yet another fun parlor question:

[queenlua]

suppose you were a super-duper-bajillionaire, to the tune of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates levels of money. what kind of super-duper-bajillionaire would you be?

some rich-people archetypes, for the sake of illustration:

* Bill Gates. Start your own philanthropic organization. Make it The Best at what it does. Wipe out bad shit in third world countries, etc.

* Paul Allen. Basically made Seattle his town, in a good way. Buys old historic buildings/theaters/etc in order to preserve them, funds museums and art galleries and sci-fi museums and nerd shit, owns a football team, all that good stuff.

* Koch Brothers. Silently influence the great political powers to do your bidding with your giant, giant wads o' cash! (Hopefully for slightly less evil ends than what they're aiming for...)

note that the question isn't meant to be a "would you be a selfish jerk, spending all your money on yourself, or would you be Good (TM) and work for Good Things (TM)"—e.g., Paul Allen still gives away half his wealth to charitable causes. he's just a little more passionate and active on the "making Seattle rad" side of things, and turns out at that level of wealth you can give away billions and own a football team.

anyway, contemplate & discuss at will :P

Comments

[arlie]

Koch brothers. Not sure I could do much good that way, but there's too much harm being done by bought and (possibly) unbought politicians; there needs to be a counter.

[kradeelav]

I wish more folks new how endearingly eccentric low-key billionaires are - remember the time I mentioned about the lady in the neighborhood who has her morning walks with a chicken on her head (and has a chicken coop in the backyard)? She, uh, definitely married in that cadre. (She's also surprisingly sweet and grounded, tbh.)

(the chicken thing is something I can *totally* see you doing, fyi )

personally?
krad: idk buying a private army to knock off warlords and to be swanky bodyguards would be badass.
krad: ... that's not very zen!libertarian of you to say.
krad: ..................... i... could draw them instead?

moral of the story: do not make krad a billionaire. :P

[queenlua]

isn't this basically what big boss did in mgs :P

[kradeelav]

and now I can't un-see ocelot taking up figure drawing classes to draw the beauty that is big boss.

....

lua's livejournal: segueing into mgs fanfiction since '17

[amielleon]

hang on, I seem to recall some orphan-turned-billionaire single-handedly making St Louis a big chess hub in the US because he made his own private chess museum, his own private chess training quarters, etc. he's basically a giant chess nerd enabled by his massive wads of money. realistically I think I'd be that, being a hermit in my house with my cats for the most part, stepping out into the world just to observe my nerd kingdom.

[queenlua]

i would love to learn more about this chess nerd billionaire. that sounds like a p badass way to be :P

[amielleon]

This is the guy, though there's little on his wiki page about his chess nerdry:

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

[lassarina]

I think I would be somewhere between Gates and Allen - I'd want to contribute a lot to organizations that work to get people with criminal/felony convictions a second chance so that they can break the cycle, and to under-funded schools in Chicago (because I know my own backyard better, though eventually I'd expand) so that those kids have better resources (included in this, I think, would be substantial in-kind block-grants to the families of those kids--not cash because that could fuck up any other benefits they receive, but coupons/vouchers for clothing, books, food, etc. so that kids could spend time studying and not working after-school jobs to keep their families afloat, that kind of thing.) But also I'd want to preserve a lot of the cool historical shit that is Chicago, and (working through community members in disadvantaged communities because they know what they need better than I do) providing safe spaces for people to socialize and play and learn. Chicago is an amazing city but also incredibly divided, and while it is nowhere near as fucked as some blowhards in the White House would have you believe, I would want to do everything I could to make it better.