You get to keep only enough to maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area, the rest of it has to go towards improving the world in some way.
Edit: Given the previous rules that you must maintain a very modest lifestyle in a low-cost-of-living area, would you rather choose to opt out and not have the money at all?
Build my own village with affordable rent and live in a mansion in the middle and be like a lord of my own little village. Maybe also build a good school there. Evict people if they do anti social behaviour. Then when someone has paid enough rent to pay off the mortgage, surprise them by just giving them the house, or maybe after a time offer them to buy it with a reduced price because of the rent paid. So someone could probably live there and raise a family until they can afford a house, then buy their own house back.
Also arrange loads of community events, get people out and involved. Just make a wholesome and affordable community for others to live in. Maybe get businesses to move in to offer jobs as well.
With 5 billion, you can provide housing for 5k to 50k people, you don’t even need to charge rent
If the Big, Beautiful Bill in the US gets passed in the Senate with the provision requiring plaintiffs to put up a bond to sue the government over these illegal actions then I’d be bankrolling every citizen and group that is interested in suing to fight them, including putting up a bond.
I set up a for profit corporation whose stated goal is to make the world a better play. I donate all the money to that corporation.
As the sole owner, I now have 5 billion dollars so I change the mission to something else because I don’t have time to deal with the poors who did work as hard as me to become this successful.
Take a page out of the Republican playbook and start buying judges so I can own the courts in 30 to 40 years
Buy the US House and Senate.
$5 B / 435 = 11,494,252 per person. Sounds do-able. Shit, Bob Menendez sold out for $480,000. 11 mil. would go a LOOONG way.
Expand food banks and shelters. Then donate water to places that need it.
This completely. You cant end capitalism with that kind of money, but you can provide cheap or free alternatives to basic needs to force the price-gouging vendors to actually compete for once and align their businesses better with the consumer.
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A 100 bed (or so, idk what number it would actually come out to) hostel / shelter / halfway house for chronically institutionalized people who don’t know how to function in normal transitional housing. Instead of a larger number of beds they might also be split into multiple smaller buildings.
Each unit would have one small room with
- a twin bed
- a closet with a storage compartment on the bottom that takes a standard lock
- a desk
- a few of those bars on the wall you can slide posters and papers into to hang
- a single-unit sink-toilet-shower stall with groutless faux tile and a detachable shower head (so that to clean it you just cover it in bleach and use the showerhead to hose it down).
- an electric kettle
- WiFi
- a locking door that the staff have a copy of the key to but have received specialized education on renters rights and education on what specifically constitutes a safety concern.
Public facilities include:
- cafeteria that provides 3 hot meals as well as a vending machine with reconstitutable MRE style meals that can be made with hot water
- laundry
- library / public access computers
- meeting rooms that are reservable but also host supportive and educational group therapies
- a large public chalkboard wall with 7 sections that are wiped down one at a time in sequence throughout the week with additional discretion of the staff to erase hatespeech
- a non-denominational / non-religion-specific “chapel” that any religious leader may rent for one hour a week in exchange for some minimum monetary donation. They also receive a listing on an updatable placard posted just outside or near the entrance on the inside listing their contributions publicly in addition to being listed on the monthly accounting posting. It is designed so that vestments can be interchangeably hung and they may also rent a closet to store them in.
Residents do pay rent but it’s only enough to keep the facility running and the accounting books are publicly available on a monthly basis. If the model does well enough and receives enough outside support, rent may be a symbolic amount like $5-10 just to legally maintain the facility as a transitional public service as opposed to a long term housing solution (although that would be another great thing to donate this money to, but my personal focus would be the people that would struggle to function in that environment without some sort of actual rehabilitation).
They can get a discount by performing tasks to run, clean, and maintain the facilities including both the public areas and turning over rooms between residents or maintaining the rooms of disabled residents (while those residents are elsewhere for the day). Their names are not listed on the public books, just the number of people contributing in this manner. Any money they make for tasks performed outside the facility is theirs to keep.
