I would live a very, very luxurious lifestyle, but my full time job would be giving money away.
I can’t really think of any silly expenditures. I am just not very demanding; the appeal money gives me is freedom from concern and stress. I guess I’d hold some pretty awesome private poker games, though.
I think a lot of the posts in this thread aren’t grasping the scale of the wealth that’s proposed in the OP. The combined net worth of the 5 individuals listed is $745B (according to the first google hit, a Business Insider piece from Oct '21).
Following the 4% rule, that you can spend 4% of your wealth annually and with reasonable investments it will return enough to fund that and grow the principal to keep up with inflation, you would have to spend $80 MILLION EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE to prevent your wealth from increasing, and $120M every day to burn through it in 50 years of profligacy. Or just $40M every day for 50 years if you’re hiding all the money under your mattress and have no investment income.
It’s okay to have modest dreams, of course, but most of the posts in this thread can be paid for with a couple days worth of income on the wealth you’ve inherited in the hypothetical. You have an income on par with national governments. Dare to dream big.
Now, what I’d actually do in the hypothetical is mostly boring - probably hire some competent people to continue running the now leaderless Gates Foundation, and direct it to promote public health and education in impoverished parts of the globe on the one hand and massive R&D in green energy, carbon capture, and climate change mitigation on the other. Then I’d mostly lead a life of leisure.
However, I think I’d also spend a few orders of magnitude more money than the Kochs could manage to try to reverse the rising trend of neo-fascist politics in the industrialized west. All those things the right pretends Soros does? I’d actually do them.
Oh, and I’d build a Bond villain-esque lair somewhere in the South Pacific where I’d buy enough influence with the local government to be effectively a sovereign microstate, complete with a small navy and air force.
I’d guess that as the crow - or zipline - flies, the two buildings are maybe 800 metres apart. That’s quite doable with a zipline, but you need the line to descend from one building to the other, so if it starts at the 90th floor of one it’s going to end up at the 75th floor of the other. (Ziplines don’t need much of a slope; a drop of 20-30 metres here would be plenty.) The question is, what’s in between? Obviously even in NYC most buildings aren’t as tall as those two, but the line must be straight and a single obstacle screws up this plan.
Of course, as Gorsnak points out, the amount of wealth being proposed here is almost beyond comprehension. You could buy the interfering building and have it torn down.
I did think of one silly thing I’d do; I’d buy the Toronto Blue Jays and have an unlimited player budget.
All I really want is a summer home in Vancouver and a winter home in southern Chile to avoid the worst weather extremes. A small private aircraft to facilitate, and a small crew of domestic help to facilitate everything. I would do a lot of philanthropic stuff.
More desires would probably flow from that, but
Oh yeah - I’d definitely pull a Brewster and spend a lot on political messaging of various sorts. And the neat thing is that I wouldn’t even have to lie to promote an anti-fascist agenda.
I’d invest in some long-range tech projects (fusion power, cheap and easy access to space, that sort of thing). Even if they didn’t fully pay off, they’d almost certainly produce something useful.
Of course, if any of them did hit the jackpot, I’d have to figure out what to do with all that money…
Does that include my suggestion for a comprehensive motorsport-based STEM and athletic program for poor students?
For the hell of it, I roughed out the cost of a comprehensive motorsports/STEM cost to cover the poorest 20% of schools in the United States. On my first round, I assumed $100K for an elementary school program (mostly staff), $150K for middle schools (more maker lab equipment and materials) and $400K for high schools (two full time staffers, even more equipment and materials) and roughly $50K to cover a racing or engineering scholarship program for 1% of students in the U.S. (this would be a combination of event fees/organizing costs/prizes, operating costs, and travel costs. It would be less for elementary school students running cart programs but more for high school students running real cars). Then I budgeted $6 million per year to finance and maintain 150 race tracks across the country (a very nice set of race courses near me sold a few years ago for $15 million so I think this is a decent approximation). All up, this would cost about $31 Billion per year, which is shockingly close to 4% per year of $745 billion.
