Good morning! This list will keep growing until it reaches 141.5. Meg Whitman just wasted $141.5 Million of her own money to lose by twelve percentage points in the California gubernatorial race to Jerry Brown. I'm open to suggestions on other ways to spend her money. (We're estimating pricing from Amazon & google, &, of course, eBay.)
1) Buy a copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland ($5.95 for the CreatSpace edition) for 23.8 Million 9-year-olds (which is probably more 9-year-olds than there are in the whole country).
2) Better yet, buy the cool Robert Sabudo Pop-up version of AAiW ($19.13) for 7.4 Million 9 year olds.
3) Smoke it.
4) Buy 141.5 million lottery tickets (which may give you slightly better odds of getting your money back than of beating Jerry Brown.)
5) Amazon sells a set of 7 fake mustaches for $2.99, which is $0.43 a mustache. THAT'S ENOUGH FAKE MUSTACHES FOR EVERY RESIDENT OF THE USA!
6) A decent Bachelor Party stripper goes for around $200. You can buy strippers for 707,500 Bachelor Parties!
7) Cut out the Benjamin Franklins from 1.415 Million $100 bills, & make an epic collage
across AT&T Park.
8) Looks like a basic civil war re-enactment shirt gos for around $17.99, $5.65 for a good hat, but you need $150 for some sort of replica rifle. That will outfit 814,904 soldiers. The First Battle of Bull Run had less than 70,000; The Second Battle of Bull R
un had about 100,000 soldiers. You see what I'm getting at, you could properly bankroll the re-enactment of a dozen or so major Civil War Battles.
9) Attach a bidet ($50) to 2.83 Million toilets, greatly increasing the cleanline
ss of buttholes in the East Bay Area.
10) I found 20 acres of foreclosed land for sale for $17,663 in San Bernardino County. If you could buy 8,011 acres together, that's enough to succeed & be governor of your own little state. (You may need the soldiers from #8 to accomplish this.)
11) Buy a tractor (7 grand) for every resident of Orinda, California (with three thousand tractors left over.)
12) Buy an iPad ($552) for almost everyone in Sacramento, California.
13) Build the new Berkeley Art Museum ($95 million) with $46.5 Million leftover t
o buy half of a Jasper Johns painting (buy the good half, of course.)
14) Smoke it.
15) A bottle of absinthe from St George's in Alameda goes for $59.99 at its cheapest. You could buy a bottle for almost everyone in Nevada.
16) A dildo is about $7.95, which would outfit every
woman and girl in Connecticut with a shiny new dildo.
17) Sly & the Family Stone's album "A Whole New Thing" can be found used for $3.83, which would greatly improve the morale of every resident in California.
18) A fake rubber rat is $4.95, which is just what everyone in K
ansas could use.
19) A Uniflame WAD820SP 34in Wide Outdoor Fireplace with Slate Mantel with Copper Accents ($154) for everyone in San Francisco.
20) Pay back MF Global, "the world's largest broker of exchange-traded futures and options," the $141.5 Million it lost from unauthorized wheat trading in 2008.
21) Okay, I think I'm getting this right: The width of a penny is 1.4mm. So 141.5 billion pennies stacked would be 10,107 kilometers or 6,280 miles, which is the
distance from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to Rapid City, South Dakota.
22) To fund a new
Johnny Appleseed project, an Apple Grow-A-Tree kit is $3.5o. That's 40.4 Million freaking apple trees!
23) Or alternately for a Christine O'Donnell project, there are 300 deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna) seeds in a $5 pack. In the unlikely event that all of them sprouted, that would be 8.5 billion plants. With the right potion, that could easily turn the earth's population into newts.
24) On February 13th, 2008, Eliot Spitzer paid $4,300 to spend the night with the hooker Ashley Dupré. He could have kept sleeping with her every night until about March 2098.
25) [suggested in the comments] she could buy her own island and become queen of that island.
26) [suggested in the comments by Gottlob K. Bremselhäcker, M.A. (Oxon.) ] The average cost of making a Hollywood movie is at least $106 million at last count. Use $141 million to make a movie in which a billionaire retired Silicon Valley executive throws a huge part of her personal fortune into running for governor of California. After bombarding every conceivable media with a many-pronged campaign of a scale never seen before in statewide politics, she unexpectedly loses the race by a wide margin to a scrappy veteran politician, but in the process learns the important lesson that money isn't everything, in politics or in life. Sharp political satire in the mode of "Primary Colors," "Wag the Dog" or "Bulworth" but with a touching, cathartic finale in which the protagonist makes amends with her illegal immigrant former housekeeper she attempted to turn into a political prop. Critics will say it is entertaining but somewhat improbable.
27) Speaking of movies, why not make a shot-by-shot remake of Metropolis (1927), which cost 5.3 Million Reichmarks at the time, approx. $200 Million in today's currency, but you could save some money by casting Mel Gibson as Freder.
28) A Bell 429 Heliocopter costs $4.865 Million. You could buy one for me & twenty-eight of my friends.
29) You can't buy a narwhal, & you can also no longer buy the Avenging Narwhal Playset action figures from Accouterments, so, therefore, you can buy infinite narwhals with $141.5 Million.
Only 111.5 left...
I'll keep updating the post with more ideas. Leave suggestions in the comments! We will get to 141.5! If you want to read the boring ways she spent it, read here.
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