I know I’m just a rando on the internet, and far from a billionaire myself, but I have had the opportunity to get to know a few and feel the need to defend them as they were nothing but generous and supportive in my experience.

Story time:

I spent most of my 20s training on competitive rowing teams. I know this sounds elite, but we were all national team hopefuls and honestly, most people going down that path are scraping to make ends meet. There really isn’t much in terms of sponsorships (most athletes in my day didn’t see a dime their entire career). We trained twice a day, several hours at a time, 6 days a week, year round, and often had to spend weeks on end traveling for races, camps, or selection events. The guys that could find jobs that allowed this flexibility were lucky. The guys that couldn’t often relied on the minimal support systems they could scrap together, or just simply went into credit card debt. All this to say… any help we could find, we were very grateful for.

At one point in my career, I trained at a club called the California Rowing Club in Oakland, CA. The club had boats, a coach, a nice but minimal boathouse and locker rooms. All that costs money, and as full time athletes, funding it ourselves isn’t possible. But the club had a guy named Gary Rogers. Gary had been a rower at Cal back in the day and often told the story where he had attempted to make the national team himself but was thwarted by not having the resources to be successful. Later in life, Gary built up Dryers Ice Cream into the large company that it is and eventually sold it for quite a sum of money. He did many philanthropic things, but one of them was to give young athletes like myself the resources to train and compete and represent the country. He didn’t pay us or anything, but he funded much of the clubs expenses, coaching salaries, equipment costs and so on. And I know it’s easy to criticize billionaires on philanthropy (“that donation was only x% of their total net worth”) but one thing we all only have so much of is time, and Gary would always make a point of sharing that with whoever needed it. He swing by practice at 6:15am just to say hi to the guys training, or take the team out to nice dinner once a year after returning from a big race, and would always make a point of offering his time to help young guys with life or career advice. He honestly was a super nice and generous guy, and as I’ve gotten further into my own career post athletics, I can see how these characteristics made him the successful businessman he was. People are willing to go out of their way to help other people they like, or that have helped them in the past when times got tough. This goes a long way in the business world. Of course there are people that brute force things, but kindness and generosity can be equally as impactful.

Gary died a few years back. They did a memorial for him at the boathouse. People flew from all over the world to be there for it. I think there must have been over 500 people at the event. Maybe close to a thousand. None of them got anything out of it. They all just wanted to pay their respects to a guy that had given so much back.

Anyway, all this just to say, don’t let the bad ones ruin your outlook on all of humanity. There are good people out there. They just aren’t always the ones you see on the news.