Trillionaires Lottery


Off-Topic Discussions

The Exchange

A Global lottery is held in which ten million tickets are sold - each for one million dollars per ticket - The Winner Gets the tallest building in the world - built for them.

Are you as a multimillionaire interested?


As far as I know there aren't any actual trillionaires...yet.

How about when there are, the world's trillionaires are all required to enter an annual lottery wherein the 'winner' loses his complete fortune to the social services ministry of whatever country he owes primary citizenship. All the 'losers' get to pay zero taxes for the coming year.

See? I told you I could come up with ridiculous stuff, too.


Sounds like a good deal. Considering there won't be more than one in any given year when they do show up, every new one is going to "win". Who could object to that? After all, they COULD get no taxes the first year!


So long as participation is voluntary I'm cool with it. If they choose to take the risk that's their gamble to make.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

How about all the billionaires are rounded up every year as Tribute for the Hunger Games? Winner keeps his/her billions for another year, (the deceased) losers forfeit theirs as socialized relief for the impoverished?

Sovereign Court

2 people marked this as a favorite.

Does Monopoly money count?

Silver Crusade

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pillbug Toenibbler wrote:
How about all the billionaires are rounded up every year as Tribute for the Hunger Games? Winner keeps his/her billions for another year, (the deceased) losers forfeit theirs as socialized relief for the impoverished?

I just got a mental image of Warren Buffett trying to crush Michael Bloomberg's skull with a heavy branch.

It's very entertaining. Especially when you imagine that they have applied war paint to their faces.


Hm, considering the most expensive building (according to Wikipedia) cost about 6 billion USD, that you usually want at least a 7% return on realstate projects to make sense as a bare minimum, and that to get such return you would need to spend about 5.6 billion USD, which in turn means a success chance of 0.0056%, the lottery would probably only attract a handful of eccentric millionaires, because as an investment it would make no sense at all.

Even if you tried to make it a completely 50/50 chance (something bellow what you would normally consider for such type of investment), I'm not sure in which market you would be able to make sense of a 467 billion building (the approximate cost a building would have to have to make the investment in tickets reasonable) and make it in any way a liquid asset.

The Exchange

1 person marked this as a favorite.

What would a trillion dollar building look like? The space station from Moonraker?


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Crimson Jester wrote:
What would a trillion dollar building look like? The space station from Moonraker?

Trump Tower atop Olympus Mons.

Bonus: The Donald's ego would only weigh about ~40% of what it would on Earth.


Methinks Yellow Dingo has found a way to fund the construction of a space elevator.


Crimson Jester wrote:
What would a trillion dollar building look like? The space station from Moonraker?

Well, the ISS has costed about 150 billion USD already, so the Moonraker station would perhaps not be that far off (plus the yellow suits could be made of actual gold).

Silver Crusade

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Klaus van der Kroft wrote:

Hm, considering the most expensive building (according to Wikipedia) cost about 6 billion USD, that you usually want at least a 7% return on realstate projects to make sense as a bare minimum, and that to get such return you would need to spend about 5.6 billion USD, which in turn means a success chance of 0.0056%, the lottery would probably only attract a handful of eccentric millionaires, because as an investment it would make no sense at all.

Even if you tried to make it a completely 50/50 chance (something bellow what you would normally consider for such type of investment), I'm not sure in which market you would be able to make sense of a 467 billion building (the approximate cost a building would have to have to make the investment in tickets reasonable) and make it in any way a liquid asset.

Yellowdingo don't need no economics.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Well, you'd have to be pretty dumb to spend 1M on a 1 in 10M chance of winning, and billionaires didn't get that way by being dumb....

The Exchange

Charlie Bell wrote:
Well, you'd have to be pretty dumb to spend 1M on a 1 in 10M chance of winning, and billionaires didn't get that way by being dumb....

And yet you would get to be a trillionaire...but yes - China is building the tallest building in the world for around a billion dollars.

The Same building would cost a trillion dollars in the City of New York.

but lets say this is too high a price to pay for a lotto ticket. So we sell 20 million tickets at lotto tickets at one hundred thousand dollars each. This brings in 2 trillion dollars - sufficient to pay 50% tax on the prize so it is effectively tax free.

Silver Crusade

The Freedom Tower in NY is 104 storeys tall and cost $3.8 billion to construct. It was a cost of $15,732 per square meter. Your proposed construction would need to have over 63 million square meters of floor space to necessitate an expense of $1 trillion in NYC.

Community / Forums / Gamer Life / Off-Topic Discussions / Trillionaires Lottery All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.