Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Fourteen selfish things I could do with $330 million
Back when I was a grad student, my thesis advisor, a newly minted millionaire thanks to his very own biotech firm, bemoaned the fact he couldn’t do anything really interesting with “just” a few million dollars. He had to be worth tens of millions, or preferably hundreds of millions, or more. He meant that he couldn’t do any worthwhile philanthropic work with his meager riches, couldn’t set up a foundation, couldn’t get a new university building or even a hospital wing dedicated to him.
This was bullshit, of course — the philanthropic part, I mean. I’m thinking of the many local charities, women’s shelters, for example, which live and die each year for only a few thousand dollars. But the boss was thinking big.
The Mega Millions jackpot has reached $330 million. That’s not a record, but it’s close, and in any case it’s still a chunk of change. A generous person could do some good works with $330 million.
Or he could blow it all on himself and his family.
1. Buy an island. I can do this on the cheap for little more than the cost of a new car, or I can drop $35 million (just over ten percent of my winnings!) on a 681-acre island in the Bahamas:
This private paradise has its own 2,500 ft. airstrip that can easily be extended. The main two-storey house with six bedrooms has spectacular views from every vantage point. Staff quarters are located a discreet distance from the main house, whilst the resident caretakers live at the opposite end of this 681 acre paradise.
Fascinating, isn’t it, how Sotheby’s provides so little detail on the Big House? They know if you’re willing to pop $35 million for an island, you’re able to pop another mil or two for renovation. Sotheby’s knows what it’s clientele care about: where are my servants going to live, and will I have to look at them?
But now I have to do something with that airstrip.
2. Pick up a private jet. A Learjet 45 will only set me back $9.5 million, while a Boeing business jet would make a more serious dent in my winnings — $48 million. But do I really need a jet large enough to carry 25 people?
What am I talking about. This isn’t about need, it’s about walking the walk. Or, erm, flying the flight.
Now that I’ve taken care of lodging and transportation, I should focus on how to expand my wealth. What better way than to
3. Buy a casino. I can buy Binion’s for $32 million in cash, but I have my sights set on the Bellagio.
Yeah, that Bellagio.
If I read this article correctly, the Bellagio is worth roughly $2.6 billion. BILLION, as in, something close to a gazillion. As in, five days worth of the Iraq war. (My $330 million would only pay for 1.6 days of the Iraq war.)
Damn. $330 million is sounding like less and less all the time; guess I’ll have to settle for Binion’s. But that’s okay, because I’ll have plenty of money left over to
4. Take a trip into space.
According to Nature (30 August 2007), “A company called Space Adventures, based in Vienna, Virginia, pioneered the marketplace for space tourism. Since 2001, it has sent five private individuals into orbit on Russian spacecraft, at US$20 million a trip.” Per Wikipedia, the price is up to $30 million.
A bargain! I’ll take my wife and son, too, but they had better be nice to me.
What’s the point of being fabulously wealthy if you can’t spend your money on something incredibly overpriced and absolutely useless? No, I’m not talking about a trip into space. I mean a
5. Jewel-encrusted skull. This one, by artist Damien Hirst, sold for £50 million. How much is that in real money?
I know just what I would do with this thing: I would use it to scare Bill and Melinda Gates’s kids when they come around on Halloween. “THIS is what your parents did with your inheritance, and now it’s all mine!”
No, I think I’ll save my loot for something useful. Something fun. Something like my very own
6. Cable television network. Al Gore bought his cable network for $70 million, so I have the cash to do this. And I have my programming all lined up, too:
- Baking with Walnut. Cooking. Famous chefs from around the world come into my studio and prepare amazing meals for me and my family.
- Everybody Loves Walnut. Sit com based on stories from my childhood. Brad Pitt, playing an adult me, narrates.
- Walnut’s Angels. Action/Adventure. Every week, a new trio of starlets get all sweaty fighting crime, and to relax, they take turns sitting on my face.
