example, the refugee crisis, which has just been under discussion in the United Nations, where political progress is grindingly slow. However noble the sentiments of President Obama, who has pledged to take a further 110,000 Syrian refugees, or of Theresa May, who has reaffirmed Britain’s commitment to funding the regions next to the war-torn country, whenever a politician returns home to speak to their public the message becomes muddied.

British voters, as witnessed by Brexit, don’t like migration and are suspicious of asylum seekers. Germany has lurched to the Right in the face of Merkel’s open-arms policy, and US voters are toying with voting in a President who has vowed to profile any Muslims entering the country.

Soros, by writing such a large cheque, makes a statement of intent. So many zeroes knock down domestic arguments about how difficult it is for governments and local authorities to take on the costs of resettling refugees among people who might be hostile to outsiders. It gives both the politicians and dispossessed people safe cover.

And by billing the cheque not as charity (he does philanthropy) but as investment in businesses he is offering to pay for more than mere survival — he wants a future for the displaced who’ve made it into Europe and to take the burden off the state.

As for the Facebook largesse, it is good to see that the founder of a global tech company which has risen on the mantra of “sharing” is now practising what he preaches — but with hard cash to back it up. While Zuckerberg and Chan’s ideals of eradicating disease through investing in scientific research might seem unreachable in their own lifetimes, it is the sort of dreaming that made California home to some of largest tech companies in the world.

Business may not always stand on the moral high ground but it has artillery that governments do not.

Opportunity knocks, even in the darkest hour

Within hours of the announcement that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are to split, my email inbox starts brimming with divorce lawyers promoting their services as consultants, and cocktail bars offering Brangelina concoctions with which to drown your sorrows.

A travel firm proposed a mini-break for “those suffering from Brangelina break-up blues”. A beauty brand writes: “While Angelina Jolie’s marriage may be over, one thing remains the same, her full and sexy lips.” And, over in Australia, a friend reports the new pitch from Remington: “We can’t fix your Brangelina broken heart,” the email reads, “but we can fix your hair.” In misery comes opportunity. How long until Chanel, for which

Pitt did ads for No 5, brings out a “free man” range?

Wonder of Kew and the Wood Wide Web

This evening I’m going to Kew Gardens for the opening of Write on Kew, its literary festival. As much as a draw as the authors will be the botanical gardens, in particular their trees, a wild bunch of immigrants drawn from all corners of the globe: Chinese handkerchiefs, cedars of Lebanon and North American black locusts rubbing along happily with our domestic oaks.

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester turned tree anthropologist, has been in London recently talking about his new book The Hidden Life of Trees. It posits that through a “Wood Wide Web”, trees communicate to their neighbours through networks of roots, fungi and pheromones, giving the succour to the weak and protect each other from predators.

Who knows what language they speak under the English lawns of Kew — but they all seem to get along just fine.

* Last night I wandered over to The Society Club, the neighbourhood bookshop and bar in Soho, to hear chanteuse Lail Arad trying out some new material on a friendly crowd. There was one wry number about the end of a love affair: “I was riddled with guilt, it was a riddle to me/ How our island had sunk in the splintering sea/ Yet the uncharted waters they didn’t feel new/ that summer I left you and we left the EU.”

For good measure there were more allusions to “heartbroken borders” and “borderline truths”. Little did Nigel Farage imagine he’d be inspiring comic ballads about heartbreak...

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