Maybe I'm not creative enough but I've tried this thought exercise with friends and it's a fun one.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
I'm of the "only way to win is not to play" mind with this exercise. I would peel off 10-20 million to eliminate lifetime financial concerns for my circle, and immediately go MacKenzie Scott on the rest, trying to put it towards maximum societal benefit.
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
I don't understand folks with these answers. I would want $1T or more. I could easily invest it.
- I want to build a human cloning startup to build whole-body, HLA-neutral, antigen-clean, headless clones. Taken to the extreme, this cures all cancers except brain and blood cancers, and it could expand the human lifespan/healthspan to be 200 years or more.
- I want to build directed energy systems to manipulate the weather and climate.
- I want to build an open source cloud, open source social layer, open source social media and actually get them real traction against the incumbents. Distributed media exchange layer that is P2P, not federated. Rewire the internet to be fault-tolerant and censorship immune.
- I want to train frontier AI models and make them open. I want to build massive amounts of high quality training data and make it all available (with a viral license).
- I want to build open source hardware. Tractors, automotive EVs, robots, stuff you can hack and own and exchange and print parts for.
- I want to build infra for my city.
I couldn't stop coming up with ideas for things to build.
But, alas, I'm still stuck here at the bottom wondering why a compound in Hawaii could be cooler than these things.
Upvoted for ambition. But some of the things you listed (e.g. cloning) are likely tech limitations rather than financial ones. It's not that money wouldn't be needed to develop the tech-- it absolutely is. But just anyone with a trillion to invest wouldn't automatically be able to develop it, or find the right people to develop it.
Building infra for your city would be great (I wish Denver had an actual metro system and not just half-assed light rail for large swaths of the area). But you're going to have to deal with the legality of that beyond simply budgetary concerns-- liability, at least, and also things like eminent domain against people who may not want to sell.
The OSS stuff already has people working on it and depends more on market share than technical know-how at this point. Depending on whether AI will actually prove monumental in long-term history, simply buying e.g. OpenAI and open-sourcing their stuff might be the most history-altering thing you could do with a trillion (or it could be a footnote, depending on how things play out).
Because your idea for spending $1T is to start six (massive) companies, hire tens/hundreds of thousands of people and basically become more powerful then most governments. Arguably it's not much different then Bezos and Musk starting rocket companies.
All of those things take massive investments in time, a compound in Hawaii does not.
i would do the same, except give every extra dime to dogs and cats (and other animals in need). i'd make sure none of my wealth would go to help other humans.
Saying you’d donate to pets is one thing but saying it will never go to a human is so out of touch with the world. I’m sure you have great intentions but I just don’t see how you can take that approach.
A large portion of aid goes to trying to help humans already. I see no reason to contribute more. Also, animals are completely innocent, most humans are not. (of course kids are though)
There's probably humans you're going to have to interact with in the course of donating to animals, who will benefit from you donating to animals (if not skimming off the top directly by way of being employed by the charity, etc). If you truly want to make sure none of it goes to any human, you'd basically just have to burn it (and maybe hope that does something bad to the economy to get back at the other humans).
> By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender
Didn't say that, you are projecting. I will assume now tho, HN has this untraveled suburban teenage male vibe when it comes to anything except code. That period when they discover Rand and are good a specific set of narrow problems.
Doesn't saying that "professional arm candy" is sexist imply that it is a term limited to only one gender?
Also, fyi, I'm 32, I was born in Paris, moved to Houston when I was 6, to London when I was 18, to Paris when I was 19, then Marseille, Grasse, and Lyon.
I'm currently writing this from the Stockholm airport, waiting for my flight home to France, and I've never read Ayn Rand, because her work seems to completely ignore the importance of cooperation, which I believe is the key to a happy and successful life :)
Maybe that's why? I know rich people (truly rich, not your upper middle class or rich as in I got a couple mils of net worth), in developed countries (West and Northern Europe) and to be honest your points, apart from being tangled and repetitive just so you can get 5, don't reflect their reality and are just a setup for your last politically charged line.
I'm sure with tens of millions of dollars in your hands, you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI. Especially when your kid gets sick god forbid.
sure but all of those are not that sustainable long term. Denmark made retirement age 70 and that will change in the future because your social economy is not sustainable. This also includes a lot of government things in USA.
$10M and more buys true freedom and reach to global travel and countries. All of those free things in Europe require certain level of native labor and population aging fast is not helpin that across globe.
