Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=314941

by DanielBMarkham • 18 years ago

23 166 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

This is basically the title on CNN's site right now, and I thought what a great question to ask you guys.

Me? It's got to be a lunar base. Always wanted one.

noodle3• 18 years ago

i'd probably take one or two billion and buy myself a giant island to live on and forever take care of my personal needs. and fly into space a few times, too.

after that, i'd take the half of the remaining and invest it in technology and fields that i'd like to see improved (i.e. space travel, science, alternative energy, etc etc)

i'd take the other half and invest/give it to more charitable devices (poverty relief & research, disease research, land preservation funds, etc etc)

basically, try and make the world a better place.

yan2• 18 years ago

Taking an entire giant island for one person would make the world a better place?

pchristensen• 18 years ago

Giving $698 billion to tech research and charity probably would.

noodle3• 18 years ago

would you like me to say "i'd give it all up to charity"? i'd be lying if i said that, and so would anyone else.

i've always wanted to live on an island, thanks for shitting on my dreams in a hypothetical thread :*-(

iigs• 18 years ago

Yep, sure would make the world a better place for that guy, at least!

I'd take a small amount of it ($2-3 million if i could be sure of good interest returns over time, more commensurate with inability to do same) and return the rest to the taxpayers.

Alternatively I'd use that money to buy/start a small nation with a refortified constitution and the freedoms we've lost over the last century.

auntjemima• 18 years ago

I'd take two billion too, set up the rest of the money as a trust to fund four specific areas:

1. get people in the developing world clean water, access to enough food, and healthcare

2. give people money to get themselves out of debt (with accountability)

3. lobby the US government for various tax (simplicity is needed), healthcare, and humanitarian laws

4. funding for major energy research results

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

Release the hundreds of drugs some people will not approve because that will hurt their financial interest.

sfamiliar2• 18 years ago

give $11,000 to each of the 62 million households in the u.s. making under $50,000. watch the ensuing chaos with glee.

potatolicious3• 18 years ago

... Give $11,000 to each household making under $50,000, and you're in essence paying all of that towards households making over $50,000.

Some people are poor because they're honestly down on their luck, and need a helping hand. The majority on the other hand are simply unemployable, or horrible with their finances. Give them a handout and the money will simply end up in richer people's hands. That's not helping them.

nostrademons• 18 years ago

However, if you gave $11K in seed capital to anyone making under $50k who has a viable plan for a business with the promise of a few hundred K more if they started showing traction, then you might shake things up a bit.

...wait, isn't that YCombinator?

Retric2• 18 years ago

Hey, I was working with a college degree for 3 years before I broke 50k. At the time I was investing 8% of my income and I was still eating out all the time etc.

I think the bar for poor needs to be a little lower than 50k/year.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

$50K is a lot of money! Can any household still be considered poor with $49K a year?

pwoods• 18 years ago

Yeah it's a lot of money if your still living at home and paying no expenses. I make 120K a year and barely get by. It's all about the debt I'm afraid and the fact that prior to 2 years ago I was making on average 20-30k. My life sucks.

potatolicious3• 18 years ago

Not that much. $50K after tax is what, $40K? Just a tad over? Rent? Food? That's all assuming you're young and single. Have kids? Good friggin' luck. You can't even afford a mortgage on $50K a year.

I've got a $100K job offer pending my graduation, and even with that I still have to be aware of my budget to even save something.

no_body• 18 years ago

I would bootstrap the asteroid mining economy, invest in micro-terraforming and nano-technology so that each asteroid could become it's own self sufficient republic. Yay Anarchy !

ph0rque• 18 years ago

>...each asteroid could become it's own self sufficient republic. Yay Anarchy!

That's not anarchy, since each republic would presumably have its own government.

steveplace4• 18 years ago

A "Federation" if you will.

ivankirigin7• 18 years ago

Build a space elevator and start mining the asteroids. This involves a robot army that would need to be built as well. No, I'm not joking

Readmore• 18 years ago

Yes! Mining the Sky was an amazing book. http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-Planets/dp...

mrtron• 18 years ago

I would agree - and combine solar panels on the moon that is beamed back to earth.

