I’m working on this myself! You would be amazed what you can come up with on a much smaller budget.
If you had a billion dollars: What are some truly bizarre or weird or eccentric things you would do?
Buy a car racing track. Jump start investigative journalism in hundreds of underserved communities across America by hiring eager writers, paying them a living wage, and rewarding them further for good work. Buy a winery and hire recent oenology grads for rotating two year terms to run it. I’d hire experienced consultants to keep an eye on them too. Start a film production company/studio focused on small budget films by minority writers and directors.
Another thing I would do is bring back the IMDB message boards. All the other boards that tried to replace it failed. I’d buy the IMDB site and bring back the message boards.
I’d find politicians I don’t like, and buy the house next to them and just have people annoy them endlessly.
I’d hire people to make new seasons of shows that ended on cliffhangers. I’d create new seasons of shows like the sarah conner chronicles, or last man on earth, which were cancelled on cliffhangers.
I’d start a stand up comedy club, and treat the comedians well. Most get treated like shit by club owners, but I love stand up comedy. I’d run the place in the red so that the comedians made plenty of money, and I’d just hang out with them and talk to them when they stopped by the club to work.
Donate money to those people who are trying to clone the woolly mammoth. If they are successful, set up a hunting lodge. Gunpowder, metal, and plastic will be forbidden. If you want to dine on mammoth steak, like your ancestors did, you have to hunt it with a stone-tipped or bone-tipped spear, like your ancestors did. (And avoid the sabre-toothed cats, like your ancestors did.)
Hire genetic engineers to create an animal that is basically a stomach and a tooth. You feed it, and it makes ivory. Its purpose would be to make ivory so plentiful and so cheap, that elephant poaching would become unprofitable.
When the Cro-Magnon hunted mammoths, it was with pits, and in large groups.
Why not just invest in nano-technology and develop a method of making ivory in a vat without any animal being involved?
Well that would be much less truly weird, bizarre, and mind-blowingly eccentric than the stomach with a tooth! 
Or else getting really lucky:
Oh - just one more thing. Set up two college scholarships – one for botany students (in memory of my father) and one for theatre students (in memory of my high-school drama teacher).
I was an engineering student and at the time would have agreed that this would be “some truly weird, bizarre, or mind-blowingly eccentric things”.
Lol- 
Of course, since they had no written language…
On that note, putting aside legality it would be interesting to do genetic breeding experiments on humans.
They could find the most compassionate, pro-social and kind people, and breed them. Then breed the children who are the best at that. Do that for 5-10 generations, and you probably have a species of human were unconditional love and compassion is the default. Its a strong argument against the existence of god if that is all it takes to create a world full of love and compassion.
In my opinion, biologicals would be more likely to produce results faster than vats, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.
If you can prevent predators from taking advantage of the compassion and kindness, and victimizing them, that might be an interesting experiment.
nevermind.
I was wondering about something similar to this a few days back. I was reflecting that humans apparently have a genetic propensity for war. Humans organizing into groups and then one group going out to commit organized violence against another group seems innate in our nature. It appears to predate all of our historical records.
And I wondered why this was. Organized violence like this carries a cost in injuries and deaths and that cost is disproportionately born by young people. You would think that such disadvantageous genes would have been bred out of us long ago. But we’re still as warlike as ever.
There is reactive aggression, which is the emotionally charged form of violence with loss of impulse control.
And there is proactive aggression, which is a cold, planned and calculated.
Humans are low in reactive aggression and high in proactive aggression.
Chimpanzees are high in both reactive and proactive aggression
Bonobos are low in both reactive and proactive aggression.
You can put a million human beings together in a city and there is very little violence. A million of many other animals and there would be mass violence if they were all together.
Anyway, one reason humans are good at proactive violence is that we would target weaker people or smaller tribes. You could take a lot of resources that way (women, land, food, etc). The benefits need to outweigh the costs. its the same with industrialized warfare. If a european nation thinks they can invade a smaller and weaker nation and take all their natural resources and keep everyone as slaves, the benefits outweigh the costs (at least up until the 20th century. In the 19th century or before, colonialism provided a net benefit to imperialists).
But there is also the sad fact that if one tribe prepares for war and no others do, then every other tribe gets destroyed. Humans that weren’t prone to proactive, cooperative aggression got steamrolled by the ones that did and driven extinct.
FWIW, proactive aggression has some good things too. Humans are more egalitarian than other primates in part because about a million years ago we evolved language abilities to ambush and kill alpha male bullies in our tribes. We would stab and stone them to death when they were vulnerable (when they were asleep, on hunting parties, etc). This pushed the worst dark triad traits out of the gene pool, and humans somewhat self domesticated.
FWIW, this self domestication could be one reason homo sapiens outcompeted other hominids like Neanderthals
As for why humans might have become domesticated in the first place, hypotheses abound. Wrangham favors the idea that as early people formed cooperative societies, evolutionary pressures favored mates whose features were less “alpha,” or aggressive. “There was active selection, for the very first time, against the bullies and the genes that favored their aggression,” he adds. But so far, “Humans are the only species that have managed this.”
But sadly, if other human tribes engage in organized warfare and you do not, then you get overrun.
Bonobos supposedly had aggression largely bred out of them because they never had to compete for food or territory, while chimpanzees did.
Sadly, evolution makes a species about as aggressive or loving as it needs to be to survive.
[quote=“Wesley_Clark, post:136, topic:1030356”]
You could take a lot of resources that way (women, land, food, etc)
[/quote] [emp added]
Excuse me!?
It’s a sad reality that for much of human history capturing women was seen as a legitimate goal for fighting.
Have you read the torah? Historically it was common to either kill or enslave the males and male children, and rape the women.
Life is a horror movie and evolution has no morals. Evolution invented good and evil.
When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. **11 **If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. **12 **If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. **13 **When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. **14 **As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. **15 **This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
Moderating:
This is a light-hearted thread about how to splurge on a vast amount of money. If you want to discuss the dark side of human nature, the objectification of women, or the economic benefits of war, please take it to another thread.