GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”
Next do lifted pickup trucks please!
And the Carolina Squat!
Makes sense. It’s not a truck, car or SUV, it’s a cosplay vehicle. Lego vehicles from the toy store will outlast this shitshow.
Lego vehicles from the toy store will outlast this shitshow.
To be fair, those would outlast Toyotas, too.
Unless you put 100,000 miles on the lego truck 😄
The “break in” period.
I’m waiting for any kind of sourcing of this that’s more than “a guy on Twitter shared the text of his rejection letter.”
This letter does not clarify if, as a matter of policy, all cybertruck insurance will be categorically rejected.
GEICO claiming this isn’t true
"In an email to The Verge, Geico pushed back. “Geico has coverage available nationwide for the Tesla Cybertruck,” Geico spokesperson Ross Feinstein said. Feinstein did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about individual dropped policies. "
So maybe it was something VERY specific to this persons use of the truck?
Thank you.
That part about how they insured his other vehicles so that PROVES this is a cyber truck-specific policy was so dumb. Insurance will deny for a million reasons or combinations of reasons.
I heard he was renting it out on Turo. That is unconfirmed. I have no source.
True or not to this specific situation, in general, that is definitely the kind of reason you might get dropped if you didn’t get the proper insurance.
Yes. If this is true the owner should be happy they did this before trying to make a claim. Often people break the terms of the insurance and then when a claim is made they are denied all coverage.
God, I hope other places follow. I work in insurance and not only is everything about the cybertruck an absolute fucking nightmare to source, let alone find a shop for, every single goddamn owner is like the most insufferable chod. That goes for women too. Tesla drivers could already be a problem, but the truck owners are like regular Tesla owners gone feral.
State farm was the first to drop them
I hope other places follow
Are they actually allowed to sell these pieces of shit elsewhere?
Also is anyone else stupid enough to buy one?
they started taking orders from presales in Canada and they went through the entire list, I’m not sure if any have been delivered here yet though
People knowingly buy stupid vehicles. I’m one of them. It’s expensive to drive, big, has expensive insurance and only seats two but I love it.
I didn’t realise they only had two seats!
Is that one for each of your brain cells? 😉
Someone with more than two brain cells could easily look that up and and realize they’re talking about a different vehicle before insulting a complete stranger for no reason.
I thought ‘expensive to drive’ would have given away it wasn’t a cybertruck, since the only good part about those things is that it’s an EV and probably doesn’t cost much to charge. I might not agree with your decision to drive a huge vehicle, but I’m not gonna call anyone an idiot for doing it.
It’s also generally good form to not make spelling errors (realise) in a comment calling someone else stupid…
Please tell me the comment about the spelling mistake is some kind of weird humour (sic)
It is mostly tounge in cheek, but they did misspell realize in their comment and later edited it to correct it.
I mean if you’re gonna call someone else stupid, but you misspell it you’re kinda putting your foot in your own mouth no?
Size is relative. Here’s my “huge” truck parked next to an American one.
Sorry mate, your comment really makes it sound like you were starved of oxygen at birth and bought a Cybertruck.
As you were
Why comment in the first place then? We’re talking about Cybertrucks and you start talking about your vehicle, people are gonna assume you mean the Cybertruck
Also is anyone else stupid enough to buy one?
Because I’m pointing out that people don’t only buy vehicles based on what’s wise or optimal. For some, it’s also a hobby and they have different preferences as what to drive. At the time of buying my current truck, a wagon would’ve been sufficient. I just went with what’s essentially my childhood-dream car instead. I’ve since developed an actual need for one too, but even now, a van would be a little more practical. Truck is simply more fun and nicer looking, while being the same size.
You can see why people misunderstood you though no?
I asked “is anyone else stupid enough to buy [a Cybertruck]”
You replied - [context as assumed by a normal person]
People knowingly buy stupid vehicles. I’m one of the
m[people that bought this fuckin monstrosity]. [The Cybertruck is] expensive to drive, big, has expensive insurance and only seats two but I love it.
People shouldnt knowingly buy dangerous vehicles.
They likely didn’t know they were dangerous when they preordered and many are now stuck with them. I think they have a no resale contract for 2 years after buying.
I mean I don’t mean to sound ridiculous, but they even looked dangerous. I am not sure why anyone would assume they were safe. I didn’t even think they were street legal at first.
That is a bummer to be stuck with one though, but you do have to be rich enough to buy one too.
I suspect that looking dangerous is a positive for a great number of truck buyers.
