Ask HN: What would you build if you would be a multi-billionare? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you build if you would be a multi-billionare?

14 pointszeynalov40 comments

What would you build to change the world if you would be a multi-billionare? Like Elon Musk trys spaceships, elektro car, Honda trys humanoid robots, arab sheikhs build super tall buildings. What would you do if you someday would have enough money?

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Attempt to make money very efficiently, in any way reasonably practical and moral, particularly ways which are hard to duplicate absent having a billion dollars in your back pocket.

Give it to someone who had demonstrated ability to turn money into positive charitable outcomes, in preference to giving it to the government or typical NGOs, who mostly have demonstrated ability to turn it into sinecures. Better yet, give it to many such someones in parallel, because portfolio theory exists.

Continue maximizing on my comparative advantage in wealth generation as opposed to being comparatively ineffective but personally involved with charity, for the purpose of impressing people in cocktail conversation. Charity is, like heart surgery for my children, something I value highly enough to leave to very expensive dedicated professionals.

> Better yet, give it to many such someones in parallel, because portfolio theory exists.

This is a bit of a controversial topic among many people I know--not settled by any means--but portfolio theory doesn't really say what you think it does here. In particular, portfolio theory suggests diversification because it reduces variance, generally at the cost of some (small) amount of return. _Since your utility from money is concave_, variance reduction improves expected utility.

Your utility from lives saved in the third world is (or should be), I think, linear. (Perhaps even convex, though that's a much more complicated argument.) While if I were a doctor, the 100th life I saved would seem a lot less interesting than the first, I don't think it has any less moral impact. Conclusion: variance reduction has little to no value, and if you think charity X is (in expected value) any measurable amount more efficient at $goal than Y, you should reallocate all donations from Y to X up to the limit of what X can efficiently spend.

Just to back you up, the idea that risk aversion is not applicable to charitable giving and that you should optimally give to only one charity is fairly uncontroversial amongst the Effective Altruism movement, and has been talked about since before that movement had a name:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/1997/0...

It's an interesting article, but I'm not sure I buy it. Boiled down, it sounds like the author is arguing for philanthropists to have only one cause. But maybe I care equally about helping this generation with hunger and future generations with saving the rainforest. I get that I could help hunger more by redirecting my rainforest money, but why is it logically the case that I should?

Also, I find it interesting that the article discusses multiple causes, but not multiple organizations within one cause. There are hundreds if not thousands of organizations focused on cancer - to which do I give my donation? Only one?

> But maybe I care equally about helping this generation with hunger and future generations with saving the rainforest.

This is exactly the "delusion of grandeur" being argued against in the article, though:

"[people donate] as if they were thinking, "OK, I think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see what I can do about cancer."

But aren't you making an assumption here that I have full, transparent knowledge of both the short-term and long-term efficiency of charity X and Y?

The diversification buys me reduced risk of concentrated failure, I would assume just the same in philanthropy. If I give 100% of my donation to one organization, and it turns out they "perform" worse than I expected, it may have been better to split my donation among multiple organizations all of whom I expect to be highly efficient but cannot necessarily predict. Particularly in cases of multi-millions or billions when, even split, the money will meet a minimum threshold to make a difference.

That's an excellent description of trading reduced expected return for reduced variance actually means. What you seem to be saying is that your utility function isn't actually linear in lives saved, but is instead slightly concave or perhaps has a step change where the utility goes from 0 for lives < n to some positive number for lives > n (for some relatively small n).

> as opposed to being comparatively ineffective but personally involved with charity, for the purpose of impressing people in cocktail conversation

I imagine there is also an element of personal fulfillment, satisfaction, and enjoyment that philanthropists get from being personally involved with charity--if that encourages them to donate more than a person who chooses not to be personally involved, it might be of net benefit. When you factor in the PR value, personal network, and unique expertise/insight that enormously successful captains of industry may provide, their involvement may be more effective than you're implying. (Especially since I'm not sure personal involvement with charity really replaces "wealth generation" very often... it seems more likely to replace retirement or a golf hobby.) Of course, I have no concrete data to back that idea in any direction--if you do, I'd be very curious to see it.

