The easiest (and safest) way to make money with a superpower, I think, is with technopathy or technokenesis. Corporations and cities are getting hit daily with hacking attempts and being able to see into someone’s network, find the bug, and eliminate it would be a ticket to easy money. No shady dealings or shadowy meetings needed, you can just walk into an enterprise, let them know that you’ll fix their stuff for $5K or whatever, than let it rip. As your rep grows, you can charge more and more and of course, big corporations get billed higher than a small town or whatever.
If you want stupid easy and lazy, you pick a power that gets you several of these possibilities: time travel. Go into the future, and you have all the ‘precog’ options to make money. Go into the past, and invest in Apple or any other big name business. For that matter, look up ‘finds’ of historical wealth as suggested for those with X-ray vision, and beat them too it (although that one skirts the ethics issue).
If you want to make the world a better place and also get rich, you could secure famous lost works of art/literature/etc by getting them prior to them becoming ‘lost’ and place them somewhere secure but still temporally accurate and isolated, and then recover them contemporarily. Depending on how you dealt with them, they could be loaned anonymously while being verified, and later auctioned/sold the same way.
Not quite as easy as ‘create anything from thin air’ Molecule Man/Beyonder levels of power, but real easy.
Least useful? Probably the reverse of one of the powers mentioned in the thread already. Perpetual, unavoidable bad luck. Anything you do to find an easy life is bound to fail no matter what. For that matter, even if you were immune to the effects, if you had a jinx power that you didn’t directly control (evil eye or whatnot) you would have a hard time trying to do anything due to the harm you’d accidently bring to everyone else - something you’d have to work hard at to maintain the mentioned ethics.
So you’d probably end up as some sort of hermit or subsistence farmer in the middle of nowhere. Pretty much the opposite of the OP intent - but you’d be pretty anonymous!
This is most definitely not true. Options trades might be considered zero sum, but simple buys and sells are definitely not once you factor in time. Even small amounts of time add value.
Most of the replies involves either lotteries or predicting the future and illegal manipulation of some kind. So how can you keep it ethical and profitable?
Some ideas:
- super-healing power
- world-class musician (genre of your choice)
- financial wizard (legitimately)
- super-programmer - write the next ten HUGE software programs
The above do not meet the requirement for anonymity, but you won’t attract negative attention.
In many areas you make a shitload as a consultant, if you were suddenly endowed with the skills, knowledge and genius-level intelligence, you won’t be poor. Such people tend to only be known within their particular field.
Personal charisma. People just flat out like me. I can get any job I apply for. Doesn’t matter if I have the skills, because two weeks later I’ve talked myself into a promotion, and another one two weeks after that.
In months I’m on the board. Where I’m just assumed to have authority, I no longer have to even pretend to have ability. They make a special seat just for me. People like having me there. Soon I’m on the boards of other companies as well. I collect fat fee after fat fee, all for smiling and nodding my head.
I could even be benevolent, using my power to introduce ideas from others who don’t have my access. And I’m not taking from anyone, not harming anyone! People love me!
I have a feeling this would be significantly harder than you think. I mean, you have to get the money in the first place. And you have to be confident that there will be enough societal stability that you’ll keep earning your x%. Won’t do you much good to spend a few decades toiling, build up enough money to set you for eternity, and, oops, you deposited it in a bank in Moscow right before the Russian Revolution. And, whoops, you have a 17th century mentality but suddenly the trusted old banking institution which holds all your accounts has a 21st century mentality and your new account rep suddenly wants to clarify some details on your paperwork and…
But bad luck isn’t a super power. It’s a super curse.
As others have mentioned in this thread, it’s fairly non-obvious how to anonymously monetize super strength, flight, or a variety of the other more canonical super powers. That’s more what I was getting at than “if you have a supernatural curse on you, you’re screwed, right?”.
I walked about this with my son as we were getting dinner and his idea was that you would automatically be 70% good at something. You can get better with practice, but right out of the gate you’re already above average. Imagine hitting .700 in baseball or trying any other sport, music, cooking, or video games.
Maybe? I feel like most telekentic powers don’t work remotely through TV, so you’d have to talk your way into where that little machine is. Are those things done in front of a live audience? Is that audience eligible to win?
This was certainly one of the first that occurred to me. But I’m actually curious how rich you could really get just from roulette without ending up on a list of Very Suspicious Individuals maintained by some shadowy vegas security consortium.
Could you win $5K and walk out of a casino without anyone caring? Sure. But if you want, say, $50M to be able to really be set-for-life rich in a mansion somewhere, that’s a LOT of winning at roulette. At which point, it’s really just a job. And remember… you’re lazy.
