Jimmy Wales: preference

Transcript context

…If you had $100 million to give away, putting aside your own enterprises, what would you do with it? That’s a really good question. I liked seeing today that apparently, Michael Bloomberg is spending $100 million in Florida for ads to defeat Donald Trump, so I’d be very tempted to go that route. Actually, I was disappointed to read something today, and I haven’t followed up, so I don’t know what the general public conclusion is. He had promised $100 million to help people who had been disenfranchised in the state of Florida because they had not paid some fines or some sort of fees to the government. Therefore, their right to vote had not been restored even though they had met all other conditions. He was going to donate a lot of money. Then I saw an NGO who said, actually, the money never showed up. A lot of other people donated, but he didn’t, and they were unhappy with him. I don’t know about that. Actually, if I stepped back, probably defeating Donald Trump isn’t how I would if I had one chunk of $100 million. For me, it’s about how do we think about restoring a sense of decency and thoughtful public engagement where we have an election, and I look at the policies and I say, “I’m going to vote for this person because I agree with that policy. ” You say, “I’m going to vote for the other person because I disagree on that policy.” Then we have an interesting conversation about the policy, and we may not agree, but we feel at the end of the day, we’ve chewed on some ideas. Whereas today, it’s the ranting and the scandal-mongering and all of that. It’s not healthy. It’s not really giving us leadership that we need. How happy are billionaires?…

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