They’re not thinking big enough…
A financial question was posed in a comment thread @ Making Light:
...If you suddenly had $11,000,000,000 cash, what the hell would you do with it?
I dunno. US$11 billion just doesn't seem to be that much money, does it? I've seen estimates that a manned spaceflight to Mars would cost US$100 billion, so that's out. But even with (heh) only US$11 billion, that's enough money to toss half a billion aside from some bright fund managers to generate an endless stream of money to live on and be left with over US$10 billion to, oh,
- buy a regional railroad and (re)electrify it (most of the Oregon Electric still exists, and a largish chunk of BCER does [BCER could probably be purchased and electrified for a couple of billion, which would leave US$7-8 billion to put into a lobbying fund to convince the SoCred morons who run BC into pursuing a more environmentally sound governing policy. Sure, it could also be used to underwrite a lefty political party, but, really, the SoCred people are small-fish conservatives and could be bought by post-collapse Enron, for christ's sake. The lure of half a billion of lobbying money PER YEAR would be like chumming the waters there,])
- buy a smallish chunk of Manhattan Island and lobby City Hall to not charge a billion a year in taxes (If I went far enough north on Central Park I might even be able to buy a city block for under a billion, which would be nice for Central Park frontage),
- go into the global warming denialist denialist business (see my previous comment about conservatives. The companies that pay for global warming denialists are really cheap, and I could probably swing 90% of the denialists around without seriously impacting cashflow,
- Perhaps I could start buying timberland and just taking it out of production until the trees got large enough to log. You get some really good wood if you let the trees grow for a millenia or so, so I'd have to set up a "if the biosystem doesn't explode, all this will be your great^30 grandson's timberland" foundation and then just let the land sit as a nature reserve until then.
- Oh, I suppose I could always buy a large chunk of New Hampshire and attempt to colonize the state with lefties. Leftists are much closer to the stereotypical "Live Free or Die!" NH resident (my father, who was born and raised in New Hampshire, is much more of a socialist that I am) than the pretend libertoonians who keep floating threats of "we'll colonize the state and make it into a corporate paradise!"
- I suppose I could also spend that money on buying property in New Orleans, then going on a delta restoration frenzy while there's still some delta to restore. But the timeframe for that is really short, and as long as Maximum Leader Genius is in power any attempts to restore the delta would collide with the reality distortion zone that's enveloped the capitol, and the B*sh junta would not allow some penny-ante socialist to upstage the dauphin by getting something done.
Mind you, this is just me. The people who already have the US$11 billion don't really care about things like that; they're perfectly happy to buy more solid gold swimming pools so they can bathe in US$100 bills. Which is another thing you can do with US$11 billion, even if it's not something I'd want to do. But, anyway, there are plenty of things you can spend US$11 billion dollars on, if you just think about it.