I’d commission a reparations project for a single US city or region (however much ~100 billion could get me). Or maybe I’d break it up and half would be that one project, with the rest going to combat sexual assault and rape.
One thing I would not do is give away money in my name. I’d create some kind of organization with a fantastic legal team, and check would come from them. I’d have a quaterly meeting, with a list of donations to be made. And BTW, the legal team/staff would be well compensated, so as not to reveal my name.
- Nursing scholarships in honor of my mom and my aunt.
- Doctors Without Borders.
- medical research in honor of Australian blood donor James Harrison
- Donations to several animal shelters I know of.
- Donations to several local schools so that the kids wouldn’t have to shill products to family/community.
- Loans to several local businesses that are in danger of failing due to the econmic disaster we are going through.
And other things as I hear of them.
$100 Billion?
Charities, like Samaritan’s Purse, Live Action, crisis pregnancy centers, Compassion, etc. I’d create a trust or charity to help families get their kids the education they want and get them out of failing public schools, possibly found inexpensive private schools in areas that have no affordable options beyond public schools. Another one to help families with crippling medical debts. I’d look for science startups that have great ideas but need money to get started (I’d ask Mark Rober about some he’s talked about.)
The $2 Billion? After paying off debts, completing our desired educations, and getting our dream house, most of that will be given away, too. We have 9 nieces and nephews, and many cousins and friends with kids who could use a little cash to get started in life.
Yeah, I figured 2 billion was more than enough to take care of almost everyone a person would know personally. Even if you’re supporting 1000 people, that still means you could give $80,000 per person per year w/o touching the principal.
My airmoble disaster relief team I had mentioned before would be well funded.
Nicely built low cost housing in nice areas.
As an old marching band kid, a variation on the silenus proposal would be ramping up marching band competition as a replacement for football.
With that kind of money you could probably spawn something akin to a pro version of drum corps international.
Along with it look at founding competitive video gaming circuits that are more focused on longer term strategic and tactical gaming as opposed to high twitch first-person shooter type games.
Epic event venue for medieval reenactment/LARP. Like room for 10,000+ on site, tons of purpose built support facilities and housing/food options for any need or budget, full size castle, market/shop spaces, dedicated high tech facilities for driving acceptable cost/effort armor and clothing production to get more people playing.
The worst places to grow up in the world have to be refugee camps, and many camps feature 3rd or 4th generation inhabitants now. 100 billion should be able to help figure out how to make life there a little less bad.
I would use it to create a third political party for independents.
If something could be profitable, it could also not be if you don’t want it to be.
Which is what I’d do with it. Start businesses that explicitly do not want to make profits. Under no circumstances are they allowed to make a profit: they get to pay their employees, they can price their offerings so that they bring in some additional money beyond expenses, but all additional money must go toward improvement of the product or expansion of the availability and such. Thus, quality products could be supplied at lower prices than anyone else, because there would be no profit margin for the company.
Then do the same for as many steps in the supply chain as possible; make it so that, from raw material all the way to end-product, nobody is making a profit. Everything is priced as low as possible, with the only income beyond expenses allowed being specifically to expand or improve.
I’d buy up failing newspapers (mostly local, but some big-city papers if they’re going bust) for just about nothing when they’re at the point of imminently shutting down, turn them into a genuine “liberal media” with reporters asking the sorts of questions and pursuing the sorts of stories someone of a liberal bent would have them do (and without any obligation to bothsides everything when the facts were all on one side), then turn each one into an employee-run nonprofit with enough of an endowment to keep operating indefinitely.
That would probably only use up a small fraction of $100B, so I’d have to figure out what to do with the rest.
Excellent idea.
Start a social research laboratory. Several separate clusters of a few hundred people each are given some starting instructions / structures and asked to experiment with non-hierarchical decision-making, modifying the rules (within certain limitations, which themselves may vary from one cluster to another) and charged with trying to come up with a decision-making structure that works efficiently and creates a dependable and reliably stable society.
Restart a few years later as need be, varying what appears to need varying, learning from the trial and error of the various test groups what does and does not work.
No charity in the world could accept that much money at once. No BUNCH of charities could. The United Way, the biggest charity in North America, is famously wasteful and it would take 30 years to burn through $100 billion. $100 billion is an enormous amount of cash; even Jeff Bezos has nowhere near that much, as his wealth is largely just theoretically what stock could be sold for. Not even an international organization like CARE could take that much. Dumping something like $5 million on a women’s shelter is an invitation to waste and it being targeted by scam artists, and it getting out that some eccentric zillionaire is totally covering entire charities could motivate other people to no longer give and to dishonestly come after a piece of the pie.