. . . But if I focus all my efforts on television, I won’t be able to saturate the media the way Paris Hilton does. I will not rest until I am Keith Olbermann’s number one story on Countdown more often than Hilton, Spears, or Richie. So I guess I’ll need my own
7. Record label — here’s one for around $700,000. Ew. Looks a little white supremacist, doesn’t it? But that’s okay, this splurge is all about shallowness, so I’m not going to worry my little blond head about political affiliations.
Rockers get all the chicks. I can’t sing, but that never stopped Milli Vanilli.
What do you mean, I’m not blond? Haven’t you ever heard of a dye job? But first, I’ll need
8. Hair transplants. The minimum cost for a hair transplant is $4000, so I figure I’ll need to spend $40,000. No problem; if I win $330 million, $40,000 in change will be falling out of my pockets.
Let’s see. Bono is 5′ 8″, so I won’t need to be too much taller. Time to pop for that
9. Leg-lengthening procedure, which in China only costs £5,700. I’m beginning to see why rich people get all this cosmetic surgery. This $$ is nothing compared to my total wealth.
Lest you think I’m only after rock ‘n roll groupies, I’m not. I’m after literary groupies, too, which is why I need to buy
10. My own publishing house. But how much would this cost? I’ve had a devil of a time finding the answer. But
Bertelsmann A.G, the German media conglomerate, has agreed to buy Random House, the crown jewel of American publishing, in a deal worth an estimated $1.4 billion.
If Random House is worth $1.4 billion, surely I can find a respectable Manhattan-based publisher for a tenth of that amount. Maybe even less.
Not that I would want to live in New York. I’m a West Coast boy, which is why I need
11. This mansion in Beverly Hills for $165 million.
Yes, yes, I already have my own island. But with my casino, cable TV network, record label, and publishing house, I need a stateside villa. Anyway, this house is special.
The Beverly House, former mansion of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies, four homes plus apartment and security staff’s cottage on 6.5 acres north of Sunset, 29 bedrooms, state-of-the-art theater, three swimming pools. Up-and-coming neighborhood.
This place is top o’ the food chain, folks, the priciest home on the market circa 8/31/07.
The asking price surpasses the $155 million being sought by developers of an estate in Montana’s Big Sky country, and the $135-million price of an Aspen, Colo., compound being sold by Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.
In your face, Prince!
All of this excess has me worried about my mortality. No one lives forever.
But I can try. And that’s why I need to
12. Clone myself for spare organs.
Hard to say what this would cost. Panos Zavos, professor of reproductive physiology at the University of Kentucky and spokesperson for a consortium of scientists who wish to clone humans, estimates
It could at first cost $50,000 or more, but he hoped that could come down to around the cost of in vitro fertilisation, about $10,000 to $20,000.
. . . but this dude sounds a little suspect. Another source estimates $100,000 or more, and at the high end, the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs estimates $250 million.
It’s safe to say the real price tag is somewhere in between — well within my reach.
Have I earned an evil laugh yet? Bwaahahahahaaaa!
And yet, despite my best efforts, I might die. If so, I want
13. The bodies of me and my family to be cryogenically preserved, then thawed out in the far, far future, when society has learned to (A) cure our diseases, and (B) truly appreciate hairy Jewish hobbits.
For a price, The Cryonics Institute will freeze humans, pets, TV dinners, you name it. Their website states they have 82 patients in cryostasis and 49 pets. The initial whole-body suspension fee is $28,000, and the annual fee after that ranges from $88,000 to $95,000. I’ll need a trust to pay for it. So, let’s see. If we call it $300,000 annually for the three of us, we’ll need a $15 million fund to generate sufficient funds AND provide us some ready cash for when we’re revived.
Of course, if all else fails, I’d like to be entombed in my own
14. Pyramid.
The kind folks at How Stuff Works Express estimate it would cost $250 million to $300 million to build a Great Pyramid.
My investments had better pay off.
