davel [he/him]
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We were spending more than $10M/month at my last job, but less than $100M.

I can spend $100M/month using only AWS CLI and a small shell script.

SavvyWolf
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Okay, this nerd sniped me super hard. Sure you can spend it on a big massive project like a mansion or whatever, but you aren’t going to be able to have it finished (and thus paid for) in a month.

Not too mention if you do want to drop that much money at one, there’ll be many checks in place. Your bank will block your account for “suspicious activity”. The person who you are paying will probably want to run a background check or just refuse to take payment up front.

You’d have to justify where you got that money from as well, most likely, and saying a “genie” probably would get you some strange looks and perhaps arrested.

I legit don’t know how you’d actually get rid of that much money in a month.

I’m assuming that if the genie is giving you the money, magic will take care of some of those concerns.

Stocks, bonds, annuities

That’s equity. Not spent money, just less-directly-available cash… But if that doesn’t count, real estate technically doesn’t either… Really tough question, depending on the circumstance

It is spent money, because you have to buy those shares from other people. It’s literally a purchase of part of a company from another party. Just because you can liquidate it easily it doesn’t mean it’s not spent.

Just pay people to be your shoppers and buy as much as they can for you. And give them a good salary for it. Hiring people is not giving it away, and they are buying the stuff for you. Or hire like a private concert with someone. So many things to spend money on.

Private concerts is a good one! And then hire overpriced organizers for those events, too :D

Arguably gambling.

GICs then!

Edit: looks like GICs are only guaranteed up to $100,000.

But honestly if you consider stocks and bonds to be gambling then you could really argue that buying anything is a gamble. Buy $100 million worth of onions and the price will go up due to scarcity, then try to sell them. Someone actually did this years ago and made a ton of money while bankrupting a lot of farmers and investors. The government responded by banning the trading of onion futures!

All this is to say it’s actually impossible to fulfill the genie’s rules if you take into account market fluctuations on the price of anything you buy.

Owl
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Pay in advance

AtHeartEngineer
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Buying property. You can close in 30 days, and if you are buying a bunch of property, you can hire people out to handle things and speed up the process, and if you put offers on a ton of property, you could probably close on a lot of them in 30 days. If you are waiving around $100m you could make a lot happen.

You’re going to fall foul of anti money laundering checks very hard and fast. There’s no way you’d be able to buy property, let alone in a month.

You could spend 100m in a day on real estate where I live. There are multiple 40-50m parcels available all over the place.

I hear there’s some politicians who enjoy “vacations with friends…”

Create a company that specializes in finding loopholes in genie challenges, hire 5 people with a salary of 20 million USD/month, pay that company 100 million USD to find a loophole to be able to spend the money easily and realize that you aleady spent the money

I get 100m up front, right?

Right?

a single university textbook

slazer2au
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Create a serverless function on alibaba that calls a serverless function on Azure, which calls a serverless function on gcp which calls a serverless function on Oracle cloud which loops it back to alibaba.

Now stick CloudFlare in between each step of that and we should hit 100M by Tuesday.

zkfcfbzr
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Finally, a use for NFTs

Edit: Wait, nevermind, they said no throwing it away

AtHeartEngineer
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That’s easy, buy all the real estate in an area that’s for sale, scarcity will drive up the value of the properties you have bought. Economics 101.

– This is sarcasm and is poking fun of wall street buying up all the property to be landlords, the world and economy are much more complicated than this… But, it is a quick way to spend $100m in 30 days

Takes a long time to close sales like that… Although I suspect paying above market rate for things would help grease the wheels.

Yeah I’m sure they’ll look the other way if you pay 1.5x the market price

Jo Miran
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This basically the premise to Richard Pryor’s movie “Brewster’s Millions” except that one of the rules was that you cannot buy or own anything. At the end of the month you must have spent the money and have nothing to show for it.

The answer is politics. Spend it all on a political campaign.

I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.

Aatube
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The political campaign is actually the innovation of the film, which was an adaptation.

ending

And then he realized that winning would break the rules, as the salary makes the position considered an asset, so he campaigned for “none of the above”. At the end of the movie, that option wins.

That is inherently a gift then, donation? No different that giving it away and morally lesser to giving to the poor. Breaks one of the rules.

Jo Miran
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Oh no. The no gifting rule is also in effect. It was his own political campaign.

Unless it is a superpac.

@wewbull@feddit.uk
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Lucky it was set in America.

$100M of $VT, secure my ultra-comfortable retirement right then and there.