Yeah I think they would be alright personal use offroad vehicles. Although they didnt build them for that, they could have.
Same, but I like the small ones personally
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Presumably, “other places” refers to other insurance companies. IOW, GEICO is (allegedly) denying them coverage. OP is hoping that Allstate, Progressive, etc will also deny coverage.
Tesla drivers have single-handedly done more PR for BMW drivers than BMW ever could have.
chod
Now there’s an insult I haven’t heard in a while.
Take my upvote!
Tesla Insurance
scamPolicy in 3…2…1…In before trump’s new monkey calls the Gecko a pedo
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Pretty sure they were one of the last major companies that would…
Even if warranty pays for repairs to it, if it damages anything else the insurance still has to pay.
The article mentions multiple examples of them just randomly shutting down during operation. That’s already bad. But this is going to be it’s first winter, it’s not surprising insurers don’t want to deal with it. They deal with large numbers, it’s not a question of “if” like an individual owner, its “when” for the insurer
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Class action lawsuits are gonna be a mother fucker
Class action lawsuits are gonna be a mother fucker
Part of the purchase agreement of a Tesla agreeing to binding arbitration. This means no class action suit. You can opt out of this within the first 30 days, but you have to send a letter requesting it.
How many Tesla owners do you think do that?
Wow, I never thought I’d find an actual good argument for keeping independent car dealers as middlemen instead of allowing first-party sales, but here we are.
Can you connect the dots for me? Third party dealers always have idemnity? clauses anyways.
Presumably anything you’d agree to while buying from an independent dealer would be between you and the dealer, not you and the manufacturer, right? I don’t understand how the manufacturer would be a party to the transaction.
(It might be that I’m naive about how modern car sales work.)
I’m pretty clueless too, but to me your assertion doesn’t hold up to the concept of recalls.
The true answer is probably that we’re both wrong and the answer is that as a consumer: you lose, fuck you. Also fuck your family dog.
John Wick enters the chat
Steam recently removed their arbitration clause, largely because paying for a thousand arbitration cases is worse than dealing with a class action.
I’ve heard that death by 1,000 arbitrations is a good way to make em regret it. Glad to see it’s true.
Which is what Musk is looking at happening.
Between cybertruck and twitter, dude’s gonna bankrupt himself.
This didn’t work for valve so I can see it also going poorly for Tesla.
That assumes the court finds that enforceable. Usually they do, but a few times recently, they’ve said it’s not.
That’s one of the nice things about the law in Quebec. Binding arbitration clauses are illegal.
Je devrais demeneger a Montreal.
*Je does
“doivent” is third-person plural (they, not I)
Oh, and I didn’t notice that autocorrect changed my French to English. Should be"dois" or, as you say, “devrais” for the conditional.
Whoops, I really meant “devrais.”
I mean in trumps court of law musk can’t lose.
If dumpy wins, for sure no class action.
If dumpy loses, his Supreme Court will still side with the conservative side anyway, so probably still no class action.
i don’t own a tesla, so if their cars injure me I can sue them*
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The go pedal and the steering wheel are equivalent to a keyboard/mouse and are not physically connected to anything. If the car shuts off, the wheels go where they feel like with absolutely no driver control.
Never thought of they how would you brake if the car shutoff.
The brake pedal.
How well does that work after losing vacuum assist?
Definitely not as well but you can still use them. Cars didn’t even have vacuum assisted brakes up into the 1960s and 1970s
Yes, and they were designed with that in mind- brake pedals with more leverage for one…
My mom had a Ford ranger for a while that had lost its brake boost, it took a lot of force to get it to slow down, and that wasn’t even a heavy vehicle, this was back when a pickup was a two-seater…
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Have you looked at the cybertruck’s manufacturing practices? Airplanes have redundancies for their redunancies and that’s why people use them. The cybertruck was built with the “go fast and break things” model, does not have redundancies, and actually removed some standard safety features found in every other car. Like tempered glass.
Comparing a cyber truck to an airplane is like comparing a pinewood derby car to a military personnel carrier. One was made by a child. The other is engineered to keep as many soldiers alive as possible.
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On the internet, anyone can say anything. I am the Pope.
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Did you really just draw an equivalency between Tesla’s software practices and the aerospace industry? Even Daddy Musk isn’t stupid enough to pretend those are the same.
Also your assertion that there is “no such thing as off” blatantly displays your horrible lack of understanding that distributed computing still relies on electricity.
