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?
You get to keep only enough to maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area
Am I allowed to still be employed to earn an income for my own lifestyle?
Anyhow, probably fund lab-grown egg and meat (lab grown dairy already exists) and deal with the red tape and political obstacles it is facing.
Nuke mar a lago from space
Kick them in the nuts (or the stomach, in case they don’t have nuts), because relying on individuals with money to solve our problems is one of our fucking problems.
Hire assassins to take care of the 1%
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.
Find out the best application of money to buy companies and turn them into worker coops.
I’d be hesitant to use the money to do anything political in my country. Have watched Musk throw around money during the last presidential election in the states and it’s not a good look.
So that leaves some kind of charity. Charities benefit from economies of scale so it would be better to give more money to a single charity than to split it up amongst many charities. Probably would have to start my own since I don’t trust many of the existing ones (too much money going on executive pay). Pretty sure dysentery is the biggest killer worldwide so would put half into that, then maybe half into libraries in my country. Libraries are a bit of a selfish choice but they have a lot of social utility beyond just having books (by my own logic I should be putting it all into dysentery too).
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.
Assassins
I like where your mind is at, truly the best decision.
Invest the money, and use the after-inflation income to do the work.
That way, you have a constant and near-permanent resource stream with which to do the work. It’s only if the markets crash as a whole that you need to worry, and nothing says you cannot build additional revenue streams along side that wealth.
I would start with the most pressing issues for Canada - housing, and the homeless crisis that arises from shitty wages combined with exploding costs. Buy large tracts of land within each city, then economically force the cities to approve large arcologies that blend residential with business spaces. Make it super-attractive for even the wealthy to want to rent homes there, but turn around and then make assisted living units available in those same areas to low-income families and homeless people who want to get off the street. Have those communities to be tightly integrated across all social strata, so everyone benefits. Plus, actual social support that helps those traumatized by homelessness to get their lives together and return to being contributing members of society.
In the US, so free health insurance for those making under 100k for 6 months (or likely less - whenever the money runs out). Maybe that would give enough people a taste of universal healthcare that they would start voting for policies that get us closer to that.
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.
I would develop some city neighborhoods and set up some community land trusts to run them.
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.
Invest it, assuming 5% return, spend the interest money of 250 million per year on feeding the hungry, educating kids, and helping animals. Somewhere along the way, buy a couple of beers for myself.
