What would you do with $1,000,000,000?

[Terxpahseyton]

Well the endless upsides of that fortune are obvious, but so is the not to overlook downsides. You loose all your friends. With that ridiculous amount of money, there really is almost no reason not to give. But that will be a poison, and except in the best cases, a deadly one, I say.
So I go with @Hygro, and use my money to enable myself to have a healthy friend circle by establishing my own tribe, my own commune.
Some business would have to be attached. And my wisdom, understanding of the human condition and life, as well as my agnostic spirituality has much further matured, so much so, that it brings me to on old childish fantasy of mine: A kind of atheistic religion. Without the believe in things entirely imaginary. But with the believe and surrender to a spiritual-philosophical-psychological-cult resting on the rich body of insights and ideas of people like Freud, Carl Jung, Jordan Person, Nietzsche, and many more, but also modern science in general if it enables to better understand the human condition and human needs - establishing traditions, stories and rites designed to nurture a culture which best brings human potential as well as human yearning for meaning to fruition.
And yes this would involve psychedelic experiences. But done the right way. Like the ancient cultures, where it is integrated into the culture in a way that proper use, place, setting, time and support is guaranteed. (something extremely lacking with the hippies in the 60s - just dumb kids)

So yeah I would find a cult. But a good one. Hehehehe
Regarding the business: Tourists. Thinking of Ayahuasca tourism. And we could sell books. Give seminars on personal development and spiritual healing. But without esoteric pseudo-science BS (and not motivation BS either of course!) - it is in the end just psychology, really, but wrapped and presented in a form that it can actually be seen and felt and lived, that it can be understood on a imaginary, vivid and alive level, so that it may penetrate your shields of self-protection, rationality and relativism and hit you where it counts.
Can also see us growing our own food, producing little hand-made trinkets for tourists to buy etc.

Alternatively I would establish a Techno Club in Berlin.

And naturally some people will get some of my millions. Family is a no-brainier.

What I would not spend a dime on are lavish mansions, pointlessly expensive watches or other status symbols. That just seems dumb to me.

 

[Narz]

Regarding the business: Tourists. Thinking of Ayahuasca tourism.

Smart. Big $ in that and you will be legit helping people.

I know a girl who is going down that path (but w dmt), at some lil commune place in Costa Rica

And we could sell books. Give seminars on personal development and spiritual healing. But without esoteric pseudo-science BS (and not motivation BS either of course!) - it is in the end just psychology, really, but wrapped and presented in a form that it can actually be seen and felt and lived, that it can be understood on a imaginary, vivid and alive level, so that it may penetrate your shields of self-protection, rationality and relativism and hit you where it counts.
Can also see us growing our own food, producing little hand-made trinkets for tourists to buy etc.

Alternatively I would establish a Techno Club in Berlin.

And naturally some people will get some of my millions. Family is a no-brainier.

What I would not spend a dime on are lavish mansions, pointlessly expensive watches or other status symbols. That just seems dumb to me.

 

[Cutlass]

Wouldn't it be better to fund a candidate you support?

I want to smash and burn.

 

[Cutlass]

1. Hire a full time accountant/financial advisor. This person will tell me how to invest most of this money.

Break up as much as you don't immediately give away or spend into about 100 parts. Invest each part in an index fund. In general an index fund will match the market, and outperform a financial advisor. And you can outperform the financial advisors without the cost of paying a financial advisor.

You can pay me half your profits from following my advice.

 

[Truthy]

Buy all the billboard real estate in my city, replace all the billboards with insults against city council for allowing billboards.

I'd like to dismantle the global advertising industry, but would need about three orders of magnitude more wealth than $1B.



Bezos has been trying that, it's not easy.

Jeff Bezos Wants Ideas for Philanthropy, So He Asked Twitter

I wrote this before seeing your post:

I'd rail against a bunch of things I hate. I'd buy tacky places like Ripley's Believe it or Not and Hardrock Cafes and turn them into destruction rooms. Then redevelop the spaces with stuff I like. I'd buy all the billboards in the Mid-Atlantic, remove them, and then lobby to have billboards banned. I'd buy entire ad breaks on major networks and just display a little message saying "Commercials suck, enjoy some peace and quiet."

