I would offer to finance a restaurant that catered to people on a diet. This would include partnerships with Jennie Craig, Weight Watchers, NOOM, etc., and feature menus with low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, etc. choices. There would also be options for diners not on a diet. It would probably last a year before the novelty wore off.
If you had a billion dollars: What are some truly bizarre or weird or eccentric things you would do?
You better stick to just one of those groups because they don’t play well with each other.
Oh, that reminds me of another crazy thing I always wanted - the adjustable house.
You own a house, but you only ever use one or two rooms at a time most days. So 90+% is sitting idle.
So make a house in which the rooms dynamically adjust in size based on current usage. Walls shift, furniture moves around, stuff like that. Probably incredibly hard to pull off, and you’d need staff to make sure that things aren’t just lying around that would get in the way of everything moving. But what else is a billion dollars good for?
That reminds me of the book “Hyperion.” It is sci-fi and in that universe they have “far-casters.” Basically a portal from one place to another. Walk through as you would a doorway and you are in a totally different place. Even a different planet.
One character was so wealthy every door in his house was a “far-caster” so, walking room-to-room put you on another planet. His bathroom was a water world (no land…you pooped in that vast ocean).
As an aside…fantastic book. Well worth a read.
In book terms I think that meant you had a lot more than $1 billion though. Think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk money.
If we’re getting into sci-fi technologies here, I could do my adjustable house by combining a holodeck with a teleporter. Have the holodeck create whatever room you want at the moment (I’d have a lot of pre-sets, but you could also make up something new on a whim). But that stuff is all ephemeral. I’d still want to own real stuff, so have a transporter-enabled warehouse for all my stuff. When I call up a room on the holodeck, it automatically transports the appropriate “stuff” into it. I can open the library, take a book off the shelf, and then carry it into a different room, or even leave the house entirely with it, because the book itself is real.
I’d build a really nice country house on about 100 acres of lakeside property, and on that property I’d run the world’s largest dog rescue center. No cages – dogs would run loose in a large fenced area, and would have air conditioned doghouses and a staff to look after them. Most of them would be available for adoption to well-vetted homes, but I suspect most of them would prefer to remain in doggie nirvana. I’d also contribute generously to animal shelters on the rationale that most donors, like the Gates Foundation, focus on human needs while many animal services are inadequately funded.
I’d also get back to sailing, but not with anything extravagant. A modest 32- or at most 35-footer would do. Ironically, this billionaire would be inclined to buy a used one because I’m extremely partial to C&C Yachts, but they haven’t been made since 2017 when the company became defunct after a hostile takeover and financial shenanigans. Naturally, several dogs would accompany me on my sailing cruises – the presence of sailing canines was something I often noticed during my sailing days!
Also, I’d buy rare old books to add to my library.
I would be tempted to get one of those Beatles artifacts, the super collectible ones that go at auction for seven or eight figures. The kick drum head from the cover of Sgt Pepper. The Gretsch that George played on the Sullivan show. That kind of awesomely cool item that fellow fans would ooh and ah over.
Sorry to be a killjoy, but from what I can Google, Marvel’s version of Mjolnir has a head that’s about 13 cm x 13 cm x 21.5 cm. If made of iridium, it would weight about 180 pounds. That seems well within the range of even a moderately strong person, and an amateur weight lifter would have no problem with it. Maybe you could fund a research effort to find a way to stabilize neutronium.
Three great books, compiled int one thick volume.
All great ideas!
There are similar things, but I dunno about the monsters. Puzzles, yes.
More eccentric than bizarre or weird but as a vanity project I’d like to bankroll a pizza restaurant that used ridiculously high-quality ingredients. Like grinding their own flour for the dough every day with an onsite mini-mill; freshly picked hothouse tomatoes and herbs for the sauce; cheese from wheels of cheese instead of the usual plastic bags of restaurant-grade cheese; toppings from the highest quality cured meats. Find a couple of GOOD chefs and pay them any amount of money it took to keep them happy. Pies baked in the best quality pizza oven of course. The restaurant would never turn a profit, they’d have to charge fifty dollars a pie to break even, but I’d subsidize the restaurant simply so it could serve the best pizza humanly possible.
IIRC Mjolnir can’t be carried by any but a very few cuz magic. It has nothing to do with the weight (which is why it doesn’t smash tables or make big dents in the earth when put down).
Just saying…
There are a few “Certified” Pizza places that do just that- Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana.
Two in LA County- I went to one, great pizza. No pepperoni, but sausage is okay.
Yes, I know that that’s true in the Marvel universe, but Lumpy was talking about making a real life replica that would be too heavy “for anyone but the strongest people to lift”. I don’t think that’s possible unless the replica were made significantly larger than the movie prop.
Electromagnets.
I would also probably get some of my ideas into production (Netflix, miniseries, et al).
One of my biggest expectations with this OP of mine was someone was going to inevitably mention Lewis Black’s comedy bit about his personal “Ball-washer” (and he ain’t talkin’ about a golf assistant, neither 
), and you basically did, you just did a PG-rated homage version.
That sounds good, take my wording this way now, it improves the hypothetical.
Did any previous thread similar to this one of mine actually do the whole “Specifically only talk about weird eccentric and bizarre things” angle I did? I doubt it but let me know
That’s cool!, but none of those are particularly weird or eccentric in any way.
I’d probably straight-up purchase the mansion in Tomales, California where the last 50 minutes of the original Scream film take place. It would be Awesome! AND I’d let people visit pretty much whenever they wanted to, plus have big parties there
Real-life only please if you can help it 
The first one’s good, the last two there are pretty standard rich-person stuff, let’s try to stick to the odd-ball shall we?
Just don’t get ‘em wet.
Iridium is about twice as dense as lead, or nearly three times as dense as steel. So maybe “anyone but the strongest” was exaggerating things a bit but it could be heavy enough to require some serious wrist strength.
I always said that if I hit a lottery prize in the “I no longer have to worry about money” range, I’d open a small restaurant that served lunch only. There would be one thing on the menu every day, but it would change daily, and it’d depend on what I felt like making. One day, it could be polenta. Another day, ribs. Sushi yet another day. Just whatever struck my fancy. I would only charge enough to cover costs, including employees if I ended up hiring anybody. I’d open about 11am, and when the food ran out, I’d close. Or sooner, if I felt like it.
Working in a restaurant kitchen was the most fun job I ever had, but the pay and hours sucked. If I had the $$, I’d have the best part of the job without the worst parts. I even have a name for it: The Mush Room. Not that I’d specialize in mush, I just like the name. (I stole it from an old comic strip, Odd Bodkins.)
ETA: I’d also make sure that the local Porsche dealer had me on speed dial.
Similar in many ways, but no, not the same though I’m sure some overlap:
It would have been a perfect thread for the ball-washer as an example of the overlap.