There's a power law in startup success, and people who seriously study charity (such as GiveWell or Peter Singer) say there's a similar phenomenon in philanthropy: the best charities are often more than 100x as effective, per dollar, than average. One popular example: the Seeing Eye foundation spends more than $50,000 to train one Guide Dog[0], GiveWell estimates that the Against Malaria Foundation can save more than 10 lives with the same amount of money. So it's extremely unlikely that donating more will outweigh the impact of donating to the right charities.

[0]: http://www.guidedog.org/content.aspx?id=564#trainingcost

> One popular example: the Seeing Eye foundation spends more than $50,000 to train one Guide Dog

An even better counterpoint than AMF to this charity is that the money used to train the guide dog would cure blindness in around 1500 people in the developing world by funding their surgeries for trachoma/cataracts. (As told by Peter Singer.)

> So it's extremely unlikely that donating more will outweigh the impact of donating to the right charities.

Sure, but that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make, which in the context of your comment could be summarized as "I see no reason to believe that charities which benefit from the involvement of the ultra-wealthy are guaranteed to be less effective than those which do not".

A modular, standardized system for building houses where you buy X external walls, Y internal walls, window type A, skylight C, flooring sections, etc .... Walls would be come wired for electricity with snap together connections, roof sections with pre-wired solar panels. Allow people to order parts and put together their own home, or do so with friends like an old fashioned barn raising.

Tornado damaged your house? Order those parts again, disconnect the damaged ones, snap in the new stuff. Baby on the way? Disconnect an external wall, add a few more panels and you've another room, no need to move. Use recyclable materials (melt down one of the 'airplane graveyards' and use the steel and aluminum for a start).

The goals would be to reduce the waste involved in constructing houses as well as achieve economies of scale through mass production that would allow buying a home to be no more of a commitment than buying a car. No more 30 year mortgages, no more being 'house poor'.

Young and just starting out in life? Buy enough for just a kitchen, bath, and bedroom ... add more as you can afford it.

Open the standard for wall, floor, roof, etc... connections so vendors can offer 'after-market' parts for your home if you want something special or more individualized.

Sounds like you have been doing quite a lot of research.

I like this answer, because you have put some thought into this. I would add to your idea these things: a) all components are "man-portable", so that they can be put together by people without the use of cranes or heavy lifting equipment (this is a big deal in construction), b) have external mounting points so that they can be attached firmly to a building skeleton, allowing for building out a skyscraper using only manpower once the skeleton and elevators have been put up.

I will say that here in the South, we have a similar product which is located in "trailer parks". It is worth looking at the failures of the existing trailer parks when looking at ways to make cheaper housing.

I'd try to fund a network of after-school/summer activity centers for the west and south sides of Chicago.

Great idea. You could start smaller though. I particularly like Blackstone Bicycle Works & The Chicago Jesuit Academy.

I'd buy up two chunks of radio spectrum (from the FCC), one medium range and one long range ("to the horizon"). I'd then set out some ground rules (e.g. digital only, packet header uIDs are registered/allocated centrally, your app must be able to ignore other user's incoming traffic, some broad rate limit, etc).

Then I'd licence the two channels to "anyone" who wanted access at fairly inexpensive rates (e.g. free for development, few cents for production, small fines if you exceed the rate limit). Then I'd let people use this spectrum for more or less whatever they want.

Want me make an inter-car communications system? Want to make a "smart-home" system? Want to control your Christmas tree lights from a wireless switch? Licence my spectrum.

The current lack of freely usable spectrum is a huge bottleneck to lots of innovation. You often see WiFi get abused since it is the closest thing we have to a "use for anything" spectrum, BlueTooth and NFC both have too many inherent limitations.

I think I'd throw more money at those initiatives where they grow meat in labs. Factory farming is a horror, and cattle do tremendous amounts of damage to land all over the world.

Veganism is part of a solution to end animal abuse, but it's currently too hard of a cultural adjustment for people. We need a better, commercially viable solution.

I would fund research into self-reproducing robots. I would then launch them into space where I would use them to mine the asteroid belt, shooting materials back towards earth where they would trapped in earth's orbit and safely dropped into the atmosphere. I would use the profits for philanthropic causes.

