I buy social medias and news outlets. Then I weaponize them to support a clueless gullible idiot candidate for POTUS.
I use my influence on him to get a position that will allow me to get grossly richer by favoring my own businesses, including crushing unions and force my employees to work to death on low wages.
When I reach 1 trillion $, I’ll have much more resources to improve the planet and living conditions of my fellow humans.
But wait! Maybe I could do even more for humankind with 2 trillions $??
Kinda hate that I’m upvoting you.
Assassinate the other billionaires. I genuinely believe billionaires are the source of all the biggest problems the planet has right now.
Someone is simply going to take their place. The problem isn’t the billionaires themselves, its the system.
We can do a lot more to change the system without a bunch of over-moneyed under-principled techbros trying to stop us.
But if we do that today, what do we do tomorrow? When someone someone else takes that vacant CEO position and starts receiving that ludicrous salary, what then?
If you killed every billionaire every month, they probably wouldn’t have time to seriously affect society, but then I suspect we’d have other problems. I have a feeling that would produce some negative outcomes for the economy and general quality of life.
You’re just worried about the loud ones who are usually loud because they aren’t rich. Its the quiet really rich ones you need to worry about
Fair. The techbros are emblematic of the problem, but it extends far outside the tech industry.
No.
Peter Thiel isn’t quiet. Egghead man isn’t quiet.
Not if you pick off each new billionaire.
Exactly what I came here to say. Hire a group, and tell them to start at the top of the Forbes list and work their way down. Send anonymous letters to media outlets that surrendering their wealth is the only way to save their lives.
It would dramatically improve the quality of living on this planet within 3 months.
Create a fake lottery to help get a fascist into office for the end goal of turning that $300bil into $1tril.
here are a few ideas I had:
- invest / subsidized green tech
- lobby to stop oil and gas subsidies
- lobby to stop meat subsidies
- lobby for stricter environmental taxes and regulations.
- subsidize repair services so that it’s cheaper for people to fix things instead of buying new
- offer bad politicians a lot of money to resign
- buy companies that provide essential services (water gas net) and make them non profits
- do the same to things like Uber Facebook Google, and make ads optional
- make public transit free
- make affordable healthcare
- set up a charity with whatever’s left. withdraw 4% a year and split evenly it between to anyone who asks for it
with whatever’s left
Heh, several of your bullets can eat that full amount.
welp. if I ever become president then there goes the national debt
The lobbying stuff seems sensible.
The market cap of Alphabet/Google alone is an order of magnitude larger than your budget.
Offering bad politicians lots of money is probably a bad precedent. Also, depending on your definition, there’s potentially a lot of them.
Free public transit, healtchcare are also significantly bigger than your budget.
So since that doesn’t work - how about you buy a social media network, and get chummy with the corrupt candidate for president you push, then be part of a commission to destroy most sensible parts of the federal government. Also, build a creepy compound for all your children and their mothers.
Assuming it’s the US
- set up a fund to provide free school lunches until the government provides them
- give grants for people to set up housing co-ops
- hire my own army of Russian trolls (they do not need to be Russian, I am inclusive to all trolls) to fracture conservative unity/support progressive
- buy up some social media companies. (YouTube would be best, but I don’t the 300 billion is enough) make the algorithm progressive
- whatever is left over goes to renewables and conservation efforts
bribe (sorry, i mean lobby) politicians to vote in interest of humanity. Environmental protection, public healthcare, solve the housing crisis/homeless epidemic, increase education budget spending, etc.
Trains
Assumption is thats in dollars:
Buy every single relevant news outlet, social media platform and information network. Then you remove all the right-wing garbage and replace it with the actual truth. Agressivly ban accounts who spread lies and hate for violating guidelines. Make accounts visible if they are bots or not.
Be partisan about it: Progressive ideas over conservatism.
In essence: Remove as much poison from the internet as possible, so people are no longer getting sucked into conservative pipelines and bubbles.
except then the people who owned those outlets would now have $300 billion…
Were they lacking in money before the buyout? If not, does it actually change anything?
So you wouldn’t actually change anything, you’d just be closing down avenues of debate and saying “I’m right, you’re wrong”.
I think you’ve just wasted your money.