Edit: since Tesla is apparently the same thing as Airbus, can you point me to the source code published by the relevant regulatory body that controls the Cybertruck’s steering mechanism?
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Yes, I fully understand the difference between analogy and equivalency. You claimed that fly by wire on an aircraft is exactly as safe and redundant as the steering wheel of a Tesla vehicle. That’s called an equivalency and is a demonstrably false statement. I never claimed that there were no redundancies to the power supplies, but it’s simply not relevant. You do understand that there are different regulations and rigors applied to an aircraft compared to a crappy car that hasn’t even passed any crash safety testing and hasn’t been certified by any engineering standards bodies, right?
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A vehicle shutting down in the middle of the freeway can easily cause multiple accidents.
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I don’t know how you got to the conclusion that OP was saying “all” and not being hypothetical.
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According to this comment thread and the article, these cars have abruptly stopped functioning with no warning. Do you not think it is only a matter of time before that occurs in a dangerous situation? Insurance companies base their decisions on statistics and probabilities. It is very much related to “hypotheticals”.
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It’s rare for normal cars to shut down with no warning.
It’s pretty common for cybertrucks to do it.
Eventually that’s gonna happen on a highway. Insurance works by assuming the worst thing that can happen will happen and charging you appropriately. It’s far from irrelevant in this case.
They do when it shuts down while driving and careens into another vehicle.
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No one is saying it’s actually happened. It is a fact though that they are shutting down while driving which introduces a higher risk of it happening which the insurance companies don’t want to take.
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I can steer to the shoulder of the road in a traditional vehicle hit the brakes. Can I do that in a cyber truck?
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Lol
Lmao, even
With some rofl on the side.
Yay, I knew it would be that super old reference!
I was actually looking for the version that includes The Muppets, because there absolutely is/was a version of that video with the Mnah-mnah muppets. I just couldn’t find it.
Edit: excuse me, but 17 years old isn’t super old. That’s not even voting age.
Wow, haven’t seen a roflcopter in a long time.
For Elon this means Relying On Father’s Luxuries
Ijbol?
Elon bad, haha
Tomorrow I post Elon bad, ok?
No, truck bad. More read article.
Reading hard. Easier to make quip.
False claim, debunked by snopes. Mods should consider blocking this news outlet.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/geico-tesla-cybertruck-coverage/
Why are insurance companies the ones making the rational decision about saying it’s a dangerous piece of shit and not our transportation regulators? It needs to be banned.
Go try to get insurance for a Lambo or a nice exotic.
Good luck giving that free market talk to the insurance sales guy.
I don’t think insurance companies care of the trucks are dangerous per se. They care if they are expensive to repair, or prone to accidents which could attach liability to the policy holder and thereby the insurance company.
I keep telling conservatives this. It makes sense to have some form of suspicion around a message when some corporation has a profit motive behind it. For instance, climate change and companies selling solar panels (although I wish they wouldn’t put SO much effort into that faint connection).
However, that also applies for the inverse - that when insurance drops coverage for Florida homes, it’s because climate change is real and they know it will hurt their bottom line.
i never understood the suspicion about companies selling solar panels… they’re not snake oil, they work exactly as they are advertised. But, they allow people to be self reliant and not forced to rely on large enegry companies. It really shows where the allegiance for “conservatives” lie.
Funny enough, that’s exactly what the article says.
The extra danger to pedestrians might also affect the liability calculations.
The weird thing about this claim is that these aren’t deal breakers. It’s possible to get insurance for exotics like McLaren or Bugatti (although no idea if GEICO does those); it just costs a lot.
I’d really like to hear more about those underwriting standards.
There probably aren’t that many people using a Bugatti as a daily driver. For Cybertruck I would think there are many people using it as a daily.
Because automobile regulation in the US is an absolute joke.
I don’t see anything in the article suggesting it’s particularly dangerous, only that it’s very expensive to fix, and in a collision will probably cause significant damage to the other vehicle (though that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily cause injury).
The US doesn’t exactly approve or deny vehicles in general; any vehicle that conforms to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards can be sold, as far as I know. And I don’t see any section that covers safety of the other party in a collision, unfortunately. Maybe write your reps and suggest they add one.
The US doesn’t exactly approve or deny vehicles in general; any vehicle that conforms to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards can be sold
Sorry, I’m not getting the distinction here. Isn’t a vehicle that conforms to the FMVSS the same as one that is approved?
Or is the check against FMVSS is not done ahead of time, but only later in any lawsuits?
