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Comment by ethersteeds | Hacker News Reader

I'm of the "only way to win is not to play" mind with this exercise. I would peel off 10-20 million to eliminate lifetime financial concerns for my circle, and immediately go MacKenzie Scott on the rest, trying to put it towards maximum societal benefit.

Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...

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I don't understand folks with these answers. I would want $1T or more. I could easily invest it.

- I want to build a human cloning startup to build whole-body, HLA-neutral, antigen-clean, headless clones. Taken to the extreme, this cures all cancers except brain and blood cancers, and it could expand the human lifespan/healthspan to be 200 years or more.

- I want to build directed energy systems to manipulate the weather and climate.

- I want to build an open source cloud, open source social layer, open source social media and actually get them real traction against the incumbents. Distributed media exchange layer that is P2P, not federated. Rewire the internet to be fault-tolerant and censorship immune.

- I want to train frontier AI models and make them open. I want to build massive amounts of high quality training data and make it all available (with a viral license).

- I want to build open source hardware. Tractors, automotive EVs, robots, stuff you can hack and own and exchange and print parts for.

- I want to build infra for my city.

I couldn't stop coming up with ideas for things to build.

But, alas, I'm still stuck here at the bottom wondering why a compound in Hawaii could be cooler than these things.

Upvoted for ambition. But some of the things you listed (e.g. cloning) are likely tech limitations rather than financial ones. It's not that money wouldn't be needed to develop the tech-- it absolutely is. But just anyone with a trillion to invest wouldn't automatically be able to develop it, or find the right people to develop it.

Building infra for your city would be great (I wish Denver had an actual metro system and not just half-assed light rail for large swaths of the area). But you're going to have to deal with the legality of that beyond simply budgetary concerns-- liability, at least, and also things like eminent domain against people who may not want to sell.

The OSS stuff already has people working on it and depends more on market share than technical know-how at this point. Depending on whether AI will actually prove monumental in long-term history, simply buying e.g. OpenAI and open-sourcing their stuff might be the most history-altering thing you could do with a trillion (or it could be a footnote, depending on how things play out).

Because your idea for spending $1T is to start six (massive) companies, hire tens/hundreds of thousands of people and basically become more powerful then most governments. Arguably it's not much different then Bezos and Musk starting rocket companies.

All of those things take massive investments in time, a compound in Hawaii does not.

i would do the same, except give every extra dime to dogs and cats (and other animals in need). i'd make sure none of my wealth would go to help other humans.

Saying you’d donate to pets is one thing but saying it will never go to a human is so out of touch with the world. I’m sure you have great intentions but I just don’t see how you can take that approach.

A large portion of aid goes to trying to help humans already. I see no reason to contribute more. Also, animals are completely innocent, most humans are not. (of course kids are though)

There's probably humans you're going to have to interact with in the course of donating to animals, who will benefit from you donating to animals (if not skimming off the top directly by way of being employed by the charity, etc). If you truly want to make sure none of it goes to any human, you'd basically just have to burn it (and maybe hope that does something bad to the economy to get back at the other humans).

I have no problem paying salaries of people helping animals. I just meant I would never contribute to a cause that helped humans

... and, hopefully, before the professional arm candy starts "accidentally" bumping into you in line at the coffee shop.

What a shallow, dismissive and sexist thing to say.

how so?

Do you think athletes and musicians are the only ones with groupies? Your assumption about gender reveals your bias.

Inform me about my assumption of gender.

Not GP, but I suspect it's the part where you call them "sexist" -

It seems like in your head "professional arm candy" must be female.

"Boy-toys" are a thing, and people from the Kardashian mother to the local gay nightlife empresario have them :)

By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender... You've kinda accidentally made a sexist remark, ironically enough ^^"

> By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender

Didn't say that, you are projecting. I will assume now tho, HN has this untraveled suburban teenage male vibe when it comes to anything except code. That period when they discover Rand and are good a specific set of narrow problems.

Thanks for your reply.

Doesn't saying that "professional arm candy" is sexist imply that it is a term limited to only one gender?

Also, fyi, I'm 32, I was born in Paris, moved to Houston when I was 6, to London when I was 18, to Paris when I was 19, then Marseille, Grasse, and Lyon.

I'm currently writing this from the Stockholm airport, waiting for my flight home to France, and I've never read Ayn Rand, because her work seems to completely ignore the importance of cooperation, which I believe is the key to a happy and successful life :)

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