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?

  • Vilian@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    72
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    buy politians to make them make laws to fuck over bilionaries, what is ironic lol

    • Jim@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • ssboomman@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      You might be underestimating how little 100 billion is, compared to the wealth of other billionaires.

      • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        27
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • CableP13@waveform.socialOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          1 year ago

          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

          • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            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?

            • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              1 year ago

              If you had 100billion, then why pay the existing shitbags, instead of getting every single one voted out?

              • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                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.

                • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  arrow-down
                  6
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  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?

      • joekar1990@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        100 billion puts you in the top 15 richest on the planet. You’d actually rank #11 ahead of Sergey Brin and Bloomberg.

        • Instigate@aussie.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • livus@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • IIII@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Instigate@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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?

      • moistclump@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

      • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

  • EchoCT@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Hire hitmen to remove the other 100 richest people in the 🌎.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • EchoCT@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        So… Not to techbro this, but can we crowdfund this and accidentally reinvent the revolution?

        • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • plain_and_simply@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Hypx@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Sugrue

  • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • blanketswithsmallpox@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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)

      • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Instigate@aussie.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • VediusPollio@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Bet you could buy a lot of teepees with that money and increase the curb appeal of tent cities.

  • nutomic@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    Buy a major social media platform and run it into the ground. Oh wait…

  • keeb420@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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…

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Ooo a meritocracy, very impressive, and surely if the poor were just better trained and smarter, we’d live in a utopia.

  • TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’d lean on the charities that have done the research on how best to deploy money and how much money those methods can support.

    I’d also set myself and my friends/family up for life with a handful of millions each. But the rest gets donated.

  • Archmage Azor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    First I’d find out how to make the money grow ethically

    Then I’d invest in fusion power and green power, invest in lab-grown meat, invest in atmosphere cleaning, perhaps start some well-funded schools in areas of low education, sponsor some hospitals, etc.

    I think I would also try to get asteroid mining to take off.