Counter-argument, largely lifted from Graeber's _Debt, the first 5000 years_:
The US trade deficit isn't ever really meant to be repaid, it's basically the modern equivalent of the Roman Republic/Empire demanding tribute from weaker states with a thin veneer of "I'll pay you back" to make it more palatable.
Like the time the homeless dude living under a bridge near me asked to "borrow" 50€ from me :)
It also matters whether we are considering it a static $10 million or considering reality.
In reality, if you have $10 million, you put it in the S&P500 and make an average of 10% ($1 million) per year. Far more than inflation and more than enough to cover those things you're talking about unless you have a pretty extreme medical condition or very expensive hobbies.
I agree with this directionally, however I think you'll make more like 7.2% per year, and inflation will be about 2.5% per year. You'll also likely pay about 30% in federal and local taxes in the USA on it since you're actually selling it to live on it (more on taxes later). So you'll pay 2.2% in taxes. So on average you'll get 7.2 - (2.5 + 2.2) = 2.5% of income. If you have $10M, you can withdraw about 250K a year in today's dollars every year. i.e next year you can withdraw 256.3K or so, and keep doing this to keep your current standard of living. In down years you may want to adjust / tighten belt a tiny bit to not veer off track too much. And you can get cute with taxes but not recommended. That loan interest will add up over time, and when it's time to actually pay those loans, you'll still sell stock and pay taxes on it, unless your offspring inherit both.. and who knows what the laws will be then.
Agreed, but would caveat that the historical market returns happened as the world's dominant economic and technical powerhouse. The current trajectory is looking different, to put it mildly. The US is undermining nearly every advantage that led to such strong growth. Barring some massive pivot in the near future, medium term economic growth will most likely be lower.
despite some pretty amazing technical innovations
pocket calculator and microcomputer (Altair 8800), first email, pong, floppy disks (they were the standard for 20 years), VCR, cell phone (1973 Motorola), barcode scanners, rubiks cube, ...
Nominally S&P500 did 23% in the 70s, and 2.08% annualised, but financial returns are not just the stock prices, they're also dividends.
If you include and reinvest dividends, you'd have made 83% in the decade and 6.2% per year.
Its true inflation was high though, and an investment in Jan 1970 would've in real terms returned -1.1% a year after adjusting for inflation. If you continued investing equal amounts each year from 1970 to 1980, it'd actually be about -0.5%.
But no investment would've meant you lost half of all your money due to 7% average inflation, so investing would've been a pretty good idea, offsetting almost all inflation in the worst decade 50 years ago.
Also it's common knowledge to do a stock/bond split. Bond returns fared a bit better. -- and it should be said, the following decade inflation came way down and in nominal terms the S&P500 did +364% with dividends reinvested.
I do agree with your general point though, you can't just rely on a 10% annual average and spend that amount. The commonly referenced safe withdrawal rate (WR) of 4% is 2.5x less than the average S&P500 return for a good reason (based on a ton of monte carlo sims that indeed would lead to disastrous results at 10% WR in the 1970s).
Except the market is a bubble. It's going to pop within 10 years as the boomers retire and die. Thats assuming low inflation. With significant inflation the younger folks might afford to prop it up.
I assure you, if $10M doesn’t seem like it’s clearly enough for you, $100M won’t either. That worry doesn’t go away.
$10M generates a passive $400k per year (trinity study 4% rule yada yada). If you can’t manage on $400k/year, you might be what we call extremely out of touch.
Lifestyle is the only real issue past a few million, particularly if you own your home (and at 10m you certainly would). Beyond that its all status oriented which is where the "should be enough" bit comes in; if its status your after then theres never really enough.
after few million you start securing the retirement and few decades. like what if you live up to 100 or more? Anything below $3million means no retirement now or money has chance to be all spent in next 2-3 decades. After $10Million it's all enough
3 million invested means you can withdraw $100000 annual income with virtually no risk of ever going broke. That is financial independence. $10MM is way too high a bar.
I don't know if you intended this to be only spent selfishly. But if you look to how the old robber barons spent their money they did things like giving the US a large portion of it's public library system. I don't think it would be hard find things to do like this that make everyones lives better.
The fact you were able to get >$1B already made a lot of people's lives significantly worse. Charity is just a way to whitewash hoarding and exploitation.
