Super-yachts.

One of the main reasons these are booming is that a billionaire can spend a sum on them he might actually see on his account. Fine food, cars, even mainsons are so cheap that they earn more through passive income while they're buying these things than they're actually spending. At the same time people, even in tje ver same society, go hungry to bed or are incapable of getting their health condition improved... it's just crazy.

Power.

Not a nicer car. Not a better vacation. Not a bigger house.

The ability to buy companies, fund institutions, shape industries, influence politics, and absorb enormous losses without changing your lifestyle.

At a certain point, more money stops buying a better life. It starts buying more control.

It used to be philanthropic stuff - because buying public opinion/legacy is pretty expensive. So you fund a big charity, do some speeches, and are celebrated for being so generous. Has the side effect of actually helping some poors.

Seems like the major expenses now are donating money to fascists and buying big boats.

But $1B (at today's levels of value - the number isn't the issue, the relative value and lost opportunity cost of distributing some of this back to the people is the issue) is an obscene amount of money. You could invest it in some safe asset making 2% per year and yearn $54k per day ($20M/year)

If you gave me the choice between 50 million and a billion I'd take a billion too; but if you gave me 50 million no one would hear from me again as I would quit my job, move somewhere quiet, and keep to myself.

Still insisted that he wanted the billion.

That demonstrates the underlying problem. When you can quantify something, people can compete over it. To most people money is THE quantifiable thing about humans. We literally call a person's money number their "net worth." It's not "oh that guy with all these relationships and virtues and vices has just seen his net assets exceed one billion." It is "he is now worth one billion."

So with it carrying such cultural weight and such quantifiability... I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes the problem really as is simple as "number go up." Unfortunately, simple problems can still have impossibly complex solutions. How do you change the nature of a person, and then do it en masse? How do you break one feedback loop and get into another? (the people in control would make society more decent if they themselves grew up in a more decent society)

Rebuild all the schools in my local district? Set up a permanent endowment for the Freedom from Religion Foundation? Turn as much land into nature preserves as I can possibly afford?

Maybe these aren’t “things” you “buy” but it doesn’t take much creativity to blow a billion. I think I just blew a whole bunch of them.

Easy, 1000x more LEGOs.

If, given the option, I would want the larger sum of money, too.

But I could also feed and educate a fuckton of people while still living it up on roughly 4%.

I’d buy a few of your countries, a space company/rocket ships. A few nukes or the facility to make them…

Oh wait that’s exactly what they did with that money.

It’s what you would do, too.

Which is why no one should be allowed to have that much. Not even nation states as we’ve seen.