Let’s say that you have an opportunity to gain billions to fix the society from the top. Do you think that you would keep your integrity and use your money for the greater good, or that you would be corrupted by your power?
If so, would you still accept the offer knowing that you would just make the situation worse?
And if you believe in yourself, how would you try to convince an hypotetical entity to give you this wealth?
To avoid regrets let’s say that if you decline the offer your memory about the deal gets erased.
Billionaires should not exist.
But I’m a infinitaire
I would trust myself, but I know that I would be the villain in some people’s lives.
Maybe the worst of us should live in fear.
If this is a magical entity, then I would just tell it to give me $100 for every $1,000,000 I use for charitable work that doesn’t directly benefit me.
If I give away $1,000,000 100,000 times, that’s 100 billion dollars of charitable work. And my net worth would “only” be 10 million dollars, certainly wealthy, but not idiotically wealthy. Plenty for me to invest and have doctor money levels of passive income, but only by giving away the vast vast majority of the money I get.
Or I guess I could just ask the entity to cap my net worth at 10 million dollars, and only give me that money when I have given away some arbitrary amount of money it gives me, like 500 billion dollars or something, Idk.
yeah I would just hire a really smart people And ask them what they think
The foundations I would be donating to probably would
No. I believe that adage about absolute power corrupting absolutely. I don’t trust myself or any other single person with that kind of money.
Yeah. Knowing myself, I’m probably going to just forget i have the wealth and spend it on getting a nice house in a nice area and getting my wife pretty dresses to wear to work while I stay home and take care of the kids.
I think the only hypothetical entity willing to give me the money would have to be Satan himself; I’d be making a bet with him that I wouldn’t be corrupted by the wealth, he takes my soul if I get greedy. Can’t imagine convincing any other sort of entity to give me billions of dollars to do nearly nothing with it.
Nobody can be trusted with that much power. Not even yourself.
I think I would because I know what it’s like to have a real job and pay my bills with it - as opposed to being born into a rich family or striking it rich because you were the right tech bro at the right time and you got lucky (and you fucked your partners over a little too).
There’s a million interesting social projects I would like to donate to. People and organization who don’t need all that much to do a ton of good around them. I would feel truly happy to donate to them and feel as though I had a net positive impact in my community.
And also, I despise the arrogant tax-evading billionnaire class so much, I don’t think I could live with myself if I realized I had become one of them without realizing some day. Just that thought alone would keep me on my toes every day I think.
Does “corrupted by power” cover mega building projects?
I don’t know where morality falls on my desire to build New Tenochtitlán.
i think super rich people do fucked up shit because:
- that’s the only way you become mega-rich, and
- they want more
if i already have ‘infinite’ money, why would i want more, and since i’m getting this via magic or something, there’s no incentive to be evil in order to become or remain mega-rich. in short, yeah, i reckon i’d be alright, and we’d all be better off in the long run.
- that’s the only way you become mega-rich
People have become billionaires by literal lottery. They’re not evil geniuses; don’t flatter them by suggesting so.
that doesn’t typically end well for most of them either
You don’t become a billionaire by pure luck though, you need to seek out situations that could make you rich and then you need to get incredibly lucky (unless you are born into money of course).
Being the type of person that seeks out becoming that rich is going to have to do it at the expense of others.
It’s true, if you don’t play you can’t win. That being said, if you go through these people’s life stories they come across as very similar to the legions of entrepreneurs that didn’t strike it big.
Maybe what you’re saying is that everyone who’s tried to make big money is a bastard. I guess you could do that, but that’s not really the impression I’ve gotten of the startup dorks I’ve met.
It’s actually really hard to get a billion dollars directly from the lottery.
You pay like 60% (or more maybe?) taxes if you take it as a lump sum. And still lots of taxes if you annuitize it, and then it will take too long to be a billionaire unless you win it in your 20s maybe.
You also have to win a full billion in the first place, and someone else pointed out the highest winnings are actually juust short. So, technically I was wrong, although the point still stands.
There’s been several winning jackpots over a billion now. There was one a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, but apparently they’ve all been split a few ways.It’s a distinction without a difference, but there you go.
Are you saying the jackpot, or the one time cash out value which is always less than the annuity value? Because those are different things. And there’s several jackpot values that were single tickets above 1 bln
Ah shit, you’re right. I was reading the table wrong.
Okay, so the top one is actually a two billion jackpot that came out to just below a billion due to the way the cash is awarded.
Lottery winners don’t often stay wealthy forever though
True. Then again, you don’t hear a lot about the Carnegies anymore either. Social mobility just works in both directions, and about as often.
Social mobility just works in both directions, and about as often.
Yeah, no, that’s a massive streaming pile of self soothing bullshit that isn’t convincing anyone but you.
You want to have a look at the hard numbers? Give me a moment to gather sources. Basically, it’s a random walk, and the ever-worse inequality is induced by the upper end “spreading out”.
I’m below the poverty line myself, BTW. I am not one of the winners who would need to self-sooth.
according to this list, nobody has gotten a billion from a lottery, yet. but sure, i guess that is the way to get rich, without having to exploit others. i also feel like i ought to point out that i never accused anyone of being evil geniuses, just evil.
edit: fixed link
Birth lottery maybe
Ah, just $997.6m. My bad, I guess.
Yeah, but there’s plenty of nasty mean poor people, too. If you put that incomprehensible wealth on a lack of morals you’re basically painting them as a Lex Luthor figure who can just choose to outmaneuver everyone else. Meanwhile, there’s pretty strong statistical evidence the ones that didn’t win literal lotteries just won figurative ones.
I would take it but it would be quite a job to manage that. If literally infinite, and not an amount, it would break the idea of money, right?
I’m not sure society can be fixed from the top but would be interested to see what happens if grants are directed in ways that grow the bottom part of the economy, could it be made vibrant, can the value be circulated around not exploited? Can the land be restored? The oceans? How do you audit to prevent fraud, to keep it from making things worse?
I would be very happy to not have to worry about my personal budget but to have the responsibility to try to fix the world with money seems like an impossible task. Money could fix my personal situation, but can it fix everything? Probably not.
I do think I would try though, yeah.
Buy all the debt. Then fuck off into the sunset. Humanity is better off for it.
A Jubilee year should happen regardless. Yeah.
I think this is sort of a pandora’s box too. Buying the debt off means paying the banks, LOTS. So you’d not only inflate all currency to oblivion, but make banks the richest entities by far. That’s dangerous.
Hmmm…so then keep your money secret, fund a space program that pays more than SpaceX, NASA and Blue origin or what ever.
The. Use that wealth to build a colony ship. Fuck off to a new planet?
I’d get YouTube premium
I would give it away by making college trust funds for poor kids in my area until I had the 4-5 million left that I would need to retire and never work again. Why anyone has more money than that is beyond me.
Yes. I would end homelessness by building housing for everyone that wanted it. Then I would donate almost all the rest to orgs that share my values while keeping a portion large enough to do whatever I want until I die and fuck off into obscurity. I would not buy media companies and try to get lots of attention.
I don’t understand people who need to constantly accumulate more. Once I can live comfortably doing whatever I want until death, that’s enough. Put the rest towards making the world a better place.
Homelessness doesn’t exist because of a lack of housing.
It exists because of a lack of affordable housing. If I’m gonna have infinite wealth it won’t matter.
I would just buy houses in fancy HOA neighborhoods and let homeless people live there.