Ideally if you could figure out how to build a factory on the moon to mine and produce the first wave of robots/solar power too.

ivankirigin7• 18 years ago

I would probably build a moon elevator first to get the materials to build the earth elevator. One of the most important things to mine is materials for power generation. Solar in some form or another, for sure.

geuis2• 18 years ago

Wow I was thinking the exact same thing. Put the money into an Apollo-scale project to perfect the 1st gen space elevator. Most of the money would go to research. The price of building it once you have the know-how is a trivially small amount of the total $700 billion.

ivankirigin7• 18 years ago

You mentioned Apollo, others mentioned the space shuttle.

NASA is a horrible organization to actually get things done. I wouldn't emulate them. Burt Rutan is a hero.

gambling8nt10• 18 years ago

$700 b is not nearly enough to make a space elevator with existing technology; you're off by about a factor of 1000.

Of course, if you're willing to wait ten years for the cost to produce carbon nanotubes to drop...

ivankirigin7• 18 years ago

Actually my brother and a good friend recently attended a conference on the subject, and I'm not pulling numbers out of the air. Clearly there is room for dispute, but between 10B and 1000B is a most reasonable range. I also disagree in principle that anything could cost $700T dollars. Are you telling me that the whole of the US working for 50 years couldn't build it? Because US GDP is ~$14T.

Also, you don't launch a company and next year make an elevator. There is a lot of tech to develop. You don't just sit on that tech. Materials made cheap enough to build a earth bound tether would have plenty of other applications. As would the automated or teleoperated construction robots.

Also, the first elevator on the moon wouldn't require much innovation in materials at all.

But I do have a very armchair understanding of the topic.

jcapote• 18 years ago

Super Crack Party.

Jasber2• 18 years ago

Nation-wide high-speed wireless. Computers for schools. Spend the rest on paying down our debt.

jotto• 18 years ago

if the 700b came from debt like it is in this situation, you're only delaying the problem

Jasber2• 18 years ago

Good point. Paying down debt with more debt seems strangely counter productive. In this case, paying down debt means not spending the money period.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

Create an alternative, multi-tiered research funding organization and proceed to turn the education system upside down.

In fact, $700b is more than enough to do this several times over, so the surplus will probably go to funding a century of other programs related to exploration, bioengineering, green technology, and other sustainable development projects.

Seriously, what could it be other than this?

potatolicious3• 18 years ago

Agreed. I would establish an organization that will essentially usurp the position of the NSF. It will be non-partisan, be free from political influence, and non-ideologically driven. It will be available to all academics everywhere.

My brother is a researcher in evolutionary biology. I have seen how the Bush administration has been sabotaging funding into this area over the last few years. Science should be a free for all of ideas, not influenced by politics, religion, or anything else except good hard science.

jrockway• 18 years ago

It will be non-partisan, be free from political influence, and non-ideologically driven.

How much of the $700b will be left over after you've developed the sentient robots needed to staff this place? ;)

phr2• 18 years ago

It's nice to talk about being non-partisan, non-political, non-ideological, etc., but it's a lot easier said than done. One way might be to fund a series of huge prizes for the company that first achieves one of your goals.

I'd start with a couple billion to the first company to achieve sustainable low-cost access to low Earth orbit.

I'd also hand out lesser amounts to p+B11 fusion projects (EMC2 and there's another one I can't remember right now), to fund their research, with maybe $5B to the first to get a 1GW commercial plant on-line.

staticshock• 18 years ago

It will be non-partisan, be free from political influence, and non-ideologically driven.

Really? No bias? How about this: you'd be a sucker. People apply for grant money and are rejected because the grants are often terrible. Sure, sometimes good grants get rejected, but, overall, the review system is pretty functional. I don't know much about NSF in particular, but if they reviewed grant proposals and then gave out money without passing judgement on quality, they'd be wasting a whole lot of money. And you'd really have to remove all judgement if you wanted a system where all academics are equal. So, judgement is back. Now, tell me this: now that we're judging, can we really keep ideological bias out?

You have to remember that grant money can pay salaries. If you give it out to anyone, people will abuse it.