First up: Capital gains Taxes. That’s $12,000,000 off the top. Next, buying the properties of all my favorite charities, museums, libraries, restraunts, stores, and setting up trusts to keep taxes and such paid on those in perpetuity … That alone should do it, within a large enough radius, but anyways … buy up the most inefficient air-planes, cruise-liners, cargo ships I can find and straight up ground/dock them or upgrade them to fix those inefficiencies. Make sure the planes are never flown again, at least not at night.

That’s giving the money away. Either you are still controlling the trusts, or you gave the money to the trusts.

Funny thing about trusts: You can set them up so you retain ownership and control until you die. So sure, giving it away, but in the future. I could also be petty later, dissolve the trusts and sell-off the land, though with the rest of the money coming from the Genie, I should never come close to needing to do that.

No, I think you are confusing the two kinds of trusts: a revocable trust means you still own the money or property, an irrevocable trust means you don’t own it anymore. Either you “give it away” in an irrevocable trust (which can’t be “dissolved”), or you don’t give it away (in a revocable trust).

You are describing putting something in a revocable trust, which is not spending it or giving it away. It’s closer to just putting a label on it: “this money is for charity”. You don’t get a tax deduction unless you put the money in a irrevocable charitable trust or the charity actually receives the money (from any source, trust, whatever).

Who said anything about setting up a tax deduction? I’m setting up an indirect benefit to others that counts as an illiquid asset. It’s not an investment since its purpose isn’t profit, and its not charitable since I remain in control.

Pay attention to the genie’s criteria, and realize: for anyone actually trying to do some good, the IRS criteria might as well be so capricious and arbitrary. With that kind of money and a lot of these organizations, I would rather donate it directly, yes, but there are also plenty of organizations and causes where more money in the pot means more CEO and middleman pay. That, and the IRS, don’t have to count as a valid reason to withhold a single penny for someone that’s supposedly capable enough to have any business managing such a large amount.

The real answer has to lie in the definition of “nothing” in the context of what counts as having something to show for your spent money vs not having anything to show for it and succeeding.

It’s most basic form is:

If nothing means no physical products then you can’t buy a jet, but you can donate it all to charities.

You win

---------

So the next level of having nothing at the end may prohibit donations, considering that to be a type of “gifting”

So now you have to spend it on a service. No holding on to goods, no donations.

So you use AWS and set up a bullshit loop of web traffic that produces a 100M$ bill for server usage.

You win.

---------

So now we must ask if the genie considers the service performed to you by AWS to be “something.”

What could we possibly do next?

Set up a charity ourselves and use the 100M as seed capital? Maybe, but if you own it or gain the assets like buildings or something you might lose.

Buy 50M lotto tickets and hope you don’t win? (Powerball is 2$ a piece I think.). Maybe…but that’s risky. That’s like a 1 in 6 or 7 chance to win at that point, plus you’re nearly guaranteed to win snaller prizes which would have to be dealt with.

I think the answer is a boat. A fuckin huge one that’s a little older. This does two things, 1.) its a single object holding all the value. If we can end the month without it, then we win. 2.) it’s easy to get into dangerous and perilous situations in a boat.

Sail that bitch into a hurricane and try to turn around. This runs the risk of failing if the boat lives, but all you gotta do is turn it sideways relative to the huge waves. As long as you genuinely were sailing the ship and not sabotaging it I don’t think it would fall under the “throwing money away” category.

Idk. It’s hard I’ve you get ticky tacky with the definition of nothing. I guess you could just yolo options. Either you’re going to be broke or you’ll have billions of dollars by the end so you win either way? Maybe the boat thing ain’t the answer. Lol I’m gonna leave it anyway.

Where does it say you must have “nothing” at the end? It says “spend”.

Oh no I’ve made a huge mistake…Idk man

The reason it was hard for Brewster was that he had to do it without maintaining any assets afterwards. This doesn’t seem hard. Real estate. Done.

Yeah, this is easy. Find a house, airplane, or mega yacht that costs just over 100mm, offer 100mm cash today, then wait 29-30 days for your billion.

Bob Smith
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My most significant run-in with a genie was in Mario Land 3. After what I did to him, I’d hate clouds too.

Transient Punk
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Buy a house, a car for my SO and I, take care of outstanding debt. Use the rest to buy diversified index tracking funds.

While low risk, I think index investing still counts as gambling. The house maybe too.

Depreciating investments like a car should be ok though.

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