The 2 Billion Dollar Challenge

What would you do if I gave you two billion dollars?

The conditions are that you cannot save it, and you cannot invest it. For the purposes of making the question simpler, we’ll also consider that the money is not affected by taxes, and that you live to be around 100 years old.

I came up with this question while mindlessly working at an Amazon Fulfillment center in an effort to challenge people to think bigger than they’re used to. I had noticed that the people I talked to never had dreams that were truly amazing to think about.

“I want to go to New York and watch some Broadway shows.” “I would like to visit Italy.” “I want to own a company and pass it down to my children.”

The dreams of my colleagues and peers were often minor, non-specific, and singular. The people I cared about almost never had more than one thing that they really wanted to do, and the thing they did want to do was so small in comparison to the possibilities of what they could do that it made me sad to hear about it.

Originally, the entire purpose of the two billion dollar question was to encourage people to dream bigger, but that all changed when I talked to my friend Reuben. You see, Reuben refused to grasp just how much money two billion dollars is. His dreams were staying small and contained in things like going to see movies he wanted to see, or spending time with his friends at his house.

To be clear, I’m not saying that smaller dreams are inherently bad things, or that you need to buy things to make yourself happy. I’m saying that if a person were to come up with stuff you would want to do, or buy with two billion dollars it shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer for so many people. I was confused why people that I knew were intelligent and creative couldn’t do it until I talked with Reuben.

Reuben was so obstinate in not using all the money that I finally pulled out my phone, a calculator, and my notebook to keep track of the stuff he wanted to do. After cajoling him for thirty minutes, we finally got his total from two billion dollars to 1.9 billion dollars.

That’s when we realized that two billion dollars is an obscene amount of money.

People weren’t thinking small because they lacked creativity or imagination; they were thinking small because normal, middle class people aren’t exposed to spending large amounts of money. The idea of spending two billion dollars isn’t something we have to think about in our lives, because we make enough money to both survive and have fun. We don’t do ridiculously extravagant things like rich people, and we don’t sustain ourselves on the crazy dream of winning the lottery like poor people.

I sat down with my sister, who wanted the Broadway trip, and we calculated a high estimate for how much her trip would cost. She wanted to see a certain number of shows over the course of a week, eat nice dinners every night, and stay in a nice hotel in the city. Her trip would cost around $8000. If she saved $200 a month (which is totally feasible for her) she could go on her trip in a little over three years. That conversation happened four years ago.

Here’s what Reuben did with two billion dollars:

• Made a food budget for himself to last 80 years
• Bought a house
• Bought a car
• Bought his parents a house
• Bought his aunts and uncles homes
• Bought his siblings cars
• Took his entire family (> 60 people) on a vacation to California
• Went to Europe for a month
• Made his parents a food budget for the rest of their lives
• Retired every member of his family that was older than him (minus his siblings)
• Bought more houses across the United States
• Bought some houses in Europe
• Bought a giant yacht
• Bought a personal jet
• Bought a second yacht and a second jet
• Bought a restaurant
• Made a budget for family so they could travel whenever they wanted to

When all was said and done, Reuben had 1.2 billion dollars left.

That’s when we realized that I hadn’t created a two billion dollar question; This was the two billion dollar challenge.

I’ve challenged over 20 people now, and only two people have ever actually managed to spend all two billion dollars. One of them spent a month using a spreadsheet to get rid of all the money. The other person got down to 400 Million, and then just started giving $20,000 away to random people on a daily basis to try and get rid of it (which still took over 50 years).

Two billion dollars is an obscene amount of money.

Here’s some more stuff people have done with the money:

• Bought a restaurant and paid a world-class chef to cook in it, but never opened the restaurant to the public
• Went on kickstarter and funded every project they liked to 300 percent
• Bought a hotel, not as a business, but for them to live in. They kept the staff and everything.
• Bought a mansion in every state (except Hawaii and Alaska), and gave each one a food supply for thirty years. They let homeless people live in the mansions rent free.
• Built a zoo in Africa
• Built a second zoo in Africa
• Bought an island and then built a castle on it
• Bought her mom an island
• Paid a person to assassinate the President (and then paid off judges and courts to get away with it)
• Bought over 400 vehicles ranging from basic cars to actual tanks that the military use
• Bought over 10 million rounds of ammunition (and the guns to use it)
• Built a bomb shelter and then blew it up
• Bought out a Disney resort for two weeks and told their 20 friends to each invite 20 people and for those 20 people to each invite ten people and each of those ten people to invite two people in order to fill up the resort. Then took all of 8000 people for a two-week all expense paid trip to Disney World complete with meals, travel, and fast passes for all the parks
• Visited college campuses and found which students had ideas for businesses, and then gave the ones they liked $100,000 to help them out. Not a loan, not an investment, not a scholarship; just a straight up gift.
• Went to Japan for a month
• Bought a house in England, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany before realizing that they didn’t want to spend their time traveling so much when they visit Europe. So they bought a few more homes (over 40) around Europe, so that they would never be more than a car ride away from home.
• Bought an apartment building and had it converted into their own personal entertainment center complete with a sports room, movie room, and video game room. The media rooms had screens that covered the wall and speakers imbedded into the structure around the room, so that the room itself would vibrate when explosions happened. (As a quick side note, the past tense of the word ‘embed’ is ‘imbedded’. Why? What was the point of just changing that first letter from ‘e’ to ‘i’ when the sound doesn’t change!)
• Bought a plot of land on a beach and spent a few hours every day for a summer digging a hole. Then filled the hole up with BBQ sauce and swam in it.
• No joke, one person actually cashed out half of the money and burned it in the middle of times square because they were so frustrated with trying to spend it all.
• Also, plenty of people donated the money and gave it away to good causes, but very few of them did so because they wanted to. They did it because one person cannot reasonably spend two billion dollars without giving it away in some fashion.

Oh, one more thing, if you remove the hypothetical costs of a successful assassination of the President of the United States from that list, AND add on Reuben’s list then you still wouldn’t have spent all two billion dollars.

Just saying.