Good start, but change them all to “by testicular/ovarian devastation” and then write in the names of every billionaire on earth followed by their closest relatives out to about 3 degrees of separation.

Might even fix some overcrowding

It depends on how small you write, I suppose.

I see I’m gonna need to buy a microfiche printer…

Lots of people here forget that you can control the actions of the person before they die.

I did almost forget, thanks for the reminder. I just looked it up again, specifically you can control 23 days.

Kim Jong Un calls for democratic elections and forms a democratic government after opening the borders

He’d get couped by the generals and they’ll instate someone else. You’d have to write the key generals too. You could run out of space to write real soon. And you’d have to hope their sucessors actually continue the trajectory after 23 days (since kim and the generals be dead)

Unfortunately you need to keep in mind that transfers and donations can be reversed posthumously. If a gunman walks up to a billionaire, forces him to transfer millions to his bank account, and then shoots him dead, the killer doesn’t just get to keep the money after getting caught. Any transfer can be reversed after the fact. And you only have a few minutes of controlling the person before they die, so you can’t have them work for years to do good with their money.

If just one billionaire died this way, the transfers would likely stand. It can be written off as one man deciding to gain a conscience before taking his own life. But if hundreds of billionaires start doing this all at once? People are reasonably going to conclude that something or someone is controlling these billionaires. Maybe people actually accept the fantastical notion of a Death Note in play. Or maybe they conclude its something strange but more scientific, like some sort of infectious electronic meme that can instantly brainwash people into carrying out some action. Maybe there’s a hereto undiscovered arrangement of pixels on a screen that can hack the human mind and gain control of it temporarily. The sort of thing that, while implausible, is at least within the realm of scientific possibility.

Regardless of the exact cause, the heirs to these billionaires will go to court and argue that their deceased relatives were clearly not of sound mind at the time they transferred all their holdings. There’s already plenty of legal precedent for this, primarily for elderly people who lose their faculties and are taken advantage of by manipulative caretakers. Even if you can convince some 90 year old woman with Alzheimer’s to sign away her fortune to you, that transfer has a good chance of being reversed in court.

Really, the most effective way to provide extreme encouragement for the heirs to give away money is by having the billionaire write, in their own blood on the wall, “my heirs should give away my money. Any that don’t will share my fate.”

This way there are no transfers to fight in court. The legitimate heirs of the billionaire do inherit the money. But after they have it, there’s nothing preventing them from donating it themselves. And the money will be like a curse. They’ll be desperate to get rid of it.

Done on a large scale, this would encourage most billionaires to give up their wealth voluntarily. You could have each of them write, “I am being killed for the crime of being a billionaire. Any other billionaire will share my fate.” If a few dozen such killings happened, and the police proved utterly unable to prevent it, then the vast majority of billionaires would give up their wealth voluntarily out of pure fear.

I love the idea of sending them a heads-up and demands.

if I were born before the internet, I would be a serial killer doing the exact same thing, driving the road taking out animal abusers, people who have cheated the system, started genocide, etc. and have zero issues doing it. now? you might get 1 before your face is plasted everywhere, as we just saw.

I’d leave reasons why they were deleted too, so everyone knows to stop with the bullshit or they could be next.

The exact rule is:

The human whose name is written in this note shall die.

I’m not sure if printing counts. Since thats you instructing a non-living object to spill ink on to a page, not technically “writing”

Yup, and add in world leaders if there is still room on the page

I’m a bit of a Buddhist myself, but knowing that I stopped billions from suffering for ending the lives of a few evil people, I could do it.

I could do it with my bare hands.

If you burn it, or fail to use it, someone you briefly thought maybe should go on the list gets to use it

You’d need to investigate their heirs first, because they’ll just make s bunch of new oligarchs when they die and those will catch the pattern pretty quickly.

I hope you are thinink of mosquitos, and if so make sure to only pick the ones that bite humans. There are a lot of other species that don’t.

(I know which species you really mean)

I don’t know why this is a top-level comment, but I’m a bit concerned

Basically write a name on a piece of paper and then they die. You can also choose the manner of their death if I remember right

A Japanese Manga and Anime from the 90s and 00s. It’s a story about a kid who gets ahold of a notebook capable of anonymously killing people.