What are you getting me this year? Gentlemen, I’m just going to lay it out for you as clearly as I can: you can’t take your money with you when you die, and anyway there’s a good chance you’re going to have it taken from you long before you do. You’ve bought your thirty mansions in fifteen different countries and your fleet of yachts (which you deserve). You’ve bought your little sports team or whatever, and all of the cars and all of the clothes and all of the jewels for your wife and all of your model mistresses. Great. As a king should. But you still have infinity dollars. Now what?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Your goal is to spend as much of your money as you can before either your wife divorces you and funnels it all, on your behalf, to homeless nonprofits that increase homelessness and “save the illegal migrant” nonprofits that destabilize the western world, or Elizabeth Warren liquidates your property and spends it all on gulags for your family. Yes, I’m kind of having fun here… but? I’m actually not joking. Once you’re gone, there is a very real danger — a near certainty, I think — that your money will be weaponized against everything you care about within a generation. At least, this is the terrain for billionaires.

This is not a note for single-digit millionaires (pathetic). This is not even a note for double-digit millionaires (whatever). This is a note for men with so much money they actually genuinely do not know how to get rid of it, or how they ever could, and so they throw a few dinners for a few politicians, set up some kind of philanthropic general fund, kind of just forget about the fact that they are worth more than most small nations, and leave it to their kids who hate them before calling it a day. This is a note, in other words, for real ass billionaires. Who I love! I mean, I am famously a guy who supports the most persecuted minority on the planet, billionaires. But you guys, as a class, are really dropping the ball in terms of inspirational spending, and, frankly, this chat has been a long time coming.

Recently, Patrick Collison shared a great tweet expressing longing for some new framework to think about good, worthwhile work.

Certainly, Patrick’s critique of the gaping hole of meaning in our present culture resonates. But I wonder if we really need a framework for doing great things, or if doing great things would inform the framework. In other words, I think our billionaires could probably just build our way to meaning by funding a lot of very evocative and impactful projects that do a lot of unambiguous, lasting good in the world, which would in turn inspire a framework for building.

Elon has demonstrated this probably more than any other person in history, as his projects also tend to be companies. These companies not only produce wealth, which he directs to the construction of new grand projects, but inspire other founders to build companies in their vein, all of which echo an implicit philosophy of Elon’s work, which never has to be said. The work is simply understood. Digested. Reflected back into the world.

But look, I also appreciate you guys are all extremely busy running successful companies, and not all of you have spent so many years fantasizing about the way our world could look, so I’m going to help you out and actually provide a list of things I’d like you to buy me for Christmas. I’ve been a good guy this year, and deserve this, so thank you in advance for your ongoing patronage (it’s not enough btw (seriously, hit me up for PW bank details you literally do owe us)).

I. The Salton City project

The Salton Sea is a highly saline ecological disaster zone just a little south of Palm Springs, in Southern California. Extremely long story short, while sometimes framed as having something to do with global warming, the Salton Sea was accidentally formed in the early 20^th Century after a dam burst and the Colorado River flooded a dry, salty desert basin of a prehistoric lake for two years. By the 1950s, a new biome formed, and the region became a popular tourist destination for humans and exotic birds alike.

But, year by year, the unnatural lake naturally dried, increasing the saline concentration until it became inhospitable to most life. By the 1970s, it was generally accepted that disaster was impending. By the 1980s, nearby towns were getting hit with toxic dust storms. And throughout the 1990s there were massive outbreaks of botulism among fish, as they died off, which were eaten by the birds, which then died off. Now, the entire region is depressed. Though Instagram girlies do enjoy taking evocative Burning Man-type pictures with all of the abandoned tourist shit, often repurposed by dystopia-loving artists into… I don’t know, whatever this is:

Anyway, we should bring the Salton Sea back to life, an idea I first floated in a piece called Terraforming Terra Prima. Yes, terraforming Mars is cool. But turning desert here on earth into a lush and livable new habitat for humans is something we can do today, now, which we proved was possible, by accident, a century ago in the Salton Sea. And so the Salton Sea should become a kind of living monument to the notion we are stewards of this world, and our job on earth is to preserve the spark of life. That doesn’t only mean protecting the environment. That means improving the environment.

When I last wrote about this project, I did a decent job on the ra ra high-level shit (pump in more water), but the actual requirements are a little more complicated.

The Salton Sea needs two things: an annual flow of fresh water, and a strategy for removing salt from the water. Since the Salton Sea is a terminal lake with no natural outflows, both freshwater runoff from nearby farms and seawater pumped in from the Ocean (the cheapest path long-term, I think) will naturally lead to further saline concentration as new deposits evaporate. But brine concentrators would be nice, and we (you, ungodly rich person) could probably set the whole thing up with a chill couple billy. You might consider funding the private or public projects already working in the space, or build your own group and manage it directly to make sure the kind of projects presently being spearheaded by government-funded NGOs are actually getting shit done.

A canal to the Sea of Cortez would be nice, which might cost a little more than the concentrators. Throw in a nuclear power plant to fuel the concentrators, and we’re really cooking.

Now, if you aren’t willing to simply give me the Salton Sea on grounds that bringing an entire region of the country back to life is objectively a cool and good thing to do, I should note the Salton Sea brines are rich in all kinds of rare earth metals. We can and probably should build out some kind of industrial scale mining / processing operation to make use of the brine from the concentrators. This would require a lot of help from government, which will be impossible at first. So save this thought for a little further down our list.

Once the lake is hospitable again, and all the birds are back, let’s build a sweet ass Sim City-style Arcology, or at least a giant park that looks like an Arcology, and do a bunch of science tourism in the region. Call the Arcology a monument that is the living monument that is the Salton Sea. A monument to you, a good billionaire. Nay, a great billionaire doing great things.

II. San Francisco Water World (game-changing housing hack)

San Francisco, much like every city in America, has a massive housing crisis due to the general left-wing belief that “gentrification” (market rate housing) increases the cost of housing, therefore market rate housing must be banned while public funds must be used to build “affordable housing” (fancy flophouses for out-of-work drug addicts). While pro-housing libs are doing their best to slowly win the housing culture war, the lack of progress is embarrassing.

Fortunately, San Francisco is surrounded by water. You can probably buy a bunch of older cruise liners for less than a billion a piece, you can probably retrofit each of them into something truly luxurious, with like 4000 to 5000 new units in each, for another 100 million or so a ship, and we can dock a fleet of them in the warmer water out by Mission Bay with a 24-hour water ferry shuttle service, a bunch of floating restaurants and nightclubs, and basically create a San Francisco Water World.

You’d make back at least a couple billion a year in services and rent. But also, who gives a shit? You have infinity money. Why on earth, with infinity money, would you not just build a San Francisco Water World? I’m not even kidding, like how do you wake up every single morning and choose not to build a San Francisco Water World?

I love you guys, but I don’t understand you.

50,000 new citizens shuttling around a vibrant new district in the city, risen up from almost nothing, building out new services on the aquatic infrastructure, raving on the high seas! Water schools. Water festivals. Water duels, probably, to deal with all the meth head pirates. But think of the stories they’ll tell about you, and what you built.

I deserve this. Give it to me.

III. Vigilantes