What would you do with 10 billion dollars?

First, I'd buy all the pants in the world, and just burn them.

Then maybe I'd buy a good couple thousand billboards and write profane things on them.

And if I'm truly bored enough, I could buy a small country, maybe something like Lichtenstein, and just paint the entire country yellow. Don't ask me why I would do that, just accept it for what it is.
 
I would buy out Blackwater and assault some small African nation, inundate it with Indian tech support and Chinese factory workers, rename it Cubistan, institute a facade communism and become the world's next economic superpower :p
 
I would buy a house in a remote part of Alaska or have one built, an arseload of guns, a helicopter, a Sherman Tank, and I'll pay of my family's and friends debt and save whats left.
 
I would invest 5 billion. 2,5 billion for reasonable long-term investments and 2,5 for high risk, high reward investments like bubble jumping.
I'd donate another 2 billion for humanitarian causes and use 2 billion for political lobbying and bribes. I don't need any official political power, I'd be content to pull some strings from behind the scenes.
There's no way I need more than 100,000 dollars per year for my expenses, so I'd keep 5 milion In a bank account and live from the yearly interest. I'll probably only spend a fraction of that, I have more than 5 million on this account by the end of the year I'll donate the surplus.
The rest of the money would be reserved for vanity projects that don't really need to be profitable. I'd probably found/buy a game developer and publishing company and do whatever I feel like. Among original works I'd try to buy derelict franchises (Master of Orion comes to mind) and make proper sequels.
 
I'd set myself up somewhere comfortably to pursue my interests. To keep myself busy I'll form a series of endowments. The first will be aimed at uncovering more of early Southeast Asia's history. I figure with a cool hundred million or two I can fund year round archaeological digs and the scholars required to interpret them. Another big ticket item would be an endowment to figure out how to substantially increase rice production in Southeast Asia. Education would also get help. And my final act of philanthropy would be to purchase rainforest concessions in Kalimantan with the intent of cordoning off as much of the place to logging as I could principally for the amusement of doing so. Otherwise, I would keep a pretty low profile. Nice house. Somewhere quiet. Good garden. Large library. And a nice car. Requisite assistance to family, friends, random strangers and so forth would also be a given. I'd also put money aside to help Aboriginals but I'm not sure precisely what it is I would do... maybe I'd need to endow a research centre first to figure that out.
 
Purchase a Russian or NASA Space going habitable rocket and shoot myself to Mars, Venus or the Sun forever cementing myself as the first man on whereever my destination shall be. Returning would be unnecessary.
 
... that's easy enough to fix. You pretend to be middle-class or whatever. Find a suitable financial product that you can lock the money up in for long fixed periods, keep enough to stay comfortable and I dunno found a business the purpose of which is solely to make you look busy. In that situation I'd spend all day reading with my feet up.
 
I'd funnel all of mine into cryogenically freezing myself until such a point as death is nullified and they've successfully found a way of unfreezing you, working on finding a cure for death, and so on and so forth in a similar vein
 
Masada said:
I'd set myself up somewhere comfortably to pursue my interests. To keep myself busy I'll form a series of endowments. The first will be aimed at uncovering more of early Southeast Asia's history. I figure with a cool hundred million or two I can fund year round archaeological digs and the scholars required to interpret them. Another big ticket item would be an endowment to figure out how to substantially increase rice production in Southeast Asia. Education would also get help. And my final act of philanthropy would be to purchase rainforest concessions in Kalimantan with the intent of cordoning off as much of the place to logging as I could principally for the amusement of doing so. Otherwise, I would keep a pretty low profile. Nice house. Somewhere quiet. Good garden. Large library. And a nice car. Requisite assistance to family, friends, random strangers and so forth would also be a given. I'd also put money aside to help Aboriginals but I'm not sure precisely what it is I would do... maybe I'd need to endow a research centre first to figure that out.
Click to expand...

What would be the point of that? Keeping money locked up and not even using it isn't helping anyone; I would keep a couple million dollars and invest/give away the rest. I'd be pretty much set for life with a well-paying job. I wouldn't need all that money, so I wouldn't keep it; that's just greed.
 
