You Are Jeff Bezos (Hypothetical)

[Kannap]

I’m going to be honest I only half skimmed the op before I decided the have a pizza party, I didn’t know I couldn’t keep the money. If this is the case am I allowed to have pizza at the world wide pizza party?

I'd say this is allowable.

[Heloin]

It's hard to say what it'd be like, other than that it'd be pretty dang good for me. But the outside world would perhaps find it "controversial" because other than spending on assets/things that'll keep me rich- I'd plan to also spend on what is seen as "evil" things, with the only line that I draw being that I don't want to do anything I could be criminally charged for.

Would still use my vast resources to maybe back neo-Nazi coups overseas, sending money to racist organizations to pit them against eachother to cause outcomes I hope for or to build the alt-right's message, maybe purchasing this website to turn it into my personal playground where the policies are vastly different and so on.

The one thing that'd be beneficial that I do want to push hard for is a global ban on plastic and to somehow make it so that people just don't know how to make it anymore, and we can't until we know how to easily remove the plastic that's polluted the planet/food chain already.

Pretty sure that you would be breaking the law in some way, shape, or form if you did that.

It’d likely turn out just as successful as Mark Thatcher’s coup attempt in 2004 and end in a big dumb mess.

[Heloin]

I’m going to be honest I only half skimmed the op before I decided the have a pizza party, I didn’t know I couldn’t keep the money. If this is the case am I allowed to have pizza at the world wide pizza party?

I'd say this is allowable.

Thank you. The pizza party marches on.

[Wizlandia]

Fund anti-malaria, deworming, and third-world sanitation initiatives. Actually helps those in most acute misery in a cost-effective manner as opposed to stuff like Make a Wish or doubling Amazon employee pay for a weird notion of "justice".

[Saiwania]

If I can't spend money on the politics of fear/hatred or both, then I think how I want to spend money is on backing imperialism/empires. This is what I'd truly want, a return to the days of European colonialism only with better technology. If financing domestic issues doesn't pay off, why not play high stakes geopolitical games with money if you look outwards instead of inward? Foreign policy questions could become my bread and butter like is the case with Bill Kristol.

There is so much potential for sabotaging China's progress towards superpower status and so on, with enough funding and playing different sovereign states against eachother. Whoever the people were who sold the Iraq War of 2003 (which never even needed to happen) was so lucky if their aim was to secure perpetual arms sales/boons to the military industrial complex as a result of a conflict without clear end. They got what they wanted and more from Saddam being deposed.

[Socialist States of Ludistan]

I would buy a country in the name of the real me, so when I get back to my body, I’ll own a country.

[Pasong Tirad]

Give all the money to everyone that's been fucked over by Amazon, turn Amazon into the world's largest worker coop.

[Wizlandia]

Fund anti-malaria, deworming, and third-world sanitation initiatives. Actually helps those in most acute misery in a cost-effective manner as opposed to stuff like Make a Wish or doubling Amazon employee pay for a weird notion of "justice".

It should go without saying that you can't buy Congress (nevermind for just $380 million lol), but if you could I'd also do it and pass policies good for the world, e.g. eliminating the quota on immigration, eliminating R1 zoning, tax reform (e.g. corp tax cuts, tax-free savings accounts, national carbon tax, eliminate SALT and the Mortgage Interest Deduction), occupational licensing reform, national right to work, increased foreign aid, etc.

[The Disorder]

My first priority would be to set up an actually permanent, self-sustaining, growth-capable Mars colony. Fling a half-million people to the red planet, along with industrial machinery by the ton.

Now that humanity's non-extinction is secured, I can solve some of the smaller, down-to-earth problems:

- Practical fusion. Scientists, solve it! I don't care what it costs.
- Invest massively in education and automation. Preferably with the government's money, but sure, I'd spend my own too.
- Buy congress. Abolish the 40-hour work week, slash it to 20 hours, and crank up that minimum wage.
- Also now that I own congress and the government, ban internet surveillance and data collection. Big data dies.
- Owning congress is great. Qualified immunity is the next in line for the chopping block. Police brutality dies.
- Since I am the government, it's time to do something cool. Universal internet for the homeless and unemployed. Government forced to conform to GAAP (generally-accepted accounting principles). I'll employ the internet-equipped homeless to track every government expense to the penny. Government waste DIES.
- Healthcare costs are too high. I implement medical liability limitations and a universal online medical exam, and anyone who passes is instantly qualified to become a doctor. Millions of new doctors flood the market with cheap healthcare services. I abolish pharmaceutical patents and make drug data open-source, and big pharma dies.

