[rednalexa]

Isn’t Patagonia privately owned though?

[ceejayoz]

Not just privately owned, but given away irrevocably by said owner to charity, and done in a way that intentionally incurred a large tax bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate...

[ravitation]

Chouinard is probably marginally better than your average billionaire, but it was almost certainly not done in a way that didn't also very clearly benefit him, and, more importantly, his family.

https://qz.com/patagonia-s-3-billion-corporate-gift-is-also-...

That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.

[blktiger]

Adam Connover has a video that pretty directly contradicts this assertion. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in-between. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cu6EbELZ6I

[unsupp0rted]

I didn’t know this before and now I’m inclined to buy Patagonia items at every opportunity.

Seriously- I’ve had my eye on a Patagonia black hole duffle and now I’ll pull the trigger.

[sota4077]

Kinda ironic that the good deeds of Patagonia were written about on a website that we cannot even read because there is a paywall to access the information. Talk about seeing two sides of a spectrum haha.

[joecot]

That's the thing. A privately owned company can keep its morals if it has them, because the owners don't answer to anyone else. But as soon as a company accepts Venture Capital funding, or goes public, morals go out the window. The original owners no longer have control, and can't decide what the goal of the company is anymore. The goal is now to make money in whatever method is possible.

Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.

[nocoiner]

I don’t know the details of Patagonia’s ownership either now or before they put it in the trust, but Reddit is also privately owned (for now, anyway).

[mvdtnz]

So is Reddit