How to: spend a billion dollars

Say you had a billion dollars. How would…you… spend it?

I woke up this morning to an oddly strong desire to pickle a bunch of veggies. I’m not sure where it came from. I like pickled stuff, but I don’t love it. Maybe I’ve got some sort of vitamin deficiency.

Whatever the cause there’s currently eight quart jars containing various ratios of asparagus, green beans, garlic and sweet onions slowly cooling on my kitchen counter.

My mind wanders and as I was waiting for my mixture of vinegar, water, sugar and salt to come to a boil I started thinking about The Magic Christian. It’s a novel by Terry Southern, the guy who wrote the screenplays for Barbarella and Easy Rider.

The upshot is that a crazy billionaire uses his fortune play elaborate mean-spirited pranks on the unsuspecting world he inhabits. It was made into a not very good movie starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr. You can watch it here.

I’ve never understood why actual billionaires don’t do something similar. It can’t be because of moral restraint. You don’t build an empire by caring about other people.

I’ve put a lot of thought into my evil plans. Not that I really think I’ll be a billionaire, but stranger things have happened. I fired my cleaning lady last week for being lazy, not something I’d’ve ever expected to need, or want, to do.

But she did a terrible job and taught me a lesson about hiring white people. No work ethic.

Maybe my idea for an app will take off. It’s called Meet Market and it’s an anonymous location based “dating” service. You log in and it uses your phone’s GPS to broadcast your location to other users looking for a no strings attached hookup. Then other users can search you out. It’s like a treasure hunt, where the treasure is an overweight married man lurking in a public toilet waiting to suck off whichever unkempt pervert finds him first, or fourth, or whatever. I’m not in the passing judgment business, I’m in the facilitating public indecency business.

Here’s what I’ll do when the cash comes in.

Become a supervillian

A person could really wreak some havoc with one of those flying water jet pack deals. Find any gathering that takes place near water, then come roaring in blasting unsuspecting citizens with your water hand cannons, then zipping away when your fun is done. Sure, it’d be felony level assault on multiple people, but once you’re in the billion club you’re above petty considerations like the law.  Look at James Pflueger, he killed seven people and got off more or less scot-free. (Click here.) 

Sink a Yacht

Buying your way into a high end regatta, then playing bumper cars off the line, what could be more fun? It’s all the goodness that comes with crashing stuff, mixed with ruining rich peoples’ good time.

Get in car accidents

Don’t you just hate it when someone is inconsiderate to you in traffic? Don’t you wish you could just put the pedal to the floor and smash right into them? Or when some asshole in a rental speeds around you to steal a parking spot, wouldn’t it be great to totally bludgeon their ride, laugh in their face, and give your lawyer a call to let him know you’ve “done it again”? If I were a billionaire I could live that dream.

Give scumbags 10K

The funny thing about ten thousand dollars, it’s enough to ruin your life, but not enough to really improve it. What’s it really get you? A few months breathing room on rent? A down payment on an inexpensive car? A year of health insurance? It will buy a lot of drugs, though.

There’s a public toilet in the middle of Kapaa that’s the hangout for our local shit bags. They do their thing, smoke their meth, beat each other with pieces of driftwood and hunks of coral, no doubt talk about all the cool stuff they’ll do when they’re billionaires. I think it would be fun to cruise down every once in a while and hand one of the losers a nice thick stack of hundreds. Just to see what would happen. Nothing good, that’s for sure.

Build low-income housing

I recently learned that George Lucas already stole this idea (click here), but I’m sticking with it anyway. Wouldn’t it be nice to buy up large tracts of land in affluent areas and fill it with poor people? Like, I could solve the Kaka’ako homeless problems by relocating everyone to their nice new digs in Hawaii Kai and Kailua! And anyone who has a problem with it can be painted as a hateful asshole, even though I’m obviously not planning on living anywhere near my own philanthropic endeavors.

Maybe I could do a gofundme.  I wonder if enough chumps would be willing to kick me down some dough?