Hmm. Doesn't include ongoing costs. The yacht for example will cost $1-4m a year simply to own it, and that's ongoing cost forever. The jet will have a similar figure. A $45m mansion isn't cheap to keep running either. Purchase these things and suddenly you're on an unsustainable financial path with a $1b completely liquid net worth. Forget about charitable giving. $20m of gifts annually put you deep in the red.
I'll bite. Private island, superyacht, G7, prime mansions in LA, NYC, London, Singapore, collection of old masters, part owner in an NFL team, establish a foundation and trusts for the kids/grandkids, trip to space. Easy
There was a movie from the 80s with this premise. When I mention this to people, I'm usually surprised to find out that I'm the only one in the group who's seen it:
This is crazy. I could easily spend a billion dollars without even thinking. That doesn't even get you a novel drug. Like, if I made $100b I have a shit ton of things I could attack with that.
Even a trillion dollars I could probably spend. I like sailboats so a yacht sounds nice, but I cannot believe it even a fraction of the satisfaction of developing some research, or of having the fundamental research itself done.
The "number" is always part of a big debate. There's no right or wrong.
Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.
So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).
If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.
Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).
All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.
I mean, can I not just spend the money to buy a better society in which to live?
Museums. I love museums. They all need more support. Kids need more places to do field trips.
Libraries ... they are experiencing budget cuts everywhere now as cities prioritize police spending.
Parks.
Homes for people that can't afford them. Seriously, one of the most effective possible cures for homelessness is to set up a program that helps people cover their rent for a month or two if they get into trouble.
Health care. Like, there's got to be a pile of people that need urgent health care and can't afford it, right?
Education. Adult education, too.
Science and research.
And most, maybe all of these, aren't even things that necessarily need an entirely new organization to spearhead them, or some kind of dramatic social change. They are all things that exist right now and need more funding than anything else. You could hire a small team to just look up all kinds of programs all day long and write checks for them and it would be enormously impactful.
I just... the answer to this seems so blindingly obvious to me, and then I read the rest of the comments, and I really wonder when exactly the hacker ethos got co-opted by the crab mentality.
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)
The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)
It seems like a lot then I think about how California’s EDD department gave 50 billion to criminals in 2020/2021 and then it feels less ginormous.
My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.
The best part of this game is that it takes time to spend the money, if you can't manage to spend more than 4-5%/year then your wealth will actually be growing.
For reference, on $1bn that's $40M/year or about $100k/day in earnings if you just have the cash in a money market account.
Coming up with a list of things to buy isn't an interesting use of the money. Starting companies, using that money to pay people to do things, for, say, 10 years, for all industries you want to get involved in. A billion dollars, over ten years, for 1,000 people, is 100k. Which is fairly decent salary.
Make it 500 people and give them housing.
What to use those people for is left as an exercise for the reader.
It would seem that accumulating stuff is a waste of time at a point much lower than one billion. On the other hand, giving every Debian maintainer $500 a month is ~$5M a year. Add in Gentoo, Alpine, and other things I like and you're looking at probably double that total. Ivy admission for kids is a few million a year for 5-10 years... Retaking Artsakh would be north of $3 billion
That was an example - not what they’d choose to pick themselves. You misread their comment and then came down hatefully upon them for it. Shame on you.
That's only if you spend your money on stuff. I wouldn't spend it on stuff, I would fund things like ambitious art and architecture projects. If you can't think of ways to allocate $1B you're probably a very boring person, and if your first thought is "yachts" then you're definitely one.
The only real way to spend billions is to build many huge houses all over the world or ONE really big house. To spend hundreds of billions you would have to build something ridiculous like a mile high pyramid with a 1 square mile base.
That's quite a cynical point of view, and while all charities certainly have overhead to account for, and not all charities are created equal in that respect, organizations like Charity Watch can tell you a long list of organizations that use donations very efficiently - in the sense that almost all of the money actually goes towards the cause, not the people running the charity.
There was a long Reddit thread[1] a while ago that describes what people in various wealth tranches spend their money on. It's very long, but the TLDR is: They don't buy "things" so much as they buy Experiences, Access, Influence, Time, Political Power, and so on.
or just look at how many big yatcht Gabe newell owns and try to calculate cost of maintaining them for a year. That alone easily requires $1billion invested in somewhere so returns can maintain the ownership + trips. Also now he now owns shipyard too.