If there is still money left over, I'm going to pave mercury in solar panels and particle accelerators, jumpstarting human antimatter production for our first interstellar colony ship.

[Thermodolia]

I buy the nation of Hungary. And with my 31,261,000,000 left over I use it to build a massive military for my new empire Amazonia!!

All hail Emperor Bezos of Amazonia!

[Heloin]

If I can't spend money on the politics of fear/hatred or both

No one said you couldn’t, just that you’d likely fail miserably trying.

[Thermodolia]

If I can't spend money on the politics of fear/hatred or both

No one said you couldn’t, just that you’d likely fail miserably trying.

Just use the money to buy a nation like Iraq or Hungary or any other nation that has a lower GDP than New Zealand

[Immortan Khan]

You wake up one morning and, by some mystical misfortune, you find that you are the one and only Jeffrey Preston Bezos, owner of Amazon. Jeff Bezo's employees are now your employees, because you are Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos' money is now your money, because you are Jeff Bezos. Nothing you can possibly say or do will ever convince anybody else that you are not, in fact, Jeff Bezos. His closest friends and family will fully believe that you are - and have always been - Jeff Bezos. You're the only one wise to what's true.

You stare in the bathroom mirror for some time wishing you weren't Jeff Bezos, but alas, you're Jeff Bezos now.

Now that you've accepted your present fate, it's time that you learn what your mission is. You've got to spend all of Jeff Bezos' money. Every cent of it. Maybe you get to return to your own body when you're done and become yourself again. Maybe not, but you'd still be the hero that spent all of Jeff Bezos' money.

And no, you cannot invest it, you may not keep it, and you cannot earn more of it. You can only spend it. And, for the purposes of this scenario, we're going to ignore that most of Bezos' wealth is locked away in stocks, investments, etc. We're going to pretend that his wealth is all cold, liquid-y cash, ripe for the spending. Failure to spend it all or try to save/invest/otherwise loophole your way to keeping the money or letting a proxy hold it on your behalf will result in your immediate arrest, where you can post bail for the remainder of your worth or be sentenced to life in prison, thereby forfeiting your worth to the state.

You, Jeff Bezos, have a wealth of $181,200,000,000. The question is, how do you spend it?

Can't think of anything? Need some recommendations?

For $22.7 billion, you can fund NASA for an entire year.
For $20 billion, you can end homelessness in the United States by ensuring every homeless person in America has a guaranteed roof over their head
For $15.8 billion, you can double every Amazon employee's pay
For $380 million, you could hypothetically buy enough of the members of Congress to abolish the electoral college
For $295 million, you could pay the back taxes Amazon owes to the European Union; this is enough money to host Eurovision nearly 12 times.
For $150 million, you could build ten fancy libraries
For $57.6 million, you could pay off 1,000 grad student's loans

Note that even if you choose all of these recommendations, you've got $121,817,400,000 left to spend. You better get to work.

So, how do you spend all of your money?

Me? I'd buy Congress to abolish the electoral college ($380 million), I'd end homelessness in the United States ($20 billion), I'd give $22.7 billion to NASA. Wow, I've still got 138 billion? Yikes. I'd double every Amazon employee's pay ($15.8 billion), then I'd double it again ($31.6 billion), and then I'd double it again ($63.2 billion). Hmmmm still got $27.5 billion to play with. I'd donate $7.5 billion to the Make a Wish Foundation. I'd donate $2.5 billion to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I'd donate $2.5 billion to Habitat for Humanity. I'd donate $2.5 billion to the YMCA. I'd donate $2.5 billion to the American Red Cross. I'd donate $2.5 billion to the American Cancer Society. I'd donate $2.5 billion to Planned Parenthood. I'd donate $2.5 billion to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. And I'd donate my last $2.5 billion to PBS.

The bolded is what I would do. The Amazon employee one I'd rather have a long term pay raise as opposed to just a one off doubling of their salary. I'd rather fund my own space company tbh.

[Pasong Tirad]

It's hard to say what it'd be like, other than that it'd be pretty dang good for me. But the outside world would perhaps find it "controversial" because other than spending on assets/things that'll keep me rich- I'd plan to also spend on what is seen as "evil" things, with the only line that I draw being that I don't want to do anything I could be criminally charged for.