***
Shallow enough for you? Let me know how you would spend your Mega Millions, and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Sam announces the launch of Calderwood Books
Dan has me beat in the computer dept.
In sxKitten’s world, it’s a zoo out there.
Kris tells us what she’d do with all that loot; also, check out her new do
Mauigirl on Dubya. See? I’m not the only one who wants to scream.
D.
Oh, this is the BEST Thursday 13 I’ve seen in ages.
Thanks for the laugh!!
This was quite an imaginative list. I enjoyed reading it. I have always thought figures like 330 million is an obscene amount for one person to win. Your average person would have trouble spending so much, but your list definitely covers some heavy duty spending. In that house you could lose yourself for a week.
Oh yes, the island. (my thirteen is on places I’ve lived, none of which have been islands.)
Ideally, you’d invest that money and turn it into a billion dollars in a couple years or so.
Years ago, I thought of building my own artificial island, but then you have the issues of storms and such, and do you move it or do you create it in such a way that you could do a controlled submersion during a storm, but then what about strong under currents? Best to scrap that idea.
Better to build a house in an area relatively free of earthquake activity, but designed to withstand the “big one” regardless. Also needs to be above sea level plus water-sealed as an extra precaution. Preferably built into a hill with the entrance angled such that, if a tornado were to hit, at most you’d have to replace the front entrance. And, completely sealable in the event of an NBC attack, and self-sufficient so that you could manage for days, weeks or months while the outside is cleaned up. Not sure how much such a house would cost, but many of the systems are affordable even for the non-millionaires among us, so let’s say $100 million or less.
Cryogenic preservation would be an option, but I worry what it might be like. What if you were stuck in an endless nightmare that never ended until they thawed you out? You could be a lunatic by the time they found a cure for whatever almost-killed you. One would hope that the lack of brain activity would also mean a complete lack of consciousness, and that being frozen would be a complete lack of any kind of consciousness so that something like that would not happen, but then we don’t have anybody that we can question on that front, do we? I suppose, though, that it may be a risk worth taking, considering the alternative. Of course, if there is an afterlife, do you really want to miss it? On the other hand, if there is an afterlife, that improves the odds that one day there will be an apocalypse of some sort, during which time your frozen body would probably end up thawed and dead anyway, so you’re going to be with everyone else eventually too. So, again, playing the odds, cryogenic preservation still wins out. Preferably whole body preservation, as I’m not entirely sure I want to be woken up as a disembodied head floating in a jar until they can grow me a new body. So, about $15 million you say?
$215 million to go. Well, I think I can start my own radio station and TV station and publishing house for maybe $15 million or so? Start on the cheap, build it up. No sense buying a floundering network in the hopes of turning it around. Just start fresh. Plus, when success starts to hit, you still have money to spare to use for promotions or buying additional stations or companies to expand. Except you’ll expand by borrowing money rather than using your own. 😉
Then, take the remaining $200 million and invest it so that you can live comfortably the rest of your life without worrying about money. You can focus on the things you want to do, have the money to get the things you want (just don’t go overboard–get rid of the credit cards and pay cash), and have money too that you can give to the charitable concerns of your choice.
I’d go for the island, and the trip into space, but I’m not sure what I’d spend the rest of my money on. Retirement home for race horses and greyhounds, perhaps. Getting all my paperbacks leatherbound and creating a wicked sci-fi library.
Estates in France, Italy, pied-a-terres in Morocco, Thailand, London, New Orleans, Belize …
Then I’d travel, round and round and round the world.
[…] Doug recently had a post about the last US Powerball Lottery, and the fact that the pot had reached an incredible 330 MILLION dollars. […]
I’d like a pied-a-terre (doesn’t have to be fancy, just a condo or small apartment with a garden) in:
London
Paris
San Francisco
Amsterdam
Lisbon
and perhaps a nice house on the beach either on Maui or Kauai.
I figure I would have plenty left over to give about a million dollars or more to each of my friends and relations, and the rest I would devote to animal welfare, the environment and other charities.