Reminds me a little of this short text adventure https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos
Am I allowed to say I’d take out a few hits - in this totally fictitious scenario? Because that’s what I’d do. When the scum rises to the top it’s always best to wipe it off so it doesn’t suffocate what’s underneath. .
My initial thought was that since 10% of the population hoard 50% of the wealth, that I would take that 300,000,000 and divide it amongst the other 90% to flip the corporate script on it’s head. But it turns out that’s only 40 bucks per person…
I’ve long held the belief that the greatest damage to the working class is the phrase “you should feel lucky to even have a job.” Because it allows the corporations to largely do whatever they want, creating a top-down economy by default.
But imagine if people only had to work if they wanted to. A writer could write without needing to get a “real job”. A carpenter who loves making homemade furniture and selling it no longer has to limit his hobby because he’s unable to make a living doing it. A person has a dream of running their own coffee shop, but can’t because they need all of their hours to just make sure the kids are fed.
If everyone can pursue a living how they want to make a living instead of stepping on our passions because there are bills to pay, then suddenly, the corporations have to deserve US, and not the other way around. I don’t need your shit wages. I don’t need your lack of health care. Make it worth my while for me to give my skills to your company or GTFO.
That’s essentially the dream of a UBI, and I initially thought I could kick start that by spreading my 300 billion around to the 90% rank and file. But it turns out I’m shit at math.
You know you can get a nice militia with those billions, would be a shame if that militia went after the 0.5% to distribute their wealth
Yeah. That can buy a shit load of assasins
There is a danish researcher called Björn Lomborg who has been researching this type of question a lot. He tends to get a lot of hate because the most cost efficient ways to spend money to do good isn’t what people want it to be.
What are the most cost-efficient ways?
Iirc, micronutrients and HIV prevention, followed by preventing malaria. The idea is that we spend a little money now, to make many people grow up and be healthy, which avoids big costs to societies while at the same time generating people who can contribute more to the same societies. Many people want to solve the climate first, but it’s very expensive for very little return. In an ideal world we would solve all the problems, but… we don’t. So if we have limited resources, we should spend it where it does most long-term good. It’s not a bad idea to do good things for the climate, but if we have to choose between things to do, it gives little benefit per dollar compared to other things.
Is it new money or money that already existed? If it already existed, burn it.
$300 Billion is both a huge sum for the individual, and a tiny sum for the world economy.
Lead by example, educate, and leverage.
Lead by building or converting one town to car free and 100% renewable.
Educate people on how to improve the world. Creating or buying radio and TV stations, producing entertaining programming.
Leverage by buying large fractions of companies to change their policies. Setup investor funds to do the same. Ensure all people I employ are paid well and treated with respect.
First off, whilst it might seem selfish, I’d get my personal shit fixed up, would take at most 50k and if I bought some apartment house to own as well, maybe a few hundred k on top.
Okay now I’m settled and healthy. Start making a media company. Hire some great talent. Hire some video game designers, politicians. Essentially start a very weird sort of studio.
Then a sort of a think-thank, a little bit. Focusing on what would be the most efficient ways of approaching systemic change. (I’ve tons of ideas already for those meets, notebooks full. Not too organised, I’m unafraid, and it’s hard to start reasoning them here due to the char limit of 10k).
Start a foundation, a league of some sorts. What I mean by that is have some sort of guiding ideology, a very rough and not too ideologically narrow, but also definitely what would be called leftist in traditional terms.
Then te work starts. Charity projects where they’re the most efficient, so they’ll have the largest effect. What that means will take a few comments to argue I’d wager.
Start promoting cooperation and whatnot. Fund streamers who join the league, so that for instance some streamers traveling in a poor country would have the ability to access the funds of the foundation to for instance help build some infra for a tiny village which will take away 50% of their travel time or work load or something, giving that community a better chance to grow.
So all these hundreds if not thousands of streamers going around the world, and if bigger infra projects are needed, the foundation can help with those as well. Like building some huge solar power/water distillation plants.
Just building from the ground up.
But that wouldn’t help jack shit with political issues we currently have. That requires another plan I have. Except if the league was also on point with what’s going on in local politics said places and could promote change with the amount of influence it had, when directed to smaller political entities it might be enough to sort of clean them od corrupt people as well if there is a democratic process of some sort at least.
Like using the foundations entire population to focus on some minor local election should overwhelm it. Do that enough and there’s a substantial effect. Maybe
