Ask Lemmy

Call a tax lawyer/pay taxes, call a financial planner, and figure out what other calls I'd need to make to set up and fund a couple of charities.

Lots of perfectly valid answers here about decent humane things to do with the money and power, and I certainly hope I would do things like end homelessness or otherwise meaningfully improve the world.

That said.

I'd build a full-scale, 1:1 replica of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-D, from The Next Generation. I'd run it like the Biltmore; technically it would be a private residence, but I'd charge people to take tours. But any time I wanted, I could close it down for a few days and just hang out on the bridge or in main engineering and vibe out to the THRUM THRUM THRUM of the warp core.

But solve homelessness first, of course.

I'd shut the fuck up. Pay off my house and maybe add an addition to where I'm at. Same with some relatives. Fix my Subaru the way I want it, buy a catterham.

Start buying people's debt for pennies on the dollar and cancelling it.

Begin process of leaving the USA.

Hire a fukn lawyer D:

Probably yell WOOHOO.

Next is quit my job.

A new off-grid house. We have a lot of power outages here every winter.

An older used car (I want nothing to do with a new car which are basically rolling spyware).

Start helping the worse off in my area such as the homeless and those living below the poverty line.

Get me, my family, and my friends the fuck out of the US

Put him to sleep agai, with a brick.

get up

I would invest it. Every year, I would withdraw the profits, so that my net worth stayed approximately the same.

I would throw an event in a different city each year.

I would get that money ("earned" from doing nothing more than investing it) IN CASH.

All the cash would be loaded up in a plane and dropped in a public place. It would be a spectacle. No advertising needed, word of mouth and social media would be more than enough.

At each event, I would remind people that the money dropping from the sky is merely the crumbs from a single billionaire. Money that I did not earn. Money that was taken from the fruits of their labor and added to my stock portfolio.

I would ask them to imagine how much more money billionaires are hoarding. I would then bid them a fond farewell until next year.

Oh, and also, maybe a nice condo in southeast Asia. Thailand, maybe. Somewhere chill and fairly inexpensive. Not because I deserve a nicer place, but because fuckyouallI'mrichbitchstillnotatotaldickheadthough.

Leave the US for a country that hasn't turned into a dictatorship yet.

Take a day off?

Buy a house far far away and leave this cesspool I currently call home.

American billionaire (1000 millions) or European billionaire (1 million millions)?

Take biggest loan(s) and sell everything I own. Buy big storage space with wall full of leaf blowers and blow the money for the rest of my life.

1. Buy the house for my kids I’ve been saving for
2. Set us all a reasonable allowance and a rainy day fund so we never have to worry
3. Find a way to donate the majority to underserved families of children with disabilities

Build out swathes of affordable housing/mixed use properties in large enough numbers to drive down the prices city wide.

If i woke up a billionaire, I would tell him to pay some taxes to avoid the guillotine in a couple years.

Finally sleep in.

I'd see a tax advisor and then a portfolio manager, and book driving lessons.

Next day I'd pay off my student loans

Get the fuck out of this country

go find where Musk is and beat the ever living fuck out of him, I'll be able to access him easier with my billion dollars, after that just do shit to help my local community.

The problem is that everything I'd want to do would be opposed by other billionaires worth hundreds of billions.

I'd probably put an entire university worth of professors on payroll, along with an army of neurodivergence specialists to make it so I could actually make use of them. If I had functionally infinite money I could become so fucking gigabrain. The saving the world stuff should go without saying since we are all ensouled beings unlike the ghoulish husks who actually have billions of dollars.

Buy politicians.

Start giving lectures about the antichrist, buy a barrel of ketamine, pay women to sleep on a bed of cornflakes.

Buy one more bicycle and then figure out how the money can help me to make my city or at least the neighbourhood car-free.

i would start looking for causes to fund. extinction rebellion for example would get quite hefty sum

cancel my benefits. tell my wife. I mean I would start trying to figure out my money but if a surface look indicated I was going to be set for life no matter what I do and if all the financials had some setup im sure we would definately take an extended vacay of no planning. Just go and do what we want and indulge. After a bit would start figuring out how to do something useful outside of be hedonistic and figure out where we want to live and such.

Create a worldwide socialist revolution.

Call my accountant

Triple-check that's it's real, make sure to secure it in multiple ways, then research charities so I can give most of it away. A couple of million € would already afford me all the luxuries that I could care about.

Not even sure what I'd actually spend money on that would improve my life. I seem to be accumulating medical issues that are difficult to diagnose, let alone treat; not sure that even a billion dollars would actually help much with that (we do have a somewhat sensible healthcare system in my country). I'd probably look into hiring some kind of personal assistant/caretaker/chauffeur, to improve my odds of actually making it to important appointments (or just having them do it for me, if it doesn't require that I personally show up).

Make sure I'm not still asleep and dreaming.

Go back to sleep

Buy back the politicians.