You make a valid point about the Bush administration, though.

pavelludiq• 18 years ago

I would start my own aircraft company, all my planes would have lisp based auto pilot AI's.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

Buy off the government. Mostly dismantle it.

gills2• 18 years ago

What will you do with the rest? If they pass this bill, apparently it costs less than $700B to buy them out...

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

World's biggest gravity bong; it'd take the place of Ohio.

tdavis2• 18 years ago

I can't imagine the logistics of such a thing, but it's intriguing enough that I'd visit home to try it!

kamme• 18 years ago

I think I would buy an uninhabited island and make it a research facility where top scientists can work together and find a way to optimize solar power and batteries.

If I have those I will start a production company that makes those inventions and sells them at the price (or below) it costs to make the goods so everyone can use them. I would also invest in agriculture in dry area's (africa for example). What I would NOT do is waste it on politics, that's why I want the uninhabited island. If you build a facility/production company with that goal there will be government regulations about it and as most of us know, they tend to screw things up and only care for their wallet.

Also a part of that money will go to education and proper sports centers. I'm a bit overweight myself and I want people to know better then always go to McDonalds and have the option to do any sport they like, as it should be.

drhowarddrfine• 18 years ago

Put it in the bank.

natch2• 18 years ago

A non-failing bank, I hope.

gambling8nt10• 18 years ago

With a $700b loan, it wouldn't exactly be failing any more...that's sort of the point of this whole exercise.

schtog• 18 years ago

surfing-equipment + house on hawaii ~ 6million$

baller-life-style-money: 10$million.

my own scientific/tech projects, 1billion.

rest i would donate to various scientifc rpoject sand charity.

run4yourlives7• 18 years ago

Dude, with ten million you'd barely be able to get off the damn island after a couple of years. Jets cost at least $50M.

zitterbewegung2• 18 years ago

Maybe you should also invest in a spell checker...

yaj• 18 years ago

Shift 3rd/4th world countries to 1st/2nd world.

steveplace4• 18 years ago

Remember, 700B pays for around 400 space shuttles.

Just to give a sense of scale.

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

Better yet - 612B is what Pentagon is getting in 2009.

rsheridan62• 18 years ago

Space shuttle demolition derby, then?

qwph2• 18 years ago

400 space shuttles would be awesome :)

timtrueman2• 18 years ago

I can see it now, synchronized space shuttles in the space olympics (http://www.hulu.com/watch/34464/saturday-night-live-digital-...)

dkokelley• 18 years ago

Yeah I'd have to race them then.

gambling8nt10• 18 years ago

Or, for other means of comparison, $700b is about:

87 next generation aircraft carriers (or about 155 current-generation aircraft carriers)

500 stealth bombers (or 5000 stealth fighters)

10 years of federal education spending in the US

1.1% of the worldwide annual GDP

2/5 of the combined net worth of the 100 wealthiest people (or, if you prefer, 12 times the net worth of Bill Gates, or about 1/6 of the combined net worth of the 1000 wealthiest people)

23 times the total annual income tax collected from the lower 50% of filers with positive adjusted gross income in 2006 (see http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html)

steveplace4• 18 years ago

Or about 4 more rounds of stimulus checks.

maxklein• 18 years ago

A monocle, a cape and a vizier. Then I'll do whatever he tells me to do with it.

dangoldin• 18 years ago

I don't see how this is different than any of the other "Non Hacker News" stories yet this one gets approval. What's up?

cstejerean• 18 years ago

this is not a story, this is a legitimate question.

graywh• 18 years ago

Legitimate? That's debatable.

Retric2• 18 years ago

Invest 50 billion and spend each years profit trying to build a real working fusion power plant, (~1 new ITER style plant design per year pick the best one and build it every 5.) when that's working invest the 50billion in power plants and keep growing till all the worlds energy needs are met. I expect 20 - 30 years till first one works and then massive ramp up.

50 billion 3rd world sweat shops to jump start the worlds economy.

100 billion, retro fit a lane on all US highway's with electric grids / contacts so there is no need for battery systems and we can go electric now. I would start by targeting the commercial trucking industry and then move to cars.

1billion fun money for me.

