Monday, October 6, 2014

What would you do with $2.5bn?

The developer of Minecraft recently sold out to Microsoft to the tune of $2.5bn (yes, with a 'b'). Naturally the topic of conversation in our office turned to 'what would you do with that sort of money?'. The obvious items came up and when we started talking about cars, I said I'd buy an Aston Martin Vanquish. We played with the calculator a bit and figured out that if you walked into a dealer at 9am and kept them talking until 1pm, you'd have made enough interest in that 4 hours to pay for the car with cash. At which point someone mentioned that I could just buy Aston Martin outright and still have a huge chunk of change left over. That's a sobering thought : if I came into $2.5bn, I could by an entire luxury car company and still have $1.9bn left over. Meaning I could pretty much just have any of their vehicles I wanted, in any colour (not monochrome) with any options I wanted, without really having to think about it. Heck - I could buy an F1 racing team and have money left over. I could buy a huge tract of land somewhere and have Hermann Tilke design me a race track that I could race all my Aston Martins on, with friends.
So what would you do with that sort of money, apart from paying off your house, and hiring a great bodyguard and a lawyer?

4 comments:

Vladimir said...

This is a really good question. As a car fan I would buy 5 cars:

- BMW M4 Coupe for every day
- BMW 760Li for long drives
- BMW i8 for driving around
- Mini Roadster John Copper Works for some fun
- Nissan GT-R for even more fun

The other money I will invest in some well established companies and will become an angel investor for tech start-ups. I would also use some of the money to invest in an own start-up.

I would also like to point out how much money this is, because the human mind cannot interpret such big numbers very well, because it switches to a logarithmic scale (counting the digits). To put the $2 500 000 000 in perspective, imagine that you divide the money equalliy to the rest of your life (say 50 years). This means that you will have $4 166 666 per month and or around $137 000 per day for the rest of your life. Not bad... :)

Unknown said...

Mostly share it no one needs 2.5BN, a fraction of the interest alone is enough to keep me set up for the rest of your life and the life of future generations.

Anonymous said...

Sharing would be nice and I would do so (to a point) but there is absolutely no moral obligation to do so. Depending on your worldview.

Anonymous said...

Tesla P85D for everyday driving, GT350, Z06, and an Atom for track days, and an F150 and/or F250 for offroad and hauling duties.
Yeah, that should about do it.