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?
Pay for drone strikes on all the world’s dictators.
Hire a LOT of hitmen
Take power everywhere i could and force permanent wealth equality.
Then redistribute the rest.
[ Removed by Reddit ]
Develop High yield and sophisticated lab controlled food production facilities that could run all year without fear of climate instability to rev the throttle on sustainable long term food production.
I would start a non profit foundation that develops and maintains cost effective, autonomous boats to clean up the great garbage patch.
I am envisioning something like a small fleet of autonomous boats that dock with large motherships dump their cargo of garbage and head out again The motherships can also work with manned crafts that can handle heavier e
The motherships should be nuclear powered, have water treatment plant so the garbage can be dryed and brought to land .
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! 😅
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
Great idea! But what happens then?
Not my problem because I would have to die too.
You don’t need to be a billionaire to eat the rich, but it definitely helps to insulate you from the legal ramifications thereof.
Best that I can think of would be to create an endowed institute of political scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, et cetera, dedicated to studying and developing ways to counter right-wing populism, and de-program people who fall under its sway.
Let’s congratulate you for being the only poster that did not want to go on a killing spree. If you want to change the world, you can do that by killing people. If you want to improve the world and start that with killing people you will never succeed. Thanks for that.
Leftist fascism killing people is not better than right wing fascism killing people. In the end everybody is dead and nothing is better. People after the second world war understood that. We have forgotten that and start looking for blood again, just to learn that expensive and painful lesson again.
Move to an undisclosed remote location and start posting massive crypto bounties on the heads of the shittiest people in the world. Like, $100M a pop. Pay a digital sweatshop to spam social media with AI generated posts and memes about it until the whole world is aware. Then wait. See if anyone is able to collect.
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.
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.
One million dollars per assassin until one of them eventually gets through to Trump, then Vance, than Musk, Than the Republican Supreme Court. After that, a 50,000 dollar bounty on any sitting member of Trump’s Cabinet and any sitting member of the GOP.
Even if it takes every penny to finish that list and I end up right back where I started. I’ll still consider it money well spent.
Anything less than a full Nuremberg level cleanse of nazi’s in America is just not going to be sufficient.
Kill them all.
And I’m not being even the least bit facetious.
$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.
distribute guillotines
Kill off the other billionaires.
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.
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I would set up a program where the teachers in Philadelphia public schools would have their school supplies highly subsidized by myself.
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The local food banks would receive five figure donations directly from myself.
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I would look into water retention and distribution in drought stricken parts of Mexico. If I could help I would leverage my money effectively to make sure humans have access to safe drinking water in the region. If acting directly would cause harm I would fund researchers until an appropriate solution could be found.
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Create an app that teaches the indigenous languages of the Americas while hiring native speakers for accuracy.
Edit:
- Donate to an owl sanctuary.
I like your very targeted responses!
With money in the billions, I agree that I couldn’t not help fellow humans first.
Your proposals also have some fairly immediate benefits to a number of different groups of underserved people.
And then you even came back in the end to include some of the critters as well!
I like your style.
If I got billions of dollars at this point how could I not throw a little at the owls. I would feel guilty everyday I open my subscriptions.
It is a nice feeling to see it means something to all of you!
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