After establishing myself someplace else, I’d start offering bounties on heads. $1 million for the head of the person who owns “Card Services,” for example. Offer The Ukraine a billion to execute all the virus writers and shut down the servers they use. Declare international war on scammers. I could probably also outfit a couple of fleets of Q-ships to sail off Somalia and the Malay Straight and pick off pirates.
Is that a typo, or are you really going to paint the moon?
- I just read an article about self-driving cars and when they could be on the market. I would invest in that market to help bring the concept to fruition sooner than it otherwise would, though there are still regulations and laws that would have to be passed to make it all work well together.
- Spread money around to all the states and the Federal government to overhaul various infrastructure, including roads and the power grid. This would include investing in various research projects to create better and smarter infrastructure.
- Invest in various research projects to improve the battery (that’s used in cars) to help the electric car market and possibly other types of cars. Part of that would include finding ways to be totally off the grid so cars don’t even have to plug into the electric grid to power up.
- Create a scholarship fund to allow anyone who wants to to go to college. It would probably be limited so people don’t go crazy and spend 12 years in school or go to stupid schools but it would allow people not to go into so much debt.
There are probably other things, but I can’t think of them right now. Of all the above where stuff is manufactured, I would make sure as much as possible was done in the US to help create jobs.
- Hold a year-long world-wide lottery for 500 billion dollars.
- Move to Oban, Scotland and buy the Oban Distillery.
- Buy this little bungalow, and throw Dopefests(airfare comped, of course).
- Fly in They Might Be Giants and John Pinette for entertainment.
- Hire professional ball washer.
- Invest in American high tech.
My new hero!
Fifteen bedrooms and only thirteen bathrooms? Who’s the poor sod who has to double up on bathrooms?
Go to the local casino, find a roulette game and put it all on red!
Double my money in a matter of seconds!
What could possibly go wrong?!
And once I had two trillion, well now we’re talking!
Plan B: Next time Powerball is way up there, I believe I could buy every ticket with every combination for only $175 million or so, and be guaranteed to win!
What could possibly go wrong? Well, granted, if two or three other people win I might take a bit of a hit, but other than that…
A trillion dollars? The U.S. government wouldn’t be that impressed with a “mere” trillion dollars.
According to Wikipedia, the cost of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is about $4.5 billion, a B-2 bomber is $2.1 billion, and an F-35 is a paltry $230 million. With $1000 billion, I think I could fund myself a decent sized personal army/navy/air force.
I don’t know if it’s a typo or not but just in case can I put my order in for a lovely shade of lilac? I think it’s going to need to be a fairly light colour so we can still see it and I think purple would add a lot to the sky.
As for me - forget about running my own country that sounds like a ton of work. I would use whatever was necessary to set up my own little corner of paradise (I wonder if I could convince Larry to sell Lanai) and set up some very smart people I know to evaluate technologies and charities to spread the rest around to. I’d be willing to step into that role for them if they had this occur but if I’ve got this much money I’m all about being a figurehead.
The difference between billion and trillion in this circumstance would be all about the amount of good that team could do and I suppose the size of my hideaway.
The first person to mention it.
One trillion USD is slightly lower than South Korea’s GDP, which is the fifteenth highest in the world. This means that you can destroy or otherwise significantly alter most countries’ economies.
The world’s total nominal expenditure on R&D in 2010 was about one trillion USD.
That bar is impressive!
A trillion dollars is not as powerful as you may think. There are scale limits to how much money or resources you can throw at something relative to how quickly or practically a job can get done. Plus if you have a trillion dollars that amount of resources and power would create its own political and economic gravitational field. As the most powerful single and unrestrained economic actor on earth a lot of political and economic entities are going to treat you warily, and potentially be hostile to your existence, and will not necessarily be cooperative with your plans.
Buy something that costs a little less than a trillion dollars, and be able to pay the sales tax.
Start a private club.
It’s like I told those kids who said they were collecting money for cancer. They won’t get a cent out of me; I’m against cancer.
Awesomely beautiful women may not want to sleep with me for $10,000 or even $1 million dollars. But what if I offered them $100 million? 
I’d hire Warren Buffett to mow my yard, Bill Gates to paint my living room, and I’ll figure out something for Carlos Slim to do.