A succession plan, filed in advance.
On what to do with a billion dollars, written by someone who has one hundred and forty-nine.
I am, as I write this, in the early days of building what I intend to be a billion-dollar company. I should mention that I do not yet have a billion dollars. I am writing this now, in advance, because the people who eventually get one appear to stop writing things down at roughly the moment it would be most useful for them to keep going.
The arithmetic
A billion dollars, conservatively invested, produces somewhere around seventy million dollars a year without being touched. A person can live extremely well on one million dollars a month. That is twelve million a year, which leaves fifty-eight million a year unaccounted for, every year, forever, before anyone has done anything unusual.
Add my mother at one million a month. She raised me; she has earned it. That is another twelve. Forty-six million remains, annually, in perpetuity, doing nothing.
Someone will object that these numbers are optimistic. Substitute your own. Halve them. The structure of the problem does not change: past a certain point the money reproduces faster than any one person can plausibly spend it, and the surplus simply accumulates.
The plan
The surplus funds new millionaires. Not donations, not a foundation, not a grant programme with an application form and a review committee. Millionaires. Hundreds of them, every year, chosen and made.
At the end of every year, whatever the principal has thrown off in interest is distributed. The principal is never touched.
Keep the engine. Live off what it generates. Spend absurdly if you like. Reinvest what is left in other people.
The obvious objection
The sharpest objection is mechanical rather than moral: distribute wealth at that scale and you push prices up. This is true, and it is also true of every other thing a billion dollars does. It is true of the yacht. It is true of the fourth house. The objection is only ever raised about the version where other people get some.
Why file it now
There are roughly three and a half thousand billionaires alive. The odds that I become one of them are poor, and I am aware of it. But the failure mode I want to avoid is not failing to get there. It is getting there and quietly deciding, somewhere around year three, that I had always intended to keep it.
So it is written down first, while I have nothing, and while writing it costs me nothing to mean.
Be told when there is something new.
A handful of times a year. No schedule.