Conforming = here’s a guide book. Follow it and we won’t bother you unless there’s an issue.
Approval = please submit every model/trim you release to our inspection/test facility for approval.
One requires a lot more people going back and forth between the manufacture and government than anyone wants.
They have to pass inspection to be sold initially.
because it aligns with their financial incentives.
Because insurance companies are filled with bean-counters (not intended as an insult, I’m a bean-counter in a different field) who want to come out ahead. That’s why the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) exists. You’d think organization that does crash tests and promotes new technology would be a government organization, but nope, it’s insurance providers that want to minimize payouts.
Now that little gecko who works for GEICO will probably tell you “You can save a load of money by switching to GEICO, and its so easy a caveman can do it, but we refuse to insure that abomination you call a Tesla Cybertruck that needs to be road illegal everywhere”
Warren Buffet refuses to insure Elon Musk
aka the battle of geriatric nepo babies
There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.
Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.
Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.
They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.
🤡
Wait, how is Warren Buffett nepotistic? He’s giving the vast majority of his wealth to charity. He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills. But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).
I really don’t see him as nepotistic, he’s pretty much the best kind of billionaire.
Buffett himself is a nepo-baby. His father was a congressman who’s connections were very helpful when starting out in business and investing.
Sure it isn’t Emerald mine money, but you can’t tell me being the son of a 4-term congressman didn’t give him a leg up.
Sure, but he didn’t start with millions or anything to invest, he started with money that he, himself, had saved up. He certainly didn’t have a normal childhood (he bought his first shares at 11), but this timeline doesn’t show much financial assistance from his parents, it shows a lot of hard work.
That’s a very different story from people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump.
You’re underestimating the effect of his father knowing the right people. Yes, there was no “small million-dollar loan” and yes Warren actually hustled quite a bit to capitalize on the advantages given to him by his father, but that doesn’t erase those advantages when talking about his success.
Hard work is not the thing that got him where he is. If it were there are millions of people working multiple who should also be billionaires. Or, better yet, no one should be a billionaire at all and we make it so people don’t have to work multiple jobs to survive, but I digress.
Hard work is not the thing that got him where he is
No other investor has his track record, or anything close to it, so I really do think it comes down to hard work.
Whether the type of work he did should be compensated as well as it was is certainly a valid discussion to have. That said, he’s pretty much the top of his industry and extremely well-respected by his peers, so it makes sense that he has an outsized portion of the wealth of those in his industry. That said, I absolutely agree with Buffett that we should have higher taxes on the wealthy (like Buffett) because that level of wealth concentration doesn’t benefit anyone, including the wealthy individual.
What got him to the top of his profession absolutely was hard work. What got him to become one of the richest people in the world was that plus the tax system and other legal structures that reward that work. In other words, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
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Look at his history. He started out selling gum and candy to kids at school, then took increasingly demanding jobs (delivered newspapers and whatnot) until he went to college, after which he worked for his professor (IIRC, I don’t recall specifics).
And he never was a day trader, so he’s not the type that’s making money on the margins off other traders, he’s actually investing and sometimes buying a controlling stake in companies that he believes in. If you look at his lifestyle, he very much doesn’t look like your typical billionaire, he lives in the same house he bought in his 20s, and generally lives a pretty modest life, especially given his wealth. Yeah, he makes a ton at his job, but he seems to be doing it because he loves his work, not because he loves money.
In my mind, he’s basically the best possible example of a billionaire. He didn’t do much of anything shady to get rich, he worked hard in his youth and invested wisely the rest of his life. And he started a pledge for other billionaires to donate the vast majority of their wealth, leading by example by giving away half of his wealth to drop from #1 to #2, and now to #10 or so.
If you’re going to criticize billionaires, start with Gates, Bezos, Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg, not Buffett. Buffett is about as ethical of a billionaire as you can get, and while there’s room to criticize him, he should be nowhere near the top of the list.
I hope you get paid for this becuase this hellava shilling by one adult for the benefit of another adult man
Jfc… The bootlicking, never seen anyone do it this strong on fediverse.
It is a tankie strategy too, just keep repeating falsehoods with home it resonates with somebody since clearly people ain’t buying it
Just stop
They have to believe in meritocracy, that wealth isn’t intrinsically tied to exploitation and a long history of classism.
Warren buffet is literally a senator’s son… CCR has a song on the topic ;)
He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills.
Literally this what nepotism looks like… 17m is prolly just enough not to get eaten by estate tax.
You are confusing estate planning with charity.
But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).
Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro
Use some critical thinking? And a bigger question why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby enough to try to defend him with propaganda that he paid a lot of money to get into your head.
Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro
You can literally see the donation of $48B. The pledge itself isn’t legally binding, but he has been consistently donating. He’s 94, so I don’t think it’ll take long to see the proof in the pudding.
Here are some notes from his Wikipedia page:
In 2008, Buffett was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of approximately $62 billion. In 2009, after donating billions of dollars to charity, he was ranked as the second richest man in the United States with a net worth of $37 billion.
…
As of 2023, Buffett has given over $50 billion to charitable causes.
I will note that the last figure probably includes the money given to his kids’ organizations (not directly to his kids).
And a quote about inheritance for his kids:
“I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing”
He has a pretty consistent track record of philanthropy and statements about philanthropy, so I would be really surprised if he changed that in the last few years of his life. I guess we’ll see though.
why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby
Where did I say I was worshipping him? I’m merely saying I think what he’s doing is admirable and that he doesn’t qualify as a “nepo baby.” If you look into his history, he worked hard throughout his early life to save and invest, and I see no indications that his parents gave him a huge inheritance or kickstarted his career in any meaningful way. Yeah, his dad was a House Rep for 8 years (6 of those consecutive), and here’s a quote about him on his father’s Wikipedia page:
‘Unshakably ethical, Howard refused offers of junkets and even turned down a part of his pay. During his first term, when congressional salary was raised from $10,000 to $12,500, Howard left the extra money in the Capitol disbursement office, insisting that he had been elected at the lower salary.’ His wife said he considered only one issue when deciding whether or not to vote for a bill: ‘Will this add to, or subtract from, human liberty?’
That doesn’t sound like the kind of man to give his son an unfair advantage…
You are poorly educated on the issue and you are citing propaganda he paid for.
Please do some proper researcher on topic of oligarch charity and what that’s all about.
I can’t believe in 2024 we still have adults larping this shite. No wonder we got shit sociology-economic conditions and only getting worse…
If you have better sources, I’m happy to review them.
I haven’t watched the YouTube video (I generally distrust what Reich says), but here’s what I see from the other sources:
currentafairs
Mentions Buffett once, and only when mentioning the pledge to Gates’ foundation. The article seems to mostly be about the Gates’ foundation taking credit for things they didn’t do. I’ll certainly read through the rest of the article, but it definitely seems to be a criticism of that org, not Warren Buffett.
inequality
Talks about The Giving Pledge (created by Buffett) and how those who have pledged aren’t donating their money fast enough (i.e. their money is growing faster than their donations). I don’t really see this as an issue, since the problem should correct itself when they die.
The article also complains about most donations going to foundations or DAFs, but honestly, when you need to move that much money, that’s probably the most efficient way to do it. So I guess I don’t understand the criticism.
apnews
This one is about wealthy people avoiding taxes generally. I don’t know how this applies to Warren Buffett, whose wealth is in the US and AFAIK isn’t being hidden in tax shelters like offshore banks or trusts. His tax bill is relatively low (this article claims 0.1% from 2014 to 2018), but I think that’s countered by his statements about increasing taxes on the rich (he is registered Democrat, if that matters to you at all).
So I don’t think the issue here has anything to do with Buffett himself, the issue is the tax law doesn’t account for unrealized gains. Or in other words, don’t blame the player, blame the game. The closest Buffett gets to tax shelters is his stock donations to his kids’ foundations, but my understanding is that those are charitable orgs, so I don’t see a ton of difference there vs donating to other orgs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he has donated way more to vs his kids’ orgs.
My personal view here is that any compensation above some amount (say, $400k) regardless of source should be taxed at the current rates, and those assets stepped up in basis appropriately. I don’t like Harris’ proposal though because it’s based on wealth instead of income, but I think Buffet himself would approve a change here. If we handled it that way, the income from stock grants and whatnot for extremely highly compensated employees (like a CEO) would end up being taxed as income (short term gains), and therefore would be functionally equivalent to a cash salary, which is what it’s intending to be.
It’s not charity to give money to an organization you (or friends or relatives) control, it’s a way to keep your assets under your control without having to pay taxes that would otherwise be required.
That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.
I think you’re missing the point - it’s not that he’s enriching himself - he’s already done that. It’s that the charity carries out his will, not necessarily the will of people who need charities.
Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.
The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.
Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.
Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.
It is if that charity uses the money to help people. So any accusation needs to actually look at the financials of those orgs to see where the money is going.
