Steve Forbes tells Washington Post readers to ‘thank the billionaires’; op-ed backfires spectacularly

‘He probably didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Media, took to the Washington Post on Monday to talk about the “titanic shift” that has occurred in the world of giving with an op-ed headlined “How billionaires are fixing philanthropy.”

It’s possible that a chunk of the nearly 300 (at this writing) reader comments were posted by those who hadn’t gotten further than those first four words — “How billionaires are fixing …’ — before they laid into Forbes, who himself is estimated to be worth around $430 million.

In the op-ed, Forbes credits wealthy individuals for taking up the banner of social justice, “sparking a golden age of philanthropy not seen since the days of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan.”’

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