 

[Synobun]

I'd buy tacky places like Ripley's Believe it or Not and Hardrock Cafes and turn them into destruction rooms.

You stay away from Niagara Falls or else.

 

[Truthy]

You stay away from Niagara Falls or else.

If we both get a billion dollars, you'll have to beat me to it because that's definitely one of the places I had in mind

 

[Zkribbler]

I just gotta build my solar-powered airship to tootle around Europe.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Smart. Big $ in that and you will be legit helping people.

I know a girl who is going down that path (but w dmt), at some lil commune place in Costa Rica

If well-guided, it can really do a lot. Those of course are just conceptualizations , and it isn't exactly clear how much they really represent reality, but it is an interesting and fruitful viewpoint that a lot of problems of the mind are associated with a conflict of the conscious and the subconscious. Or, put differently, of what you allow yourself to see and what you actually can see. That is also one of the aims of therapy. To make you conscious of things hidden from you within you. And well-guided experiences seem to have a quite unique way to bring that subconscious into your conscious, whereas you yourself sort of remove yourself from your own consciousness by seeing it like a pattern of thoughts in front of you, making you free to dive into the subconscious. And if all goes well, this can lead to a harmonization of the conscious and the subconscious, to healing. And brain scans have also actually shown just that. Brain activity in the area where more or less your identity rests becomes more wholesome, rounded, less fractured.

 

[Hygro]

I would buy and sell companies.

 

[IglooDame]

Assuming you hire all the lawyers, accountants/advisors, and pay all the taxes and all the kinda mandatory stuff, and obviously quitting my day job:

1. I'd probably adopt a couple kids. I have two girls but if I had unlimited time and money now I would like more. I don't think working I could find enough time for 4-5 kids or enough money to give them the lifestyle I want. I think I'd want two baby boys so they could grow up together, I don't care what race or anything like that but I'd like babies so we could become the first parents they remember. Then I think I'd probably want to foster a tween/teenager or two. Might be hard, but that's why...

2. Hire me and my wife personal assistants. They'd live on site in a guest house or something and basically do whatever the heck we told them (within reason of course). Like yes, not working I'd like to bathe my children, play and read with them, feed them and do all the daddy stuff, but some days I can imagine needing help for sure with the extra kids. And laundry, who wants to do that ever? I love cooking but some days I just want dinner already made for me. I also like grocery shopping but not all the time. So my assistant would do all that crap for me. And baby sit on date nights. So come to think of it, we might just need a full time maid/cook who cleans and does all the laundry and shopping and cooking when we need it in addition to our assistants. And I'd pay them well over market rates, plus tons of benefits. I'd probably need to incorporate and hire them as employees.

3. Get a big house on a lake somewhere in northern USA for summers and a big vacation house on a beach somewhere in southern USA for winters.

4. Buy a bunch of franchises like QDobas or McDonalds or something and hire smart, trustworthy people to run them.

5. Visit all those places I talked about in the other thread!

The assumption, call it a couple million.
1 - (adoptions) A lot less than a million, so let's round up.
2 - (personal assistants) Call it a 24/7/365 operation, meaning say eight people, and way overpay them, $100K/yr plus all the collateral. A million per year total, call it $50mil total.
3 - (northern and southern houses) A million for each, throw in another million that uses the interest for eternal taxes/utilities/upkeep.
4 - (franchises) Didn't have a clue, so looked it up (https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-us/franchising/franchising-faq.html), $1-2mil per McD's franchise)
5 - (travel) Call it $100K in travel expenses per year, so $2mil in principle and draw off the interest.

Tally it up and you get $58mil for everything except the McDs franchises, which using the rest of the billion gets you roughly 628 of them. How much income the franchises get you (after all, they should make you more money, not break even or lose it), I've no idea.

 

[El_Machinae]

I would like to have more money, so I can invest in projects I believe in instead of spending a lot of my savings building wealth. There are a 100 charities and projects that I think could benefit from a few more million - and I'd really like to be the one to give those millions.

