Real. Give me a state of the art lab for multidisciplinary scientific research and some of the world's best scientists to do as they wish in that lab. I have so many unanswered questions about the universe.

Why did various EU regulators had to tell Valve that their gambling business is illegal? It remains legal in some and so he continues to run them there.

Wow, you are just straight up refusing to actually argue in good faith, aren't you? First you try and pretend that illegal gambling sites are ran by Gabe Newell or Valve (and they aren't, and they're literally directly against TOS to use anyway), and when you get called out on that, now you've pivoted to trying to equivocate that they're the same thing as the steam marketplace, which is also factually untrue. Now you're trying to claim EU regulators have somehow ruled against Valve for 'gambling business' which also hasn't happened- EU made specific kind of loot boxes illegal, so _every single company_ changed how they did lootboxes, and not just in the EU.

Lootboxes are gambling. Courts in multiple jurisdictions like Netherlands, Belgium or Austria off top of my head agree. I realise it’s normalised in some countries and some people don’t want to admit they have a problem, but that doesn’t mean people have to accept it. You’re not the best at googling I guess.

Look at them goalposts move!

Please enlighten me how did they move. Let’s have a laugh.

I already listed them, and lmao your position literally went from 'Gabe Newell personally owns and operates multiple illegal child gambling sites' to 'well gambling bad'

Gabe Newell is a CEO of a very small company, staff-wise, can’t feign ignorance. That company runs multiple games with lootboxes and doesn’t make any attempt at restricting gambling from underage customers. They were restricted from doing so in some jurisdictions, can’t feign ignorance. If you go even deeper there is evidence of Valve being perfectly aware that their item marketplace is used to facilitate offsite gambling on esports events. Gabe Newell runs multiple online casinos. Are you one of those people that think Uber is a tech company and not a taxi company because they have an app?

> Leviathan has two gyms, a 250 square meter beach club with a spa and bar, diving platforms, and whatever a "dedicated drinks pantry" is. The cherry on top: a room with 15 of the finest gaming PCs ever assembled. Yup, research vessel.

> It’s easy to secure so that nobody can kidnap you. *Pirates have entered the chat* Yar, hold me grog me matey. *Somali pirates have entered the chat* Look at me. I am the captain now.

> 15 gaming PCs Priorities, eh?

It turns out that things are complicated, and that a company that is pro consumer in so many ways that almost nothing else is can get praised for that and denigrated for doing predatory loot boxes. And that a billionaire owner can get praised for maintaining a pro consumer company and denigrated for running a loot box racket and buying yachts. All at the same time. It's so exhausting how people like you have to go on every thread and complain that people are happy about something instead of mad about everything, energy single time the company comes up. *sigh*

You’re really going out of your way to baby face the corporation that would fuck and sell your kids if it made them a buck. It’s one of the sickest things about Americans, Their NEED to love and defend billionaires and brands. It’s demented

Can't really do anything but roll my eyes at this ridiculous hyperboly

Go fuck your Gabe body pillow

Well the submarine on their is for research afaik (the hospital too I guess) he is doing ocean floor mapping afaik with manned submarines

Well that's not fair, a lot of his money also comes from scammers laundering stolen credit card funds through steam game keys.

Here's another way you can look at Valve. They are a case study of how a privately held company, a company that does not have a boardroom of investors, demanding maximum possible short term profit, all the time... Can actually allocate capital more efficiently, and generally more fairly, and innovate better than a ravenous hoard of interest/rent seekers. You can look at them as essentially a counter argument to the modern American concept of a publically (stock market) traded company. While what they do, the tech, the platform, the games... while that's rather cutting edge... the way they do, that's actually old school, at the level of how a business fundamentally works, is legally defined. They are not 'beholden to capital' so much as they are ... 'beholden to Gabe.' You would think business majors and economists could look at this and go... oh, turns out capital markets aren't efficient, at all! We are at the point now where a privately held, effective monopoly is... actually less evil than basically every other major tech firm that is entirely investor-returns / capital-rent driven... where probably roughly 20%-40% of the people/orgs on all those other boards ... are just the same people, forming basically a de facto conspiracy. Basically, being beholden to a single, publically visible capitalist, who doesn't have to show you his internal books... appears to be objectively better than being beholden to many, obfuscated, invisible capitalists, despite them actually having to show your their books.

> ethical billionaire A close example is [Warren Buffett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Philantropy). He's about as ethical as they come IMO. He still lives in the same house he bought over 60 years ago, and he has given away a _ton_ of money: > As of June 2025, Buffett had donated over $60 billion to charitable causes. Hearing him talk about it, it's apparently really hard to give away that amount of money. He wants to give away something like 99% of his money, but he seems to really like his job and that takes priority for him. He has claimed his children are tasked w/ giving the rest away within 10 years of his passing, outside of the little he has marked for inheritance.