I would build a new city. Not some attempt at utopia, but a fresh start in a remote but desirable destination. The town would be seeded with a university and focused on outdoor recreation, startup (and self-employment) culture, and diversity. Basic employment would include the university, but also tourism and startup incubators. Non-basic would initially include something like a brew-pub and grocery store. Basic amenities would include subsidized internet, alternative energy grants, public transportation to outdoor recreation and nearest major airport. The planning of the city would be based on Traditional Neighborhood Design and include a large buffer zone to prevent sprawl.

I'd actually be doing exactly what I'm doing now, though admittedly I'd change out the ramen for a more well balanced diet. We're bootstrapping, but if I was a billionaire I'd be dogfooding :)

Let me explain...

We discovered investing your money in social causes is incredibly difficult, so we're building out the Giving Graph to make it easier to be the Bill Gates of whatever your main social cause is. You shouldn't need to recreate the infrastructure of the Gates Foundation to be as effective a donor.

http://kyn.me

[disclosure - I'm the founder of Kyn]

I believe the biggest opportunity for human progress is the development of some kind of affordable, portable & clean energy system. From 'energy' you can get most everything else you need. People could pull water form the air in dry regions. Grow food indoors where the environment is not supportive. Power computers and mobiles for education and information distribution. Run bug zappers in malaria prone regions. It really does seem the foundation to further progress for much of the developed world. I believe once we have this we will see progress on the scale of the industrial revolution.

I would try to buy enough land to start building cities or compounds in various places.

Ultra efficient, lots of solar power and initially strong infrastructure, health care. I'd fail a time or two and might not be able to do everything at once, but i*d surely try. Living there would cost a portion of income, but included would be internet and housing and electricity and health care and things like that. Possibly healthy food if I can figure that out.

Yeah, definitely a dream :)

A game company that offered experiences for mobile that rival those found on console and PC. I don’t mean in terms of graphical fidelity or gameplay length, but in richness of how stories are told or really taxing a player mentally to solve a puzzle. Right now the most famous games for mobile are ones like Angry Birds, Clash of Clans, etc. which I find pretty sad personally when the equivalent on other platforms are games like Deus Ex or the Zelda series.

I'd get in touch with Givewell, and make sure that adequate funding goes to the charities that are very important but too small for me to research myself.

If you have billions of dollars, you can try funding one really big thing, which might fail - or you can fund a thousand smaller things, some of which will fail and some of which will succeed. The latter is usually better for the world.

Invest in think tank that will work on figuring out a model of governance/society that will ensure no one goes hungry, no one lacks healthcare, everyone has access to education/learning material in their chosen field, there is little or no income inequality - maybe a society that does away with money.

1. A Space Travel. Would pay Roskosmos or NASA for a travel. 2. Build a whole new industry - Flying cars. I know, I know it's very complex story, but I would invest a billion on this! 3. Build a competitor to SpaceX and make it even better. 4. Find a Foundation to help people those need help, like Bill Gates does. 5. There are more... but for now I'll keep them for myself.

>I know it's very complex story, but I would invest a billion on this!

Just for perspective, GM spends something like 7 billion USD a year on R&D. I'm not saying you can't make progress with a billion dollars on the problem, but a billion is not a gargantuan sum when it comes to things like cars. Tesla already spends a few hundred million per year on R&D for a much less ambitious problem.

1) I would fight with government and fix bad driving and road accidents in India and China. India is the current world accident capital.

2) Build a quora like website where anonymous government employees explain about various happenings in the govt and politicans minds. Eventually, I would make it a real time corruption alert machine.

I believe Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin is the only reasonable answer to this question. :)

Chip that assembled carbohydrate molecules. Make fuel, lubricants, food out of electricity. From thin air. Change the world, circumvent expensive and fragile economies of farming, drilling, refining and shipping.

Attempt other models of education - alternatives to universities - so I could still hang out with younger folks, teaching and learning.

Or flee from my country to a place with Amazon Prime.

I would pour billions into desalination R&D to chase an efficient, non-polluting and economical solution to providing clean water to the world.

Modular safe city - and install around the world in troubled areas to give people an alternative.

An encyclopedia of pollenating insects, with repositories of all the research about those insects.

A bot making company to abolish all jobs and probably myself.

I'd want to go check out the polar glacier on the moon.

Money fort.

Map the ocean floor.

Atlantis

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