Back in the late 1990s, long before he became one of the most philanthropic and altruistic captains of industry that the world has ever known, Bill Gates was perceived as a ruthless enfant terrible businessman—a Justice Department-thwarting swashbuckler whom Scott McNealy, the former C.E.O. of Sun Microsystems, referred to as “probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age.” Bob Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com and a personal associate of Gates, compared him and his emphatic partner, Steve Ballmer, to “huge teenage boys who don’t know how big they’ve gotten, and they keep knocking things over.” At the time, many feared that Gates was going to gobble up American industries, one by one, and become as seemingly omnipotent as a modern-day John D. Rockefeller.

Two decades later, humbled by regulation and perhaps wiser with age, Gates has steadily turned his attention to other legacy-defining pursuits. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding the eradication of malaria, H.I.V., and polio around the globe; agricultural development in Africa; projects to give millions of people access to clean water; and countless other causes.

As perhaps the first teenage genius of the Internet Age, Gates has blazed trails that his successors continue to follow. In many influential Silicon Valley circles, its widely assumed that Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos will inevitably force the hands of government regulators as their companies approach (or pass) the trillion-dollar market-capitalization threshold. But Gates’s second act as a magnanimous doer of good deeds also appears to be a harbinger of the future for many successful technologists who have ascended to great heights. I was reminded of this thought on Sunday evening after it was reported that Marc Benioff, the co-founder and co-C.E.O. of Salesforce, agreed to purchase Time for $190 million.

Benioff is following in the tradition of Mike Bloomberg, who bought a struggling BusinessWeek for $5 million, plus debt and liabilities, in 2009; Bezos, who bought The Washington Post for $250 million a few years later; and, most recently, Laurene Powell Jobs, who bought a majority stake in The Atlantic. In all cases, new ownership has revivified the properties. But at what point does one single person have too much influence? Are the people who made their fortunes in one distinct arena qualified to enter different fields, simply because they have the money? Or is that the continuation of a world in which young adults make the fundamental distinctions about totemic notions like privacy? Benioff has indicated that he isn’t going to be involved in the management of Time, but it’s hard to imagine that he’s just going to blindly support the property sans the curiosity of a guy who built a colossal business and planted a mammoth flagship skyscraper in America’s richest pot of gold.

In my experience, many of these modern-day Rockefellers share one common trait: a day-one mentality in which they look at every day of their job as the first day of their job. “I talk often about the importance of maintaining a Day mentality. It’s always Day 1, and I work hard to apply that mindset to everything I do,” Bezos recently tweeted, when he announced that he was giving $2 billion to charity. (Appropriately, his philanthropic endeavor is called the Day One Fund.) But the response to his eventual benevolence was less than kind. On social media, people had a “is that it?” mentality. CNBC put together a chart, noting that $2 billion for Bezos was the equivalent to $1,187 for the average American. As one person said to me last week after the Bezos announcement: “Anyone who is worth $168 billion and still wakes up every morning like it’s the first day of work isn’t a good businessman—they’re kind of a sociopath.”

In an almost parodic interview with David Streitfeld of The New York Times, during which he was getting a massage, Benioff texted Streitfeld “a cartoon image of a man under a towel with cucumbers on his eyes.” In the conversation, it was clear that Benioff, too, adheres to something like the day-one theory. “I live with a beginner’s mind,” Benioff texted the Times in the interview about his latest acquisition, which Benioff followed up with a screenshot of a quote from the Zen master Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.”

Back in his day, Rockefeller was considered a monster on account of his laser-focused attention to controlling cost (like Amazon) and ruthless approach to destroying competitors (like Facebook), and a belief that he alone was the best person to shape society (like almost everyone in Silicon Valley). As Ron Chernow elaborates in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Rockefeller took advantage of the U.S. government’s inability to adapt to change, and a lack of regulation, to grow his business and place his imprint on society. We’re watching the same choreography play out in real time today, only with different side effects. And as these acquisitions of big media brands like Time and The Washington Post prove, the tech titans who are shaping the world today will be part of our lives for the next century or more, long after they’re gone. Buying newspapers, magazines, blogs, or adhering to the ruthless rules of other governments ensures that the world continues to be shaped in the way they believe it should be—even if we’re not sure that’s the way it should be shaped.