Faster to fly between yachts stashed in different parts of the world than it is to move one around. If it were just for your own use, you could have it moved while you were elsewhere occupied between trips, but I assume people would make them available to family and friends also.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but all that stuff is personal spending on luxury goods, which is probably the least useful thing money can do. If your goal is something like "solve supply-side housing in my city" then you might need to build hundreds of high-rise apartment blocks, at which point you'll be able to burn through $1bn pretty quickly. And yeah, you'll eventually make your money back, but that's a side benefit.
Posts like these seem a bit silly to me because it's incredibly easy to spend billions of dollars as soon as you get away from a consumer mindset. The value in a billion dollars comes from being able to shape the future in whichever direction you want. I'm not interested in spending money just to make my own life marginally more comfortable, but in elevating the quality of life and overall experience of everyone around me.
Here's a few random frustrations I have:
Most modern hardware appliances are not easily repaired or hackable. I'd love to manufacture and sell open hardware appliances which prioritize repairability and maintainability, including sharing the CAD models and opening up the firmware.
Despite the years of effort that have gone into the Linux Desktop Experience, it still often lacks polish in various areas. You could afford to hire world class engineers and designers to fix up every minor annoyance and really provide the most deluxe desktop experience possible without compromising on the slightest detail. Not only that, you could contract companies to add Linux support for any essential tools and applications which aren't already supported.
And that's not even getting into the ability to fund the creation of really outstanding media. Most modern kid's entertainment treats them like morons while slapping them in the face with basic lessons. You could create some truly delightful kid shows without having to skimp on any aspect, and really lay the foundations for creating a brighter future. Embed lessons of every major topic as part of the show without being hamfisted about it, and when they start to encounter those challenging topics in school they will have some foundational models on which to build upon. A basic example: you can teach a kid the fundamentals of calculus from an intuitive perspective, and when they actually learn proper calculus in school it'll be much easier to ramp up.
Heck, you could fund the modernization of a ton of college level educational content with enough money. Buy the rights to any important textbooks, rewrite as needed, then make them freely available. Hire a team of world class artists, animators, and builders to help create supporting materials / content that cover any topic. Pair that with world class educators and experts. You put that all together and create the most powerful repository of high quality educational content that the world has ever seen. By doing this you're laying the foundations for the development of future generations and setting them up for success!
Those are just some quick thoughts which I'm willing to write up here... If I thought about it longer I'd probably be able to come up with more significant quality of life improvements that could be spread out if someone was willing to spend a few billion dollars into making them into a reality.
Oh here's a final quick one: funding maker spaces across the country. It's not clear how much potential could be unlocked if we had widely available maker spaces where people can ask for help with their projects and ideas. Sometimes all it takes is having someone who can point you to the right tools or people.
I hear what you are saying: consumables and normal luxury items are hard to spend a lot of money on (houses, cars, boats, planes, clothes, food, etc)... if you however were to choose to spend a lot of money on the R&D required to reducing human suffering you'll find that the money will go like its on fire. Build a new drug, create novel ai tech, driverless cars... $1B would feel like you need to clip coupons for the grocery store.
People don't talk about their losing art trades or the art they over paid for and are trying to sell in a completely illiquid market.
We were in a huge fine art bubble up to covid. This decade has been a much different story. It is a boring news story though compared to a Ken Griffin balling out last decade buying his favorite paintings for incredible sums of money.
Yachts and houses are boring. Can't you think of anything you'd rather do with your life than live in a house and go sailing? You can do that without money!
A million dollars is, roughly speaking, a person-year of dedicated professional services from a world-class professional of almost any profession. There are a few exceptions, like stockbrokers, surgeons, and some kinds of lawyers. But a billion dollars buys you, say, 1000 person-years of the best professionals.
For millions of dollars, you could have your own vaccination program, your own particle accelerator, your own web browser, your own steel mill, your own religious cult, your own pyramid, your own AI research lab, your own permaculture experiment station, your own rare book collection (which you could digitize), and so on.
That's leaving aside personal consumption of things like a diplomatic passport from a foreign country, a private doctor, a comfortable apartment in a former missile silo, and a helicopter to get to it with. Your yacht isn't going to do you much good if you get arrested in a foreign country on trumped-up charges because you unintentionally insulted the wrong guy's daughter, or if your cancer goes undiagnosed until stage 4.
Not all hope is lost; Zhu Yuanzhang was born a peasant and was iliterut before becoming an orphan and a homeless beggar. On top of that, his oldest friend tried to murder him! And that worked out brilliantly in the end.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?