Would still use my vast resources to maybe back neo-Nazi coups overseas, sending money to racist organizations to pit them against eachother to cause outcomes I hope for or to build the alt-right's message, maybe purchasing this website to turn it into my personal playground where the policies are vastly different and so on.

The one thing that'd be beneficial that I do want to push hard for is a global ban on plastic and to somehow make it so that people just don't know how to make it anymore, and we can't until we know how to easily remove the plastic that's polluted the planet/food chain already.

If I can't spend money on the politics of fear/hatred or both, then I think how I want to spend money is on backing imperialism/empires. This is what I'd truly want, a return to the days of European colonialism only with better technology. If financing domestic issues doesn't pay off, why not play high stakes geopolitical games with money if you look outwards instead of inward? Foreign policy questions could become my bread and butter like is the case with Bill Kristol.

There is so much potential for sabotaging China's progress towards superpower status and so on, with enough funding and playing different sovereign states against eachother. Whoever the people were who sold the Iraq War of 2003 (which never even needed to happen) was so lucky if their aim was to secure perpetual arms sales/boons to the military industrial complex as a result of a conflict without clear end. They got what they wanted and more from Saddam being deposed.

Holy fuck all this is absolutely horrible how are you not on a government watchlist somewhere

[Fedel]

Every penny of it goes to funding pro-liberty movements.

[The 189]

How much to end homelessness worldwide?

[Immortan Khan]

It's hard to say what it'd be like, other than that it'd be pretty dang good for me. But the outside world would perhaps find it "controversial" because other than spending on assets/things that'll keep me rich- I'd plan to also spend on what is seen as "evil" things, with the only line that I draw being that I don't want to do anything I could be criminally charged for.

Would still use my vast resources to maybe back neo-Nazi coups overseas, sending money to racist organizations to pit them against eachother to cause outcomes I hope for or to build the alt-right's message, maybe purchasing this website to turn it into my personal playground where the policies are vastly different and so on.

The one thing that'd be beneficial that I do want to push hard for is a global ban on plastic and to somehow make it so that people just don't know how to make it anymore, and we can't until we know how to easily remove the plastic that's polluted the planet/food chain already.

If I can't spend money on the politics of fear/hatred or both, then I think how I want to spend money is on backing imperialism/empires. This is what I'd truly want, a return to the days of European colonialism only with better technology. If financing domestic issues doesn't pay off, why not play high stakes geopolitical games with money if you look outwards instead of inward? Foreign policy questions could become my bread and butter like is the case with Bill Kristol.

There is so much potential for sabotaging China's progress towards superpower status and so on, with enough funding and playing different sovereign states against eachother. Whoever the people were who sold the Iraq War of 2003 (which never even needed to happen) was so lucky if their aim was to secure perpetual arms sales/boons to the military industrial complex as a result of a conflict without clear end. They got what they wanted and more from Saddam being deposed.

Holy fuck all this is absolutely horrible how are you not on a government watchlist somewhere

I mean he probably is.

[Infected Mushroom]

I’d use the money to support the government.

[Sannyamathland]

I will donate the entire money to the original me......

[The Sakhalinsk Empire]

Pretty sure that you would be breaking the law in some way, shape, or form if you did that.

It’d likely turn out just as successful as Mark Thatcher’s coup attempt in 2004 and end in a big dumb mess.

With a trillion dollars, you could fund a private army large enough to overthrow a mid-sized nation. You could also fund existing rebel groups, buy companies to generate money to fund those groups, buy the mercenary companies themselves, etc.

[Ayytaly]

I'm Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately, 80% of my money is borrowed from the Rockefellers.

[Osiris Proper]

Purchase The Virgin Islands

[Greater Eireann]

Immediately I turn Amazon into a co-op, and I use my newfound wealth to pay the workers that "I" have exploited in the past. I also would put much money towards ending world hunger and thirst. Finally, I would get lobbyists to get Congress to actually tax the rich and support extensive social programmes.

[Sky Reavers]

I remember, there was a joke about such matter. "If ya' could choose between world peace and all the Bill Gates' money, then what Ferrari would ya' buy?"

[Resilient Acceleration]

I'm not sure. The problem is that if I have to liqudate and spend all of Bezos' net worth and corporate properties, Amazon will immediately disappear. Most importantly, Amazon Web Services will also disappear into thin air, causing the instant collapse of 40% of the (global?) cloud market and the temporary end of the literal internet. So I would hire a team to study the impending catastrophic socio-economic impact of such event, and plan out my money accordingly.