Give most of it away to free software foundation and put couple million to an low yield ethical index fund and start packing for some traveling.
If I woke up as a billionaire tomorrow I’d probably sleep in.
Take a day off?
Two chicks at the same time, man.
That’s it? If you had a billion dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
There making a reference to Office Space.
I know. What I wrote was Pete’s follow up.
I would invest it. Every year, I would withdraw the profits, so that my net worth stayed approximately the same.
I would throw an event in a different city each year.
I would get that money (“earned” from doing nothing more than investing it) IN CASH.
All the cash would be loaded up in a plane and dropped in a public place. It would be a spectacle. No advertising needed, word of mouth and social media would be more than enough.
At each event, I would remind people that the money dropping from the sky is merely the crumbs from a single billionaire. Money that I did not earn. Money that was taken from the fruits of their labor and added to my stock portfolio.
I would ask them to imagine how much more money billionaires are hoarding. I would then bid them a fond farewell until next year.
Oh, and also, maybe a nice condo in southeast Asia. Thailand, maybe. Somewhere chill and fairly inexpensive. Not because I deserve a nicer place, but because fuckyouallI’mrichbitchstillnotatotaldickheadthough.
help SO many people. I’d build homeless shelters etc. I always had the dream of building a whole shitload of apartments, and offering them on a sliding scale, or free if homeless. Hell, I’d be a billionaire. I’d probably just offer thme free anyway
- Hire an accountant. I assume I’ve entered some sort of tax hell for this, especially as a US citizen living overseas.
- pay off my house
- pay off US student loans since I assume there would be no way out of that
- send my wife to driving camp (she doesn’t have her license which is a liability out here) which costs > 300k JPY
- set up for our retirement. We have no kids to help us, so we need to have good investments in planning
- put ~50 million into other investments, savings, etc.
- replace my car with an electric vehicle
- get a new tractor for my farm
- build out the workshop with proper tools
- take care of the needs of any immediate family making sure to pay off any loans they have
- start looking at causes to set up donations with the goal of donating most of the money
It cracks me up that people are like “Hoarding a billion dollars is just morally wrong, so I’ll hoard $50 million instead and be a good person.”
Pick a lane, people. Hoard the wealth or don’t hoard the wealth, but stop feeling guilty about an imaginary scenario.
That’s two orders of magnitude different. It’s like a dollar versus a hundred dollars. That doesn’t sound hypocritical at all.
A few things:
- I have no idea how much retirement would cost (with buffer for needing care in advanced age since we have no children), so I pulled a number out of my ass with a lot of buffer
- If invested and it grows, that’s just more I can give away later. Again with the childless thing, anything we had left would go to charitable causes
- 50 mil is 5% of a billion dollars so ~95% of what I got would be moved to decent causes from the get-go
- Perfect is the enemy of good and I never claimed to have some moral highground to begin with. Doing (at least in my opinion) good things with 95% of the money given to me certainly is better than 0% of it.
so much lottery tickets!!!
Besides paying off my debt and repairing my house as well as installing a geothermal heat pump, set up investments, basically all the normal shit one would do if they suddenly got a large windfall?
Buy up land to turn into forests, figure out a way to set it up in trusts or something such that nobody will have the right to do a full clear cut for timber any time soon, but maintenance cuts are fine.
Set up about a gigawatt worth of wind power generation in my country if the billions are multiple rather than exactly a billion euros or dollars or whatever. Our power usage peaks at around 1.6 gigawatts in the winter. Wind’s unpredictable and I don’t expect it to completely fill all demand, but rather make electricity so cheap that the fossil plants wouldn’t turn a profit most of the time. Solar would be nice too, but it’s borderline useless for about 2-4 months a year, I’ve forgotten the exact numbers.
Can’t change the world with a few billion, but could noticeably improve one particular corner of it - and one that has a particularly dirty power grid at that. Driving an EV is STILL as bad as an ICE here because in the winter our electricity comes not from something as beautifully clean as coal or gas, but fucking shale rock…
Bonus, not only would I improve the availability of cheap green power, our government is currently partially funding heating system conversions from SFHs in cities and small towns, to replace solid fuel furnaces with heat pumps (ideally) or at least newer, cleaner burning furnaces, with the goal of improving air quality. Meaning the government would essentially be helping people make the most of the cheaper and greener electricity.
I’m not a fan of cannibalism, but I guess waking up a billionaire would make for a good breakfast opportunity.
It’s not cannibalism; billionaires don’t have enough empathy to be considered human
Ouch!
Lots of perfectly valid answers here about decent humane things to do with the money and power, and I certainly hope I would do things like end homelessness or otherwise meaningfully improve the world.
That said.
I’d build a full-scale, 1:1 replica of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, from The Next Generation. I’d run it like the Biltmore; technically it would be a private residence, but I’d charge people to take tours. But any time I wanted, I could close it down for a few days and just hang out on the bridge or in main engineering and vibe out to the THRUM THRUM THRUM of the warp core.
But solve homelessness first, of course.
There we go, there’s the childlike wonder and whimsy we so desperately need.
Make it so! :D
Donate 900 million, give to friends and family 90 million, invest 10 million
The question is: donate to whom?
Good question, it would take some serious research but I would spread it over many different foundations and non profits.
I also wouldn’t donate it all at once, I will donate it in donations that are relative to the places’ needs over several years.
i would start looking for causes to fund. extinction rebellion for example would get quite hefty sum
Finally sleep in.
Exactly, finally get some sleep
You know I think about this all the time. A lot of those rich fucks are on the hook for meetings and bulshit all the time. If I had to wake up at 430 am every morning to get ready for meetings would it even be worth it to be rich?
We’ll… Yes, probably lol but still it makes me feel better about it. At least I can kind of choose myown schedule with my current job. Not rich but I do get to sleep in sometimes.
And sometimes, every once in a while, that is priceless.
