You get to keep only enough to maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area, the rest of it has to go towards improving the world in some way.
Edit: Given the previous rules that you must maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area, would you rather choose to opt out and not have the money at all?
Expand food banks and shelters. Then donate water to places that need it.
This completely. You cant end capitalism with that kind of money, but you can provide cheap or free alternatives to basic needs to force the price-gouging vendors to actually compete for once and align their businesses better with the consumer.
5 billion is a lot, but it’s not quite change the world money.
I’m not looking to go on a murder spree, even if there are people out there who might deserve it. Not to mention that going after other billionaires is basically the one thing that billions of dollars can’t insulate you from.
I’d probably find an underserved region of the world, start up a hospital and health clinic, pay for good doctors, and treat patients for free for as long as we still have money.
Buy the US House and Senate.
$5 B / 435 = 11,494,252 per person. Sounds do-able. Shit, Bob Menendez sold out for $480,000. 11 mil. would go a LOOONG way.
Find out the best application of money to buy companies and turn them into worker coops.
Idk, whatever I can come up with would probably have massive unintended negative consequences.
distribute guillotines
Kill off the other billionaires.
I would donate the vast majority to education in the rest of homelessness
$5b wouldn’t do much in the grand scheme of things but it would make me the wealthiest person in my city 10x over. I’d fund progressive campaigns across the board to stack the legislate with like-minded people and then work on building my local community and hope that it has leeching effects on the surrounding area, state(s), country.
I feel like we have very different beliefs on what “grand scheme of things” means because I don’t believe $5b will make an immediate difference right away for most people, but you can implement small things that will create ripple effects that greatly change the grand scheme of things for the future.
There are billionaires out there right now who are investing their money in trying to solve the world’s problems. Bill Gates has given away $60 billion dollars of his own money so far through his foundation as of the end of last year.
That money goes further being spent on developing nations as opposed to the USA so people don’t seem to notice. The WHO is trying to eliminate malaria by 2050 and we’ve gone from there being ~1,000,000 deaths per year in 2000 to ~300,000 cases per year in 2024.
Wholesale murder of my fellow billionaires
Great idea! But what happens then? There’d be some fear, but more importantly, a certain vacuum of power. How could you make sure another power-hungry, sociopathic populist wouldn’t rise? Or, again more importantly, make sure people cannot fall into these traps again, which only happens due to a lack of ideology, generalized ignorance and a belief in ‘moral relativism’ (among other issues)?
Btw, Frank Herbert explored this in Dune… it requires a virtually immortal prophet! 😅
Great idea! But what happens then?
Not my problem because I would have to die too.
People who seek power being more scared that being exploitative has consequences, so they limit exploitation.
It took hundreds of years of revolts to get from absolute monarchies to representative systems in most European countries. You could argue the French revolution failed because it was succeeded by Napoleon. You could also understand it as an important step forward.
Take another example in Europe. Initial plans were to create an US style capitalism in Western Germany after WW2. However it was understood this would create a large class of disenfranchised and poor people. This would have given communism a chance to become the dominating ideology in Europe. So instead capitalism had to be coated with social security, access to opportunities by education, access to home ownership… Structures that were subsequently damaged and destroyed after the collapse of the Soviet Union as now the ruling class thought themselves to be able to exploit people with impunity. Something that will fail eventually, but get much worse until then.
It is like brushing your teeth. Yes they will get dirty again. But not having the perfect solution to keep them clean forever cannot dissuade you from brushing them regularly. On the contrary it makes it all the more important to keep brushing them.
People who seek power being more scared that being exploitative has consequences, so they limit exploitation.
Or you just bias the power vacuum to be filled with even more paranoid and ruthless nutjobs, because the more sensible psychopaths choose to avoid the consequences you are proposing. We see this fairly consistently when authoritarian governments get coup’d - the person most likely to take the place of a bloodthirsty dictator who knows he could get assassinated at any moment is an even more bloodthirsty future dictator.
When authoritarian governments get coup’d and there is external influence seeking to further destabilize. Also every authoritarian dictator needs a class of people loyal to the regime, who fall into the category of people wanting power but also staying alive.
We also see many dictators that got more paranoid over time as they ruled too long, because there was no opposition to keep them in check until things exploded fully.
Top tier reply
You don’t need to be a billionaire to eat the rich, but it definitely helps to insulate you from the legal ramifications thereof.
Nuke mar a lago from space
I would fund community-led projects that align with my values such as:
- mutual aid collectives
- community-run gardens, libraries, and clinics
- labor and tenant unions / cooperatives
- intentional communities
- food pantries / soup kitchens
- parks and other 3rd spaces
- art collectives
- sustainability initiatives (rooftop solar, heat pumps, microgrids, rewilding, permaculture / indigenous farming practices, etc.)
- public multimodal transportation infrastructure
My focus would be on empowering people to help each other even after the money runs out.
You get to keep enough to maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area
Don’t know why I must move to a cheap area… no, I would probably decide to stay here at least for half of each year. My lifestyle remains modest as well, but I would actually rebuild some parts of this old house.
the rest of it has to go towards improving the world in some way.
There’s only a small part of the world that I could actually influence so far in my life.
With the billions, I would try to expand this radius of course, but only slowly, only reluctantly, trying to stay wise. I would focus at first on the ones that are closer to me, and mitigate their needs. You did not require me to improve the whole world after all.
Yeah, cheap area will likely be a not-so-desirable place, unless you’re the type who likes to live in the boonies.
Thats the point.
The money isn’t for you, and you don’t get any of the benefits of having it. The only reason I allowed for a stipen for a modest living in a cheap area is because I knew that half the comments would be “First I buy land build houses for me and all my friends and family, buy everyone cars, and fund all their colleges, then with the hundred million left over, I’ll help some homeless people” OR if I would have said you get no money at all, everyone would have said they wouldn’t have time to do anything good because they still had to work full time and half to afford their bills. So, the compromise is you get a modest lifestyle in an undesirable area fully funded, or no money at all and you can continue to work full time and a half to afford your basic ass lifestyle while not helping anyone.
Edit: Given the previous rules that you must maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area,
It said that I get money for such a lifestyle.
But now you add that I must actually move before I even get that little money.
You definitely want to clarify your “Question”.
would you rather choose to opt out and not have the money at all?
No, I would still play that game, but maybe my way of spending would concentrate even more on those where I expect something back.
you can continue to work full time and a half
I don’t have that.
your basic ass lifestyle while not helping anyone.
I don’t have that either.
I’d immediately invest most of it in stable, developed economies where the far-right doesn’t seem close to taking power—so somewhere like Finland or Singapore—and invest the rest in Syria because God knows they need it. This way I’ll have a permanent stream of change-the-world money that I can use to support pro-democracy and worker organization efforts in the third world and in countries such as Turkey where there are serious efforts to democratize. With whatever remains from that I’d then go around funding relief efforts in Africa and the like.
Robots that sow kelp and kill zombie urchins
Set up a global
bountyGoFundMe that anyone can contribute to anonymously.It keeps an up-to-date ranking of everyone worth over 1 billion, and pays out to anyone who removes someone from the list.
