If I Had A Trillion Dollars

I've been absent too long, I know. Please, internet - forgive me. I've had a hell of a time with a gnarled-up foot.

Less than a week away from a general election, the temptation is for me to talk about election politics. I am not going to do so. If you want my views on it, hell, drop me a memo. We'll chew the fat. What I AM going to do is share with you a game that myself and my housemates invented.

It's a very simple game, and one that came out of a discussion regarding intellectual property law. The game is this:

What would you do with a trillion dollars?

That's quite a lot of money. Just hold it in your head, the number of zeroes following the one: 1,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes.

To get your juices flowing, and to encourage some thought experiments, I'm going to have a wander through my own spending plan. (I'll keep a running tab of costs.)

The first thing I do is buy a house with cash ($1.5m). No mortgage, no debt, no rent. Just buy it outright.

The second thing - and this is quite a leap - is I buy 21st Century Fox ($72bn).

I'd dismember them, frankly. Trash the news outlets, replace them with actual music channels. I'd give the rights of several of the TV and film franchises that Fox currently own back to their respective creators, pretty much free of charge.

I'd follow this big corporate purchase with an even bigger one, ExxonMobil ($524bn). This time we divert the thrust of the company's infrastructure - sell off all the outmoded fossil fuel apparatus and devote the company to sustainable energy research and technology. Maybe offer to rejuvenate the entire power grid of a dilapidated city somewhere just to prove it can be done as a working model.

...and that's almost $600,000,000,000 of my trillion dollars spent...but I like to think that it would make the word at least a little better.

What would you guys do?