Billionaires will act like admirable citizens, and due to their wealth, they can employ various individuals to shape their public image into a favorable one. Bill Gates and his Giving Pledge serve as a prime illustration of a PR initiative aimed at improving the image of the billionaire class. The Giving Pledge is complete nonsense. Allowing billionaires to decide where their wealth goes does not resolve the issue, as this is precisely the problem—only a small number of individuals determine the distribution of billions in society. 

Bill Gates is widely recognized in the software world for being an enormous jerk. He is well-known for it. Before cleaning up his reputation through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he was largely linked to Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. After he tied the knot and launched his foundation, people suddenly recognized him as the man donating all his wealth (which he isn't), penning books, and sharing reading lists like a wise old grandpa. 

After a while though his wife finally had enough of his crap and the dirt started coming out again.

They are all promoting their own interests, and these interests mainly benefit themselves rather than the public. Whether it’s the Koch Brothers, Buffett, Gates, Elon Musk, or anyone else, if they are billionaires, they strive to retain that wealth and generate additional profits, even if it comes at the expense of the working poor and the environment. 

If most of these billionaires agreed that progressive government reform was beneficial, it would take place. What we possess now is what they desire. Corporate earnings have risen, employee salaries remain unchanged, and wealth continues to ascend into the hands of the affluent, who devise diverse investment strategies that allow them to generate profits, aided by their political partners. 

Stock buybacks are where a company uses it's available cash to buy its own stock back from the public thereby raising share prices. Until 1982 this practice was illegal. Why was it illegal? Because it's insane for companies to use billions of dollars in capital to inflate their own share prices while at the same time not paying people living wages and failing to reinvest in their own infrastructure and business. When the pandemic hit the airlines started screaming for government aid, meanwhile in the years leading up to that American Airlines spent $12 billion on stock buybacks.

The Koch family has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding climate change denial.

Gates wanted to keep low income countries from obtaining access to covid-19 vaccines, but was overruled and now the Gates Foundation will allow a "narrow waiver during the pandemic."

Elon Musk has literally and unapologetically screwed his subordinates and furloughed thousands of workers while collecting billions in personal compensation.

In 1969 the USA landed men on the moon when the total computing power of the planet was less than my phone. We could have funded further space exploration via NASA/ISRO/JAXA/ESA, but why bother when a billionaires can dodge taxes and use public subsidies to fund an operation that doesn't even get someone into orbit, something the Russians did in 1961, as a tourist attraction?