What I would do is hire a platoon of lawyers and veteran charity managers, only with the finest pedigrees and relevant experience, and create a charitable corporation, which I would be the full time CEO of. The purpose of Charitable Giving Inc. (and yes, it would be a boring name like that) would be
- To manage the $100 billion fortune in safe and ethical investments, and
- Give away the interest to worthy causes.
The causes I would choose would start with CARE, a charity that helps the least privileged people on earth. But even CARE couldn’t spend all that interest, not even close; it would take years for them to scale up that big, so I’d find other worthy causes as they worked their way up. Women’s shelters would be fully funded, diseases fought, and hungry people would all be helped. The only condition would be that the charities helped must be fully vetted and must be dedicated to helping the poor, the disadvantaged, and the sick; I would not be interested in helping the arts or animal welfare. Worthy causes, but not where I want my fortune to go.
I would accept no credit. None. I would accept no award, no honor, no trophy, no dinner. If I was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, I would actively campaign against myself, and if awarded it, I would decline to even show up. They would unquestionably try to give me an Order of Canada; I would refuse it. I would give no interviews and decline all praise.
dupe
RickJay is right - $100B is too much to dump on anyone or any set of anyones.
So, set up a foundation. Assuming a 3% ROI, that’s $3B a year. Spend it on three things -
-
Scholarships for engineering students and others in the hard sciences. But hard sciences only.
-
The first manned expedition to Mars.
-
Destroying the scam artists who call me up to try to get any of the money.
Regards,
Shodan
OK, so I’m getting 2 billion more or less, I’m going to be busy trying to put a dent in the interest I’ll be receiving. I give my gf the 100 billion and tell her to give it away, since that’s more a her thing than a me thing.
There’s an American NGO called Heifer International that does this.
As others said, that is too much money. It’s going to have a corrupting influence even amongst the poorest and even among existing NGOs. Plus throwing around too much money is going to have an inflationary effect. One thing I’d do is fund the opposite of whatever the Koch brothers are funding, especially population control, birth control and abortion service providers. And also throw money at education but not to any school in the US. A billion dollar gift to a college in Africa or India is going a lot further.
Edited to add, and set up something like the Long Range Foundation in Heinlein’s fiction. Perhaps invest fifty billion in fusion power research? Maybe that much will be enough?
A few other things , just for giggles:
Bring my foundation proof that you scrapped an internal combustion automobile in the last six months and we give you, gratis, your choice from a selection of domestically-produced hybrid/electric cars.
Buy as many gun companies as I can. Shutter them and destroy the machinery. Then start a “double its value” gun buy-back program.
Secretly arrange that on a given day, all food and drink (except beer) at every major league game is free. Another day all parking is free.
I feel like from your posts that I’ve read that you are a big gun enthusiast, is that not true or is it ok for you, but not for the commoners?
This is similar to the movie Brewster’s Millions. Brewster had to spend ~$20 mil or so and not get anything in return. He could not gamble and could only give 5% to charity. If he did that he would inherit even more money. It was a comedy with Richard Pryor.
It was $30 million in 30 days in the last version, the Richard Pryor version in 1985. If he succeeds he inherits $300 million.
In addition to the fact he could only lose 5% to charity and 5% to gambling, he wasn’t allowed to overpay anyone for service - he could not, for instance, go get a haircut and pay a million bucks for it. He could not possess anything of value at the end of the thirty days, but he also could not buy something valuable and then destroy it to skirt around that rule. He also wasn’t allowed to tell any of his friends.
You could do it now and I suspect you could have done it in 1985, but you’d have to know how (private jets and luxury destinations would have gone a long way) and the idea was that Brewster had never had any money so he didn’t know how to blow it at that level. Of course he comes up with quite a clever scheme - he runs for mayor, wasting his money on authentic campaign expenses. (However, he had to losee the election, because the job carries a salary.)
This story has been filmed many times, and is based on a 1902 novel. In 1902 the challenge was Brewster had to blow $1 million in a year, which even in 1902 was actually an easier proposition than $30 million in a month in 1985. The Richard Pryor film puts a much better and more difficult question to Brewster than the original story does, in that he had the option of just taking a million bucks and not attempting the challenge at all, versus attempting it and either getting $300 million or nothing.