Let’s say you have this (scroll down… :eek:) in your secret warehouse. It’s easy to imagine what you could do with a million dollars. Buy a new car, house, go on more vacations, ect. When you have a billion dollars, you can be more creative. If you have a trillion dollars, you can do the unthinkable.
What would you finance? What would you buy? There must be more exotic things that you could do with that kind of money. After you’ve bought islands, what’s next? The skies the limit. Or is it?
Aside from the whole “starving kids in Africa” stuff.
Good sized private grants to science researchers. Like, “here’s a huge donation NASA, keep being awesome! Call me if you need another computer guy”
I’d found a company to design a bio-diesel producing algae that converts typical sewage waste output to diesel fuel, then buy a couple politicians to ensure that the diesel production system was installed at every sewage plant in the US just to screw with the Koch brothers.
Then, with the $5 I have left, I’d get a coffee.
I would like to purchase a country. I would provide all services. Roads, schools, health, food, electricity, they just have to make me King for life. I think I could do that with a trillion dollars. I could probably do some small country with a billion but with a trillion I could get a decent sized country. Heck I could get a place like Iceland with a trillion, maybe Ireland.
Invade Iraq. Or Afghanistan. But not both.
Buy Apple, make cobbler.
Hm, contact the dudes who designed the loremo [gets 100 mpg] and arrange to open a factory here in the US with them. Find a location that does not require me to immediately install a fucking union, create a small factory to produce the loremo. [though I would also have them come up with a sprinter equivalent that gets in the same 100 mpg range if possible] and start producing the loremo. I can’t remember without looking if the loremo is gas or diesel, but if it is diesel I would make sure to push the idea of running it exclusively on biodiesel whenever possible. I would also start small, with perhaps 5 or 10 dealers and plunk down a small biodiesel manufacturing facility and station next to each loremo sales facility. It would be great if I could plunk down a miniature version of Old Man River City and make an efficient combined manufacture and support community and replace a slum area of rental houses and apartments with nice condo equivalent units with efficient infrastructure to replace an ageing one.
I figure I could go into a depressed job market with a few hundred to a few thousand jobs and make a difference in the community. Then with each of the 10 sales offices/biodiesel manufacture and sales offices, I could make a small difference there as well.
Get my ass to Mars.
Heavy funding in R&D on projects I believe in (sustainable energy, neuroscience, anti-poverty efforts, etc).
Paul Allen from Microsoft spent $300 million on an open to the public brain atlas, with a billion that would take up a good chunk of my funds, with a trillion it’d be a drop.
If you wanted to, and had no ethical concerns, you could probably hire a private army and take over a 3rd world country. Once you are dictator (and assuming the west doesn’t dispose of you out of fear of what you’d do) you can use the nations resources for your own advantages.
A billion dollars buys you a lot of nice things and a lot of temporary influence, but with a trillion you can probably change the course of human events over the next 50 years if you invest it properly the way people like Bill Gates are doing with his fortune.
2 possible scenarios, split into two posts.
Plan #1
Buy up land that is proven to be able to grow sugar cane. Plant sugar cane. Build cane ethanol distilleries (refineries? not sure of the terminology).
Get the best engineers I can think of to come up with 3 or 4 cars, a sports car, a commuter sedan type car, an SUV and a truck/work vehicle that are easily the equivalent of their petrol counter parts.
Found 2-3 factories to produce these cars.
Found a chain of convenience stores across the country using my ethanol on at least one pump each. Possibly more. Include normal fuel, for now.
Subsidize my ethanol cars personally, so that I can establish a market for them.
Wait, while my US based cars, driven with US sourced fuel, slowly grow in popularity.
Profit, eventually.
Buy a billionaire.
The biodiesel producing algae already exists. You would just need to focus the research on making it more cost competitive. And politicians aren’t that expensive. You’d at least have $10 left. Enough for coffee and bagel.
With my trillion I am financing research to make fusion power viable. It would be a huge project and a real game changer.
Plan #2
Find the largest landmass I can buy that is an island. Buy that island. I see several listed that are over a thousand acres, which is good.
Build infrastructure to support a small population, and essentially set up my own kingdom.
Alternately, though more messily, purchase or create a PMC, and take over a region, probably somewhere in Africa, and work to create an idyllic nation of stability. A well trained, well funded military is key to this, but it would be volunteers.
I want to be a warlord of a king so bad it hurts. 
Buy one billion and one $1 tacos.
I would create an institute of nuero science and invention. The focus would be on lowering consumption of all materials while maintaining a high standard of living. The purpose of the nuero science dept would be based on the premise that with the proper stimuli humans can accomplish far more than we are presently accomplishing, we can perform on a much higher level.
Not to threadshit, just to add a wrinkle: money doesn’t have any meaning independent of goods and services. It’s just a convenient means to lubricate the transaction of goods and services. So if a warehouse full of a trillion dollars just showed up, it’d massively devalue the money in circulation, to such a degree that you’d probably find laws passed (or court cases decided) pretty quickly that rendered your cash meaningless.
Maybe a more accurate question would be something like: suppose a trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services were somehow placed at your disposal (e.g., because you just conquered a major country and declared yourself dictator). What would you do with that much goods & services?
Do not fight the hypothetical.
Breakin the bank in the
Forum
I fought the hypothetical and the
Hypothetical won.
Damn, doesn’t scan.
You MONSTER! I, for one, would certainly NOT use the money to starve kids in Africa. That’s just cruel.
I’d colorize the moon.