Long term - I want to own my very own star system. I think that'll be enough. Just a nice star that I can colonize and develop.

A billion dollars would make me noticeably more optimistic.

 

[warpus]

Break up as much as you don't immediately give away or spend into about 100 parts. Invest each part in an index fund. In general an index fund will match the market, and outperform a financial advisor. And you can outperform the financial advisors without the cost of paying a financial advisor.

You can pay me half your profits from following my advice.

See, I need a financial advisor to tell me this stuff. I can just research it, but somebody with a lot of experience investing hundreds of millions is who I want holding my hand while I make these decisions. That's what I'd want a financial advisor for, even if he just tells me what you did. I'd also probably pay him on payroll so if unexpected stuff happens with what I own or if there's unexpected market stuff going on, I have somebody on the front lines alerting me of problems before they occur (if possible).

 

[El_Machinae]

It's not true, fully, that 100% index funds are the best choice. It's true that index funds should usually match the market and that the average efforts of advisors will underperform the market, but much of that is due the simple fact that advisors are the ones doing the price discovery that the fund is matching. Because the idea of 'matching the market' is growing in popularity, there's the ever-increasing chance that a bubble is being created. Everyone buying an ETF is causing the price to go up, and there's insufficient downward pressure because the number players engaging in price discovery is dropping. Or, "this time it's different" is starting to rear its head.

The other thing is that it's not completely your goal to outperform the market, since a large part of your goal is do better than negative returns. Hedging against negative requires additional effort. The market going negative is the sum of the decision of sellers predicting that the market will go negative.

Of course, with a billion dollars, you will always have a viable income stream, no matter what. And the corrupted American system means that politicians will reinflate the bubble for you, so that you feel rich enough to spend. So, tracking the index would probably work best, because the people who decide how to create and spend money care about that index.

 

[Narz]

I want to smash and burn.

That's an understandable feeling but with a billion dollars you can afford better feelings.

 

[IglooDame]

That's an understandable feeling but with a billion dollars you can afford better feelings.

And a good thing, too. A billion dollars gets you a lot of smashing and burning.

On the one hand, how much, really, did the 9/11 attacks cost?

On the other, how much to do something very extralegal like infiltrating various groups (violent pseudoNazis, as an example) and do things that the Feds can't do, and the Southern Law & Poverty Center won't do?

I feel like if I continue with any specifics I'm going to get modded into a smoking hole in the ground, so I'll stop there.

 

[civvver]

The assumption, call it a couple million.
1 - (adoptions) A lot less than a million, so let's round up.
2 - (personal assistants) Call it a 24/7/365 operation, meaning say eight people, and way overpay them, $100K/yr plus all the collateral. A million per year total, call it $50mil total.
3 - (northern and southern houses) A million for each, throw in another million that uses the interest for eternal taxes/utilities/upkeep.
4 - (franchises) Didn't have a clue, so looked it up (https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-us/franchising/franchising-faq.html), $1-2mil per McD's franchise)
5 - (travel) Call it $100K in travel expenses per year, so $2mil in principle and draw off the interest.

Tally it up and you get $58mil for everything except the McDs franchises, which using the rest of the billion gets you roughly 628 of them. How much income the franchises get you (after all, they should make you more money, not break even or lose it), I've no idea.

Well yeah, I'd easily make it on way less than a billion. So I'd probably donate a lot to charities, invest a lot, play with day trading options, buy a boat and some cars, but nothing specifically planned.

 

[El_Machinae]

I would buy Thunderfall's moderator vote

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Something like this:

 

[Morty]

Some excellent ideas here, and should I get this $1B then I'd be sure to pinch...errr, borrow....some of them!

Personally, other than the standard provide for family, buy fast cars, have lots of holidays, I'd like to:

a) build my own house...well not build it....design my own house so it had everything I want but to make it as energy-efficient as possible (wind turbines, recycling of water, solar panels, all that stuff), and
b) build a new school for my son....not his own school where he was the only pupil ....but sort of claim it to be for the community, but really it would be to ensure my son had the best chance of a good education. Again same policy, ensure it's energy neutral where possible and fill it full of mod cons...science labs, IT suites, etc, etc.