I'll donate 9 billion.

I'll buy an apartment in Paris, a villa in Tuscany and set up a Buddhist monastery in Bodh Gaya, India.

I'll travel the Near East from Greece to Lebanon to Egypt to Iran.

I'll write poetry and paint and learn to cook and drink lots of coffee.

And I'll marry a hot Italian or Frenchman. :rolleyes:
 
Mango Elephant said:
What would be the point of that?
Click to expand...

Personal vanity misconstrued as philanthropy? More seriously, lots. Any sustainable increase in South East Asian rice yields would help alleviate rural poverty for six hundred million people or so. In term of cost effectiveness endowing an institution to find means of achieving that with the intent of marrying it to environmental best practices probably revolves around optimising crop mixes, adjusting for soil particularities and making allowances for the addition of animals and trees/palms to the mix. I'm inclined to believe that the existing system left-over from earlier efforts ignores regional particularities to such an extent that it actually handicaps production. What works in volcanic Java doesn't necessarily work in shallow soiled Sumatra.

Results would then be disseminated to the people via existent NGOs and government agencies with the resulting adjustments made over decadal horizons largely by the people themselves. Teams of researchers might also be despatched to targeted areas to support the change-over. Model farms might also be established. Affecting improvements to agricultural yields is now best achieved by this kind of approach as most of the low hanging fruit like improved access to fertilisers et. al. have already been attained. Really, all we can do now is tweak at the existing system optimising for the particular contextual features already present.

I guess my willingness to retain control over this is informed by my own observations: (1) most NGOs operate over short horizons to adequately handle this task; (2) I can't think of an existent entity that would cater to these goal; (3) governments are no use as they have an irascible urge to re-task long term projects like this for short term electoral or otherwise goals; (4) while I'm human I'm not under the same pressures to preform, if the outcome takes twenty years then that's fine by me, it was never envisioned to be a quick fix; (5) I don't have to keep donors interests either; and (5) I'm not likely to pull the funding on my own project either.

As to my other goals. Well, I'm not sure what would fix Aboriginal disadvantage in Australia. There is a need for more quantifiable data and I believe that with a fairly modest endowment I could set about rectifying that lacuna. I'm not about to spend money on a problem without knowing what first to spend it on. If I put a substantial amount of that money under lock and key until that day, that's fine. I want to have the highest possible bang for my buck I can.

I also figure that a billion dollars would allow me to purchase concessions to vast swathes of Kalimantan's rainforests. I would do this partly out of legitimate environmental concern, the desire to make some money through properly tourism and in doing so legitimise this kind of conservation as both an economically and environmentally desirable thing to do and finally because tree-clearing is a personally affronting to me because it generates such a pathetically low economic return with little to no visible upside. You need to make money out of something before you can really attach a new value to it. A few hundred dollars per old growth tree is pissing away a huge potential steam of revenue in the long run. People need to be shown that in practice.

I'm also a firm believer in education the benefits of which are pretty obvious.

I'll admit that putting money aside for Early Southeast Asian history is probably a touch vain. But, really, its what I do. I figure it wouldn't hurt anyone if a fairly modest sliver of my money was put towards something that would gain me a measure of personal and professional satisfaction in addition to enriching humanity's store of knowledge.

Mango Elephant said:
Keeping money locked up and not even using it isn't helping anyone; I would keep a couple million dollars and invest/give away the rest.
Click to expand...

Good for you. Can you guarantee that your selfless approach would actually achieve anything more than mine?

Mango Elephant said:
I'd be pretty much set for life with a well-paying job.
Click to expand...

Sure, so would I. I'd just choose to live in comfort surrounded by books with a fast internet connection so I could be up to date with the boys on the ground.

Mango Elephant said:
I wouldn't need all that money, so I wouldn't keep it; that's just greed.
Click to expand...

Because endowing charitable institutions albeit under your titular control for the sole intent of philanthropic purposes is greedy.
 
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