So far I think the two clear winners are:
(1) time travel/precog, and be a successful day trader (they already exist, after all)
(2) matter transmutation, and sell gold/diamonds to various brokers
Lots of the rest of what people have suggested are:
(a) effectively having a full time job, but you’re just good at it
or
(b) likely to end up with you being investigated and found out by someone because of either a paper trail or a lack of a paper trail
There are a number of super heros that have the ability to cause others bad luck - that was the point of the second chunk of my first paragraph. And there are tons of superheros with poor control over their powers. Although that would be a more general issue, in that if you have any power but poor control over it, it would make it difficult to monetize and/or stay unknown.
Day traders might provide some value to the market, but if you’re making a huge fortune by day-trading based on precognition, your fortune isn’t coming from the extra wealth produced by the services daytraders provide to the market. Your fortune is coming from the losses of other investors who sell to you at low prices and buy from you at high prices.
I mean not really, even if you only ever bet red/black that’s only 25 bets from 5k to 50million. And it not too onerous, you aren’t digging in the dirt looking for diamonds, you are being treated like a high roller. You obviously need to lose some money here and there to alleviate suspicion, but it seems like a pretty cushy gig to me.
The main risk would be (assuming your super powers are effected by booze, Hancock style) having one too many comp’ed high end margaritas and telekenesis-ing the table across the room by accident
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Longshot’s luck power was conditional, though: it only gave him good luck if he were using it for altruistic reasons. If he tried to use it for personal gain, it was a bad luck power.
Both of these would, I think, be really hard to do with just telekinesis. For the lottery, to get the right ball to drop, you have to spot which of the 99 identical white balls, in motion, is the one with your number on it, you have to spot it before the normal selection method picks a different ball, and then you have to do it five more times.
For roulette, you have a different problem, in that making the ball bounce look realistic, while still hitting a very small moving target, is going to be really hard - and casinos are already on the look out for people cheating through non-super means, like magnets or whatever.
Casinos are a bad bet anyway, because a big part of their fraud detection is simply monitoring for people who are winning at a statistically impossible rate - which you’d need to do if you wanted to get rich off of gambling. They don’t need to prove how you were cheating to decide they’re tired of you taking their money, and kicking you out on the street. (Or burying you in the Nevada desert, if you go to one of the more “traditional” casinos.)
What activity are you going to pursue that will allow you to become very rich (a) without much effort, and (b) anonymously?
(Only 13 or 14 bets, I think… 10 bets is 1024x).
I’m genuinely curious what would happen if someone walked into a casino with $1, put it down on red, and then red won 20 times in a row. Do even high roller rooms at casinos have max bets? Would they just be banned (or worse) even with no proof of wrongdoing?
(I guess there’s an implicit assumption in this question that the existence of superpowers is not known to the general public. If this is in the xmen universe where mutants are known to be at large, no way casinos don’t have some SERIOUS “if-we-even-suspect-you-of-being-a-mutant…” policies in place…)
If you’re gambling, I think precognotion is going to be a LOT more useful than telekinesis. I don’t think there;s much aside from roulette that TK would help (assuming the slots are largely electronic). And even if the slots have a mechanical component, there are probably circuits that detect any kind of nudging as a potential form of cheating.
You can go to casinos and win small amounts - not enough to twig any alarms. A couple thousand here, lose a few hundred, say “Oh well, better quite while I’m ahead”, then go to the next casino down the road.
I suspect they have monitoring in place to see if someone comes in regularly and wins a bit TOO consistently. Plus, a big enough jackpot will get reported to the IRS - an I’d bet casinos share lists of those winners. If you win just a hundred bucks here or there, that may not be enough to trip any reporting but it’d be a lot more work, since you could only get a little bit of money every day.
I’m still holding out for precognition and a Powerball win.
That’s why poker is the way to go. If you can read minds, you can even admit that you read minds, and people will just believe that you are really good at reading people. I’ve played with some people who, if I believe in telepathy, I would swear they had it.
I don’t see anything unethical about it either. Poker players at casinos are either people there with money to burn, or they are rounders, looking for the people with money to burn. I suppose, since you can read minds, you can see the occasional person that is there with his life savings desperate to make their house payment or something, and help them out, rather than take their money.
I suppose that they would likely ask you to submit to some sort of search of your body for magnets or something, and investigate the table and dealer before they paid out, but if they couldn’t find anything amiss, they’d just chalk it up to extremely good fortune on you part.
They may ask you not to come back, but why would you want to?
That’s the trick, I think. I think it would be easy to rich with some effort but hitting .700 in MLB would get you noticed pretty quickly.