My partner and I were discussing this over dinner, our ideas went from buying up land to finance organic farming and distributing it at the lowest price to crashing the financial system to “reset” everybody’s bank account with no possible recovery. Any other ideas?
buy politians to make them make laws to fuck over bilionaries, what is ironic lol
I feel like this is the only answer that would make a difference long-term.
The other suggestions like giving people food and housing would only be putting a bandaid on a broken system; it needs to actually change to prevent the same situations from reoccurring.
You might be underestimating how little 100 billion is, compared to the wealth of other billionaires.
With the pennies they actually pay lawmakers, though? 100 billion could go a loooooooooong fucking way to outspend the billionaires.
The reason they’re billionaires is because they’re fuckin misers and penny-pinchers. They hate spending money and that is evidenced by how cheaply our politicians are bought for.
Simply outspend them quickly, and you’ll have the politicians licking your boots.
This one crossed our mind as well, the problem is you usually don’t compete against billionaires but rather against corporations or conglomerate which has much more economic power that single individuals. You also have to account for the benefits that these private entities can promise (knowing a law will favor a certain industry is a good way to make cash by buying stocks before said law passes), that’s quite hard to compete with that when you’re a philanthropist
don’t compete against billionaires but rather against corporations or conglomerate which has much more economic power that single individuals. You also have to account for the benefits that these private entities can promise (knowing a law will favor a certain industry is a good way to make cash by buying stocks before said law passes)
I don’t disagree. However, 100 billion is still a massive amount.
$1 million is literally only 0.1% of $1 billion. That means $100 million is similarly 0.1% of $100 billion.
Nancy Pelosi is one of the wealthiest people in congress and with all her assets, she’s only worth around $114 million.
Rick Scott, the richest, is only worth around $259 million.
If $100 million is only 0.1% of the total amount I am working with, I can literally EXPLODE the valuations of these people really simply.
Sure, they can “make a lot of money” by knowing insider information before others do, and people like Pelosi and Scott are doing well because of it, but I have a hard time believing they would shake their head and say “No, not enough” to increasing their personal wealth by 10 times.
I could give Rick Scott a cool $2 billion and Pelosi $1.5 billion and still be left with $97.5 billion dollars to spend. Their personal wealth has just been multiplied by a factor of 10.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much 1 billion is, let alone 100 billion, and genuinely don’t understand how much more wealth that is than those people will ever see by just investing. On top of that, wouldn’t they prefer to have 10 times the amount of money to invest?
If you had 100billion, then why pay the existing shitbags, instead of getting every single one voted out?
I personally feel like changing the laws to limit corruption has to come first before politicians stop taking bribes.
If they can be bought by me, they can be bought by someone else just as easily.
What hopes do I have that the new people will be different? Just look at fucking Kyrsten Sinema. She ran as a moderately progressive candidate and hasn’t just become a Republican and Billionaire enabler, she straight switched to Independent after running as a Democrat.
If we get the laws changed first then there are fewer ways for them to be corrupted/bought. Just changing the person in the position leaves open the option of the new person being corrupted by the same system. Personal opinion, of course.
You are so naive it’s almost adorable. Politicians today are 100% manufactured and raised by PACs trying to push an agenda. “Kyrsten Sinema” who ran as a “moderate democratic” your words, exists so that idiots like you would think that she was the only option in “red state” arizona. However in this fantasy the “new” people are funded by YOU! So if they didn’t believe in a glorious socialist utopia, they wouldn’t have your support any longer, and they wouldn’t be part of your coalition and they could be trivially replaced. It would also mean that you were exceptional bad a building social relationships. So if you funded someone and they turned into a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema, it’s literally only yourself to blame. In this fantasy you are the one with 100billion dollars, so who the fuck are you blaming here when shit goes wrong?
As an aside, who do you think “changes laws” so that corruption can be limited?
100 billion puts you in the top 15 richest on the planet. You’d actually rank #11 ahead of Sergey Brin and Bloomberg.
That’s the publicly known list. There are many billionaires out there whose asset values are intentionally obfuscated so that they can remain below the radar (particularly offshore holdings), and there are known cases of people suing to stay off the billionaires list.
This. It’s called “legislative capture” and corporates do it all the time.
I would set up a massive lucrative company and lobby the hell out of governments.
I am surprised nobody said ‘education’. Every dollar spent there generates two dollars of worth. Educated people have fewer children and pollute less. Educated people don’t vote as many morons into power. I sincerely believe many problems of the world could have been prevented with educating everyone involved.
Education, specifically primary and secondary education for girls, is highly effective at reducing poverty. It deserves be highly prioritized for investment.
True. Also sex ed and ‘life education’ like spending advice or household tips for people who struggle to live alone. I’d probably have a board of various teachers advising me on where to spend how much and track the results with studies to be able to correct course.
Very true…
Depends what areas of education you mean. I think the most important areas people need to know more about in order to better the world as a whole are literacy, numeracy and world issues (war, current politics, climate change, etc).
Spending $100B to make university free would just accelerate a new problem that the world is facing: overeducation. Now it’s harder to get a job without a college degree as a minimum, especially above minimum wage, even though the skills gained in the degree are not what is actually in demand or being used in whatever job someone ends up with.
Granted that’s mainly a problem in the USA at the moment, and with $100B you could also fund a lot of R&D so people studying STEM end up in STEM jobs bettering the world.
It needs to be heavily targeted towards mandatory education, particularly K-12 or equivalents, and have a strong focus on critical thinking, scientific skepticism, technical literacy, entrepreneurialism, and the methods and models of social programming that are commonly used (how to identify, resist and avoid them).
This will help create generational change which is great for the future, but sadly does nothing to solve the pressing issues we face right now.