There are no drug tests but no drugs (or weapons) are allowed on the premises. Any paid staff are background checked and any 24-hr safety staff (so not kitchen / EVS) who do not already have a license or advanced degree in health and human services receive somewhere between a 2-week to 1-month 8hr per day classroom education on human rights, nonviolent crisis deescalation, CPR, safety and sanitation, and policy training on how to assess and what to do if they suspect drugs or weapons have been brought on the premises (probably some other stuff too but idk. I’d make the class longer if I thought it would be financially possible / likely to get enough people to attend). Would also probably help to have 1 hour of monthly continuing education on a bunch of those topics but also to help them contextualize their experiences with this population.
The floors are sex segregated with the exception of one floor (or a smaller proportion) that is co-ed and allows persons of any gender presentation provided they have no history of sex or gender targeted charges.
If I think of anything else I’ll add it, but these are my thoughts having worked with this population and wishing there were more services focused on helping them reenter society.
Also tbph I’d probably actually live there myself, eat in the cafeteria, have a weekly movie night in one of the public meeting rooms, etc, the only thing I’d be missing is a workshop, but I could do with maybe a slightly larger permanent suite in the basement or on the roof or something. The tradeoff would be dealing with the bullshit that would necessarily arise on a 24/7 basis, LOL. I might also want a bigger bed if my husband wanted to live there with me, which he might because his 5b idea is almost definitely a free or low cost cafeteria (I’m a nurse, he’s a cook) but he’s also much more misanthropic than me and might want more privacy / emotional distance.
Idk, whatever I can come up with would probably have massive unintended negative consequences.
Thought about this before. I’d build out the high-speed internet structure to encompass all the populated parts of the world (omitting coverage across large swaths of open sea) and provide free, no-questions-asked WiFi internet service to absolutely everyone.
(Yes, a lot of places don’t have devices, but parallel programs already exist to get people enabled on cheap devices)
The obstruction would be legal battles with current stakeholders that have regional monopolies and are very addicted to making odious profit. (Looking at you, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.)
I have an ok lifestyle with the people in my house all working now, so would put all of it to use, that’s fine. If I am allowed to keep this in my community and city, I would put it in a trust that could only be used to extend the trolley system here back to at least what it was in the 1940s, and as much farther as practical with that $ and make it free to ride. An endowment that could generate enough money to keep that going and to modernize it.
If it must be global, how many people are there? 8,9 billion ? That’s not even a dollar each, I’m not sure. Maybe plant 5 billion trees, or buy up land & rewild it.
Invest it, assuming 5% return, spend the interest money of 250 million per year on feeding the hungry, educating kids, and helping animals. Somewhere along the way, buy a couple of beers for myself.
I would fund community-led projects that align with my values such as:
- mutual aid collectives
- community-run gardens, libraries, and clinics
- labor and tenant unions / cooperatives
- intentional communities
- food pantries / soup kitchens
- parks and other 3rd spaces
- art collectives
- sustainability initiatives (rooftop solar, heat pumps, microgrids, rewilding, permaculture / indigenous farming practices, etc.)
- public multimodal transportation infrastructure
My focus would be on empowering people to help each other even after the money runs out.
In the US, so free health insurance for those making under 100k for 6 months (or likely less - whenever the money runs out). Maybe that would give enough people a taste of universal healthcare that they would start voting for policies that get us closer to that.
I always wanted to see if I could ‘fix’ the Berkley Pit mine. It’s a superfund site with some of the most acidic water in the world. It was a cooper mine for decade that went bust. When the owners walked away, it started filling up with rain water. But, because of the way mines work, that water became VERY acidic. So now there’s this lake of acid out in Montana that no one wants to deal with.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit
Inter-mountain Histories: https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/376
ChemAnalyst News - Pit might have rare earth minerals: https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/montana-toxic-legacy-could-become-america-rare-earth-savior-36626