And I don't know about the rest.

natch2• 18 years ago

Solar electric for, back of the envelope, maybe 1/3rd of the US total electricity supply. I'm not an electric power expert - maybe someone with actual expertise will correct me.

davidw• 18 years ago

If you'll settle for Zimbabwe dollars, that shouldn't be too hard to arrange.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

You know what I would do if I had seven hundred million dollars? I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds, and then take the other half over to my friend Asadura who works over in Securities...

mtw• 18 years ago

research in space travel, terraform Mars, build cheaper space shuttles

jm4• 18 years ago

Two chicks at the same time.

Seriously, I have no idea what I'd do with that amount of money. If I was completely selfish maybe I'd buy an island somewhere. I sure as hell wouldn't use it to bail out a bunch of failed businesses whose executives have been giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses.

jmtame2• 18 years ago

lmfao... office space ftw

samwise• 18 years ago

hehe

I would invest it. I would buy most of wall street and wait for it to bounce back. Turn that 700b to 10 trillion.

einarvollset2• 18 years ago

Yeah cause you're gonna notice the difference between 700b and 10trillion..

run4yourlives7• 18 years ago

And then what?

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Two chicks? Must be like Bill Gates' sister and mom.

Seriously, since the moon base was pretty selfish, I should give a serious answer. I think a series of X-Prize ideas, in the $10-20 Billion range, would transform our society in ways we can barely imagine. Fusion, solar power, field propulsion -- it would be like having a war and pushing for new technology without going through all the death and destruction.

nazgulnarsil4• 18 years ago

the correct answer is 70 million chicks at the same time. and that represents the majority of attractive women alive today.

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

If by "the majority" you mean "a multiple".

gtani• 18 years ago

I would hire a team of 87,000 competent developers to develop better documentation for java, C#, javascript, python and ruby. Oh yeah, erlang, OCaml, F#, a few others.

corentin• 18 years ago

Buy a copy of "The mythical man-month" before.

rsheridan62• 18 years ago

I'd buy a sovereign country and break it up into city-states, and allow them to compete with each other as an experiment to see which policies and forms of government are the most effective. It would be kind of like Pokemon for social science geeks. You could have libertaritopia, commietopia, fascistopia, etc, and you'd get to see what happens. For motivational purposes, after 50 years I would have barbarian hordes burn and pillage the unsuccessful ones.

If I couldn't find somebody to sell me a country I would build large offshore platforms or rafts that would fulfill the same function.

boredguy82• 18 years ago

Don't we already have a bunch of states competing with each other as an experiment to see what form is the most effective?

huherto• 18 years ago

yes, we only need the barbaric hordes every 50 years

DLWormwood• 18 years ago

I know you're trying to be cute, but our current situation has too many confounding variables: cultural makeup, history, terrain advantages, economic baggage... We'd need a more laboratory like situation where the city-states are more alike, save for the variables we want to test.

run4yourlives7• 18 years ago

Spoiler Alert: Fascism wins unless they are lead by a retard.

gambling8nt10• 18 years ago

Spoiler Alert: If you wait long enough, all fascist countries are eventually run by retards.

earle• 18 years ago

Short the dollar into capitulation :)

floozyspeak• 18 years ago

Go to war with IRAQ!

boredguy82• 18 years ago

Invest in the stock market.

sdurkin• 18 years ago

Build nuclear power plants, and fund fusion research. Permanently end our addiction to oil.

vaksel3• 18 years ago

Build a huge space station...something that can be seen with bare eyes during daylight.

dfranke2• 18 years ago

The present one can.

vaksel3• 18 years ago

I mean something the size of the moon

bwag• 18 years ago

Build the world's largest super computer. Then ask it what the meaning of life is.

qwph2• 18 years ago

"You aren't going to like it..."

alex_c• 18 years ago

You should ask it:

"Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age?"

Long-term, that would be the most useful possible way to spend the money.

(Source: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

TweedHeads• 18 years ago

LSC: "Life has no meaning, you have the choice of giving it one, or let others give it for you."

BSOD

Ben65• 18 years ago

froo• 18 years ago

700B dollars... Well given the odds of me obtaining that amount of money is just shy of being pure fantasy, I figure the only real answer to this would be in the realm of fantasy too.

So, 700B - here's my shopping list.

