If Marc Benioff, "Davos Man," represents billionaire hypocrisy--giving prominent charity while working the system--what of sports team owners like the Nets' Tsai?

The New York Times Sunday Business section last week published C.E.O.s Were Our Heroes, at Least According to Them, a surprisingly tart essay from Peter S. Goodman, which--ah, makes sense--was adapted from his new book “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.”

He focuses on mega-wealthy Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who during last year's World Economic Forum--held online, rather than in the Swiss Alps village of Davos--claimed that CEOs were "the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources, their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly — not for profit, but to save the world."

Yes, acknowledges Goodman, Benioff had helped get protective gear to U.S. hospitals thanks to his connections in China. He adds:

But it was also fair to ask a pertinent question: Why was the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth dependent on the charity of a profit-making software company to outfit medical personnel with basic protection in the face of a pandemic? 

Individuals like Mr. Benioff had benefited from public goods financed by taxpayers — the schools that educated their employees; the internet; roads, bridges and other infrastructure enabling commerce. Then they deployed lobbyists, accountants and lawyers to master legal forms of tax evasion that starved the system of resources. He and his fellow billionaires could crow about giving back in part because of how comprehensively they had taken.

They work the system, Goodman writes, with numerous examples--and avoid taxes thanks to lobbying. So, while Salesforce lobbied for new taxes in San Franscisco, which should cost the company $10 million a year, "it was less than a trifle alongside the money that Salesforce withheld from the government through legal tax subterfuge."

And in Brooklyn

Reading about Benioff, I couldn't help thinking of billionaire Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, who used his connections in China and wealth to contribute ventilators and other valuable equipment. With fellow Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, the donations were worth more than $50 million, just for the ventilators.

More recently, the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation has gotten much mileage out of a ten-year, $50 million Social Justice Fund commitment, aimed to benefit "the BIPOC (especially Black) community," with a priority on Brooklyn.

So far there have been grants to individuals, support for a Basquiat exhibition and curriculum, and a new low-interest loan fund, plus a striking and perplexing neon art installation that purportedly honors the arena plaza's inadvertent prominence as home for protests, while also advertising the arena.

But the arena doesn't pay taxes, and paper losses--depreciation and amortization--push ownership of the arena company into loss territory even when, pre-COVID, it was making a profit. Same, most likely, for the Nets, since sports team owners get huge write-offs that are divorced from reality, as Pro Publica reported.