Don’t forget to build a funicular or similar device to let you get down to the waterfront easily.
Oh, good idea!
I think I’d pay some Dutchmen to set fire to Lord Snowdon.
A few houses…not mansions, but just comfortable. A medium-size condo in New York City, another overlooking Puget Sound, a flat in London and another in Cardiff. Travel to film festivals. Go back to school and do a deep dive on a few languages. Go to a lot of concerts. Pay Richard Thompson and Dweezil Zappa to teach me guitar (how to play, respectively, “Tear-Stained Letter” and “Watermelon in Easter Hay.”)
Pretty normal, low-key stuff, I think.
OK, then. Two Smurfs.
This is actually quite traditional. The Grand Old Mansions were riddled with secret doors and hidden passages. They did not lead to a Mad Scientist’s Lair. They led to storerooms and servants’ quarters. They allowed the servants to enter a room when the aristocrats were gone, and make a quick exit before the aristocrats entered. Cleaning and maintenance were supposed to happen as if by magic. Harry Potter’s house elves, and the invisible magical servants in the Arabian Nights stories, are literary reflections of real-world practices.
I just thought of another project: hire a team of genetic engineers to produce a critter that is basically just a stomach and a tooth. You feed it, and it produces ivory. Its purpose is to make ivory so plentiful, and so cheap, that elephant-poaching becomes unprofitable.
And, as a sideline, the geneticists would be tasked with making unicorns, and griffins, and some kind of giant flying animal that is big enough to carry a human, and built so that you can put a saddle on its back without interfering with the wings.
No, I’m aware of how it was for house servants in grand manors. But I’m not intending on house servants, no live in staff!
I don’t think I could do that.
Hmm, I realize now I may need some sort of Signal, for when it’s safe to clean and garden!
I do like the ivory idea, genius!
People riding giant flying animals? I’m out!
Why???
I mean, yeah, you might want to never go outdoors again without an umbrella or parasol, because of those inconsiderate louts whose giant birds do not wear diapers… but then again, carrying a parasol could be your “I’m so rich, it’s not weird, it’s charmingly eccentric” trait.
Sadly, as animals get larger and larger, the physics would seem to make flying difficult or impossible (e.g. the square-cube law, that means we will not have house-sized ants). So, if we want to keep this fantasy in the realms of what might genuinely be possible with known science, we would indeed need to omit them.
Now, a personal-sized helicopter would be quite doable, I should think.
I’d like an elephant the size of a house cat, please.
Quetzalcoatlus might not have been able to carry a human-sized object, but the estimates for their size and flight characteristics are all over the map, so I will cling ferociously to the hope that they could.
Yeah science investment needs to be done. I’d invest billions into neuroscience research, Paul Allen put maybe $500 million into his foundation and it helped advance the entire field.
Primary all 20 GOP senators defending their seats this fall, with the most batshit-insane MAGAt-sounding candidates I can hand-pick. I also back 14 similar GOP candidates in the remaining races.
Assuming they all successfully reach the general election ballot, I then wait for November. The ones who lost to Democrats, I write off. The ones who got elected, I wait until they’re sworn in. Then I execute Order 66, and all of the brand-new GOP senators switch to the Democratic Party.
Then I sit back and await the thanks of a grateful nation.
Stem cell research. Right now it’s limited in scope because a bunch of religious jagoffs have made it so that anyone within six degrees of separation of someone doing research on embryonic stem cells will lose all funding forever. So fuck that; I’ll buy the land and the building and all the stuff inside and pay everyone involved a generous lifetime salary so they’ll never have to kiss the ass of anyone who has to kiss the ass of a Bible thumper.
Then, while I’m pissing off the so-called pro-lifers, I’ll give Planned Parenthood an endowment that will make Harvard’s look puny. They’ll be able to go on forever, without federal funding and without charging anyone, just from the interest.
Then, a beach house and a convertible. And though I haven’t yet figured out exactly what it would be, I’m sure there’ll be more scuba gear. But that was gonna happen regardless.