  Create Jurassic Park
  Army of Super Oompa Loompas - perhaps with bionic implants
  Moon based Laser "Defense" system
  Universal Optional Breast Enhancement Surgery
  Giant Robot of Doom
  Another Giant Robot (so the first one never feels lonely)
  Build an even bigger supercollider, just to scare the bejeezus out of the irrational people
  Terraform Mars
  Create a religion based around the works of Bruce Campbell

I figure I'd get some change out of that list, so I'd buy a few people a couple beers.

Next stupid question please!

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Can I administer the breast enhancement program?

neilk• 18 years ago

It would be pretty easy to knock off all water-borne diseases. Distribute existing technology to clean water where it's needed, or use that newfangled thing that Dean Kamen has.

Bribe all genociding warmongers (e.g. in Sudan) into retirement. Pay for relocation and land redistribution of affected ethnic groups.

Immunize all children in the USA.

Then, with the other 600 billion, I guess you could throw an awesome party.

jmtame2• 18 years ago

probably start 700 seed fund firms

dfranke2• 18 years ago

That's ridiculous. You'd never come close to finding enough entrepreneurs to give the money to.

mhb• 18 years ago

Hire 70 trillion people to draw me a $700 billion bill.

apollo• 18 years ago

Damn that's some fine resolution. Unfortunately if you want to hire unique people you'll have to wait for the earth's population to increase about 12,000 times its current size.

gills2• 18 years ago

Energy development (fusion and solar).

Compact self-contained hydroponic gardens (think shipping container).

geuis2• 18 years ago

A very large truck of cigarettes, enough to last my family for the rest of our lives. Then scream "I'm rich biatch!" and honk my truck's horn a couple times.

elai• 18 years ago

I would create a commercially viable, extremely useful version (versus just plastic doodads) of the self-replicating fabricator ( http://reprap.org ), design a decent computer & solar cell that could be easily manufactured by this fabricator and is easy to make into a cluster system (and have semi decent performance). And create some fabrication programs that can manufacture buildings, farming equipment and other such essentials.

Then I would fund a bunch of funding into cures for third world evils like malaria and such.

timtrueman2• 18 years ago

Microsoft just bought back stock with its cash. How about a down-payment on our national debt?

ars• 18 years ago

It's fun to read these, but I feel compelled to point out that the 700 Billion is not going to be spent, but rather it's the amount the US is on the hook for.

The last time the US did this they not only got all the money back, they even made a small profit.

To join along: if I had the money I'd spend all of it on as many nuclear reactors, to generate electricity, as I could. I'd standardize the design to keep the costs as low as possible.

jah• 18 years ago

Rest

lallysingh• 18 years ago

Hookers and RAM.

When I've got a good rate with a few of the girls, and my DIMM banks are filled, I'd probably start building a loyal robot army to help fight the evil ones that come with the inevitable robot apocalypse.

Each of which, incidentally, will require RAM.

beaudeal• 18 years ago

probably something like this: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/gallery/251007war_costs?pg...

i mean, no more poverty and educating every child on earth for 7 years seems like a good idea...

kolokonokos• 18 years ago

Death Star.

UandIblog• 18 years ago

I'd get a crew of volunteers together and torch the The World Bank & The International Monetary Fund.. just burn it to the ground. That might cost a couple hundred grand tops. With them out of the way it would be easy to implement a true Meritocracy in all governments. Presidents will get a paycheck on a sliding scale, the more wealth they are responsible for creating for their people, the better off they will do personally. I'd then use crowdsourcing to dictate what investments were made with the remaining 699 1/2 billion. We would then use the interest created by the these investments to fund all of the projects previously mentioned by the HackerNews Community.

edit I'd make sure all of the employee's were out of the buildings, of course...

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Use it to somehow dismantle all organized religion, probably. Likely the quickest way to save the world.

gambling8nt10• 18 years ago

$700b is almost certainly insufficient to do this; the Catholic church has around 4 times this amount by itself (most of it is illiquid, though--a large fraction is in real estate).

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

Whoa - are you serious? Are these documents public? I want to see them. What about the Deferred Liability on their balance sheet for "Child Molestation"?

danw• 18 years ago

Try and fix poverty, hunger, clean drinking water in a sustainable way.

felipe• 18 years ago

A few years ago I attended a talk by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University who was commissioned by the UN to develop a program to end worldwide poverty with sustainable, long-term initiatives -- Note this is not the standard aid, but stuff like microcredit and micro-entrepreneurship.