I think education on this level even for adults, especially in ‘third world’ countries, would help alleviate some issues we face today very quickly over the course of a few years.
Why entrepeneurialism?
Agreed. Education does not = academia. I’d argue that right now the incentives for academia for the sake of academia is far higher than for education and learning. There’s something systematic there. I can’t tell where $100B would be the most effective but getting 20 years olds MBAs ain’t it.
I’d buy Facebook and rebrand it as V.
Pretty sure that would kill it.
Gonna need a couple hundred billion more for that :(
I’d do this and then turn it into a socialist hell hole where I censor everything that looks like it came from Storm Front. And when conservatives birch and moan for rhetoric that is Storm Front lite, I’ll remind them that the platform is private and duck their feelings
immediately going hard authoritarianism against individuals. Hitler would be proud. Read some sociological theory please. If you want to nationalize all corporations, you are on the right path. But if you want to immediately go “big brother” it shows you are just a petty tyrant who would probably be even worse then our existing society.
Hire hitmen to remove the other 100 richest people in the 🌎.
This is a great answer. But you have to realize, “hitmen” cannot operate autonomously. You would need to fund them, create a private investigative network, etc etc so that you could hunt down other billionaires. basically, you have to get your hands dirty if you want this to work.
So… Not to techbro this, but can we crowdfund this and accidentally reinvent the revolution?
Unfortunately unless you introduced some kind of sci-fi “keep what you kill” culture like in Chronicals of Riddick, no. Revolution is expensive, and those that have money are absolutely not interested in that nonsense. Ultimately if you want a revolution, it had to happen without an individual profit motive.
It’s a good start but then their wealth just transfers to their next of whatever. Hire hitmen after and during investing in creating political changes that ensure wealth is more fairly distributed through society.
Create a fund and use the dividends to fund free healthcare. Rather than spend it all in one go, I want it to continue generating a stable fund to keep things going.
Ewwwwww! You want us to get Pensions you filthy commie!?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
The simple answer is to give it all away in some way. The notion that you can personally do good with that money is the delusion of every billionaire.
Buy and open source as much farming, education, housing, medical and general automation technology and is practical, then deploy non profit supply chains to allow even the furthest reaches of the planet the ability to acquire and implement this technology.
Subsidize the edges of this supply chain to ensure the most disadvantaged get equal access
With everything that remains, acquire the means of productions (farmland, housing, mines, wells, roads, rivers) that are in private lands and set them up with an autonomous non-profit democratic anti-privatisable organisational structure built to exploit those resources for the benefit of the local population.
Basically, it’s doing the exact opposite of the “enclosures” and then making sure it doesn’t happen again.
Hire people who would actually know where to begin with that.
With 100 billion dollars, I would spend all of it on housing to end homelessness. Let’s just provide homes for as many people as possible. All of it would get spent on this if I had my way.
200,000,000,000 / 200,000 = 1 million homes.
There are about 140 million homes in the USA.
You have ~2.5 people per home in the USA.
You would essentially be able to buy everyone living in Chicago or Houston their own home per population.
Chicago, IL (Population: 2,670,406)
Houston, TX (Population: 2,378,146)I think I would rather work with a builder for higher density housing simply because the money could be stretched further. We need to rethink the concept of housing and homes.
I think you’ve touched on a great point as to how some of the money should be spent - finding the brightest people with the best ideas and adequately funding them. Yet another folly of most billionaires is that they think they have all the answers; if you’re able to eschew that idea then you can really get some serious bang for your buck by not going full-blown Elon with the Captain’s Calls.
Bet you could buy a lot of teepees with that money and increase the curb appeal of tent cities.
Idk probably buy the Amazon rain forest and then hire blackwater or whatever their name is to patrol it and make sure no logging or clearing or anything else is taking place. The indigenous people can use the land for their needs but no one else.
Buy a major social media platform and run it into the ground. Oh wait…
In the book Capital in 21st Century, the author comes to a conclusion that one way to reduce inequality is by increasing the skills among the people. I would make higher education more accessible to poor people via scholarships, establishing colleges, etc…
Ooo a meritocracy, very impressive, and surely if the poor were just better trained and smarter, we’d live in a utopia.
Spend on research and development to end menstruation.
Fund projects to drastically upscale desalination efforts.
Buy as much land a possible and build houses for homeless people to rent at an extremely low cost. They would need to either have a job or be actively looking for one (with proof since trying to get one shows they might actually be trying to better their life, in my eyes at least), pay for their own food, and maybe a $10 monthly rent.
The lease would be on a yearly basis and if they find a better place they can afford before the lease is up, they would be allowed to leave without any sort of early lease termination fees. There would probably be a month long period where the person(s) could move back in just in case the new place doesn’t work out and they have to move out. During the grace period, nobody can move in.
I would, with the hypothetical money, pay for their utility bills and try to keep up on repairs/maintenance so long as they don’t abuse it by doing something like constantly keeping the water on 24/7, using as much electricity as they can physically can, or purposefully breaking and wrecking the place.
Also, I would let them know that they would be responsible if they get their internet access cut off because they were too busy pirating. Even though I personally support piracy, I wouldn’t want to be in trouble for piracy that I wasn’t directly involved in.
Wow you would reinvent “means testing” except make sure that it is to your whims speciifcally instead of a government service. So tell me, how would building houses 500 miles from the nearest metropolitian area while requiring “a job” be sustainable? Are you providing them jobs? What if the jobs they found didn’t meet your definition of “bettering their life?” Would you then bus them off to Chicago or New York city? Why not just create company town where you provide them with the job you find useful to your bottom line and then post on lemmy.ml about how benevolent you are?
