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?