He traveled the world and came back with the price tag: $1 trillion. That is not to relief, but to END poverty worldwide.

yters4• 18 years ago

What kind of guarantee did that have?

rms3• 18 years ago

Sounds about right. This is something worth adding a trillion to the US Debt for.

iamdave• 18 years ago

Probably keep enough to retire on, and give the rest to my alma mater and have a football stadium named after me :)

rms3• 18 years ago

Cure cancer

Cure HIV

Eliminate hunger

Eliminate thirst

Take over Equatorial Guinea

gambling8nt10• 18 years ago

The only one of these you could afford for $700b is Equatorial Guinea... :P

rms3• 18 years ago

1B is enough to take over Equatorial Guinea... the failed 2004 coup attempt was financed with a pathetic 20M. This says that the military budget of EG is 150M/year (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm) and I suspect that is a very high estimate.

It would be easy to invest in modern pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in African nations with generous IP laws and then start making modern HIV medications available for practically nothing.

Curing cancer is more of a crapshoot, but throwing several hundred billion at the problem would be a good start, if nothing else.

Proper distribution of the money remaining could go a long way towards eliminating extreme poverty.

raheemm• 18 years ago

build my own university - maybe university on a ship, no a university on a ship with its own navy, wait - a university on a ship with its own navy, its own private islands and a jet plane and a space shuttle. Damn, it got crazy so quickly!

michaelneale• 18 years ago

Free renewable energy. Probably geothermal. About 100bn on research to develop the system, the rest to roll it out.

einarvollset2• 18 years ago

I would sponsor a manned mission to Mars. It's roughly the same amount of money.

nazgulnarsil4• 18 years ago

money doesn't solve problems, smart people do. money is just a way of freeing smart people of distractions. and i think 70 billion in todays dollars is a lot more realistic than 700 billion. that said:

10 billion for space elevator research

10 billion for terraforming mars research

10 billion in scholarships available to anyone in the world as well as the money needed to pull strings to get the smartest kids into the best colleges.

10 billion for a clean water research

30 billion in free contraception/medical for every country.

run4yourlives7• 18 years ago

I wouldn't do anything. You would, because I will own you.

qqq• 18 years ago

100 billion goes to speeding up immortality and cryonics research a lot. i don't want to die, and i'd rather you didn't die either. 10 million (or whatever) pays for aubrey de grey, and anyone he recommends, to be my advisors for using the 100 billion effectively.

thebigshane2• 18 years ago

Find the 299 most influential people in the world and pay them 10m a year for twenty years to do my bidding. Hold on the last 2 billion for reserves in case they turn on me.

thebigshane2• 18 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned buying Microsoft or Apple and "open source"-ing them. That would be $300b if you buy them at market cap value.

phr2• 18 years ago

Hire a mercenary army to conquer some third world sh*t hole, then give it a modern infrastructure, education system, etc., and turn it into a capitalist/libertarian utopia.

With some of the profits, I'd pick another country and iterate.

dshfnc• 18 years ago

I would buy massive amounts of gold and start a anonymous, secure digital currency backed by gold :)

semblance2• 18 years ago

Since it seems like defaulting mortgages are the cause of the situation, why not use the money to pay off those mortgages?. If it took $50,000 on average to save an individual mortgage, then you could rescue 14 million mortgages. Some would say that presents a moral hazard, but it seems like that cat is way out of the bag already.

MaysonL2• 18 years ago

Replace the US auto fleet with Better Place cars http://www.betterplace.com/ .

zandorg• 18 years ago

Longevity. Hook me up with some new organs.

tptacek• 18 years ago

700 billion is 1400 times the operating budget of Harvard Medical. So I might do that a couple times.

zitterbewegung2• 18 years ago

Create a new space station and possibly try to go to mars.

trapper• 18 years ago

Buy microsoft and open source it. Buy google and open source it. Buy apple and open source it. Spend the rest on hookers and beer for all programmers.

rainface• 18 years ago

I would use it to pay back the loan from which it came.

Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?

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