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> "financial terrorist" As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do e
by yodsanklai 2y ago
> "financial terrorist"
As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
Or if not damage, just trolling. For instance, writing X on the moon or something like that.
- _huayra_ 2y agoEasy: buy media companies to sow political division and pollute the discourse, buy political influence to restrict access to open and unbiased education to ensure the populace cannot engage in critical thinking, then poison the environment in myriad ways until people in their 20s require a dozen rounds of IVF to have kids (or more likely, just giving up because of the ruinious state of inflation compared to incomes).
- EA-3167 2y agoCome on... endlessly wealthy and wants to do harm? There's only one real, obvious answer: Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans. Make something as contagious as measles that kills a third of people reliably, spread it multiple global focal points at once, and you could topple the world pretty effectively. If you attacked the economy and food supply at the same time I don't think there would be any coming back from that. It would be insane, an apocalyptic fantasy that few could afford outside of (hopefully somewhat) accountable or at least pragmatic governments. But a very rich person could afford it. And as much as information warfare is terrifying, biological warfare is much worse. I get your "it's already here" point, but lets really take the question at face value and run with it. edit: Consider that a group MUCH less wealthy than Elon Musk was able to experiment with nuclear weapons, and managed to carry out a sarin attack.
- saagarjha 2y agoJust doing that seems like you will likely be arrested.
- EA-3167 2y agoI think that's more of a concern for people who aren't genocidal maniacs out to destroy the species. Like I said, we already have examples of people who wanted to usher in an apocalypse, some of them even gave it the good old college try, but they lacked resources. If you gave Shoko Asahara a few hundred billion to play with, who knows what Aum would have come up with. At the very least their sarin would have been pure.
- viraptor 2y ago> could do entirely legally. > Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans. I think you missed a constraint there.
- Peaches4Rent 2y agoWhat do you mean I only have 256 GB of memory on my server?
- senordevnyc 2y agoThe thought experiment was to do maximum harm entirely legally
- IAmGraydon 2y agoI don't think you actually read the assignment. Please try again.
- ydnaclementine 2y agogood thing even parts of this would never really happen haha
- ben_w 2y ago> entirely legally. Hypothetically, would it be legal to fund a president whose policy was "let's nuke everyone"?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- krapp 2y ago>I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally. Run a government. No single person has ever been responsible for more death, suffering and harm as a person wielding a monopoly on violence. Even the Church only managed its bloody conquests, cultural genocides and colonialism because it had the power of imperialist states behind it. If not for Constantine, Christianity would have remained a weird apocalypse cult in the Levant.
- SequoiaHope 2y agoOil companies have been doing this for 100 years.
- scarecrowbob 2y agoI mean, you could invent tetraethyl gasoline and CFCs.... you don't have to be super wealthy for that, but getting the world to adopt them in horribly harmful ways certainly takes capital.
- CamperBob2 2y agoCFCs are easily a net win, as they made refrigeration (and consequently food preservation) practical, cheap and safe. TEL, though, yeeeeah... that was a bad move.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoPreviously I would have said buying election results. But apparently the electoral college makes it surprisingly cheap. Musk buys twitter for 44 billion dollars and yet he only needed a quarter of a billion to buy the American government.
- ivewonyoung 2y agoThe dems outspent republicans by a billion or so, so 250M didn't do much. If it did, Kamala would've won by a lot. https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-spending-election-day https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp... Way more billionaires supported Kamala vs. Trump (83 vs 52).
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI'm assuming whatever spending advantadge Dems had was more or less squandered the moment those billionaires got cold feet and decided to oust Joe Biden instead of relying on the incumbent vote. That disruption very likely scared off several donors. But yes, there was also simply a lack of energy in the D voter base in 2024. No amount of spending can recover disengaged voters who simply dismissed everyone as "equally bad".
- pjc50 2y agoDem handling of the Palestine situation went extremely badly for them.
- neoromantique 2y agoThere was no good way to handle it, Pro-Palestinian propaganda was very active, to a significantly larger extent than it is now.
- theGnuMe 2y agoRussia probably played a role in that.
- hightrix 2y ago> I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally. We seem to be watching this in real time. Musk bought influence over the US president, gained access to critical US systems, and is about to benefit from the EO pausing of enforcement of law banning bribes to foriegn nationals. He bought power. He is buying more power. We are watching a supervillian rise.
- theGnuMe 2y agoThe next Bond movie is going to be historic... Honestly I preferred it when he was considered the next Iron Man. I dunno maybe that asteroid is coming and we need his rockets and mass distraction.
- CamperBob2 2y agoAs a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally. Ian Fleming explored that idea rather effectively with Hugo Drax in the original Moonraker novel (which doesn't have much besides the name in common with the movie.) The way things are playing out, Drax must have been Musk's childhood hero.
- ModernMech 2y agoYup! You guessed it! https://www.inverse.com/article/32100-elon-musk-favorite-james-bond-movie https://www.inverse.com/article/32100-elon-musk-favorite-jam... The person who asked 7 years ago never forgot that and made the same connection as you: https://www.threads.net/@pixelastronaut/post/DFFJF9GxE7D?xmt=AQGzch9YvlyZA9JrrphPDFLLXDzpS285cK3XUXkKRqTrZw https://www.threads.net/@pixelastronaut/post/DFFJF9GxE7D?xmt...
- CamperBob2 2y agoIf you read the book, the comparison goes from amusing to unsettling, if not all the way to scary. Among other parallels, Drax ingratiates himself with England's leadership ("Your Majesty, may I have the temerity...") and cheats at games despite obviously not needing the money or fame.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoI'm actually started to wonder if Elon is actually deeply mentally ill, high functioning, and living in a completely delusional reality. He's clearly trying to live out things he's seen in novels. If you haven't yet read up on where his name came from, check this out. He was named after the main character of a book written by a Nazi rocket scientist. It's almost too weird to believe, but it is indeed true: https://youtu.be/9y-erGt0LsU https://youtu.be/9y-erGt0LsU
- thinkling 2y agoWikipedia says his great-grandfather’s name was also Elon. Compelling as the other theory is, this seems much more plausible as the reason for his name. > Their first child, Elon Reeve Musk, was born in 1971, named after Maye's grandfather J. Elon Haldeman, with the name Reeve after her maternal grandmother's maiden name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_family https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_family
- UltraSane 2y agoI wonder what would happen if Musk just paid $1 million to every single women who was willing to be inseminated with his sperm and $100,000/year/child to raise them and he ended up having thousands of kids.
- vjk800 2y agoBuy a lot of forest, cut it down, and replace it with a smooth concrete surface.
- 28304283409234 2y agoIt rarely is 'doing damage' in the eyes of the one doing it. A person such as Musk (or Trump, or Biden, or...or...) live in a completely different reality when compared to yours or mine, as their input differs vastly from ours. This is inevitable given the flaws of being human. It's like training two AIs on completely different sets of input. The bigger the difference in training data ...
- pixxel 2y ago[dead]