How a billionaire could spend their money to help the disadvantaged: 7 ideas from the top of my head

When I first began writing this, my goal was to think of 50 different ways an extremely wealthy person (by which I mean wealthy on the level of having hundreds of millions to several billions of dollars at their disposal) could use their money to improve the lives of as many people as possible, as much as possible. After writing this list, I narrowed it down to seven ideas that I thought were both potentially viable, and which I haven’t seen discussed in any detail elsewhere before writing. This is a list of those seven philanthropic ideas, along with a brief discussion of each one.

It should be noted that I do not have any experience actually managing extremely large sums of money, and as such all of these ideas should be taken with an equivalently large grain of salt. The goal here is to get people thinking, and perhaps come up with some original insights, rather than to serve as an immediately practical resource for a wealthy reader (though if you are a multimillionaire reading this, feel free to DM me or comment below about any ideas, criticism, or insight that you may have on the topic coming from your position). It should also be noted that the fact that I haven’t seen most of these ideas discussed before signals that I may be missing some obvious problems here, so if you see anywhere where I may be going wrong, I’d be more than happy to discuss that in the comments.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some ideas for how multimillionaires might use their money for good:

Start your own insurance company, and design it to maximize medical coverage and ease of use for consumers, rather than to maximize company profits. The goal should be for it to make only enough money that is necessary for continued healthy company survival without needing further funding, and everything it might make beyond that should be re-invested in improving the experience/minimizing costs for consumers. As a disabled person myself, who has a huge amount of lived experience with the (American) medical and psychiatric system, it seems that insurance providers who refuse treatment to those who desperately need it (even when those treatments are prescribed by doctors!) are one of the largest institutional sources of suffering and wasted time in America today (coming in second only to our prison system, perhaps, while followed by filing taxes). I do not think I have ever met a disabled person who doesn’t have a genuinely chilling horror story about their insurer (See https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/k3oyuw/poor_guy/ and the comments below it for countless examples of this—I know of people who have died due to their insurer refusing to cover needed medication, or people who have been stuck unemployed for years because they can’t get approval for an operation that would treat their symptoms), and this seems like something that can be actually changed by a determined billionaire who wants to shake up the market. An open question which I do not know the answer to is how much it would cost upfront to start such a company, as I have been told by people more well-versed in economics than me that if they start too small, insurance companies carry a huge risk of failure. Depending on how much is needed to start such a company with minimal risk of going bankrupt, this idea may only be feasible for a very small handful of people in America to carry out, unfortunately. I do believe this idea is worth investigating further, however, as it would be both tremendously beneficial to millions of disadvantaged people, and would be self-sustaining over very long timeframes.
Fund a transparent meta-scientific organization which uses some form of peer-review for accreditation of scientific papers, bypassing the current system of scientific journals. This organization should follow stricter and more rigorous standards for accreditation than is currently required for acceptance by most modern journals, and should optimally require that the goals, methods, and expectations for a given experiment mentioned in an accredited paper be submitted to an open repository before being performed. The ultimate goal of this organization would be to improve the current replication crises in science, which shows no sign of ending under the status quo, and has resulted in a tremendous amount of stagnation in scientific advancement. Buy-in from the scientific community would be necessary for success of course, so every effort should be made towards transparency, and optimally a large fund should be set up to incentivize scientists to gain accreditation for their papers from your organization. As a model for how this might be implemented successfully and with community buy-in, it is worthwhile to study the history of “Kashrus” organizations in the Orthodox Jewish community (such as the Orthodox Union), which dramatically improved the state of kosher food throughout America as a result of their totally optional certification labeling. I could see a project like this resulting in at least some amount of success with even relatively modest funding (on the scale of a few million USD), which might make this an attractive concept for wealthy scientifically-minded people with less than billions to spend.
Create a company which offers loans to people in disadvantaged communities, with the lowest possible interest rate (and largest possible willingness to give to potentially risky causes) that would still keep the company self-sufficient. The goal here is to put an end to loan sharks in poor communities, by offering a competitive service that won’t bankrupt poor people at their lowest moments. I’d hire a team of experts to figure out how to make such a company act in as ethical a manner as possible (including debt forgiveness programs perhaps), while still being capable of turning a modest-enough profit that you won’t be in danger of losing too much money if things go south. This would clearly require a rather large initial investment, but should also be self-sustainable once set up in a given community. I consider self-sufficiency to be a very powerful positive here, as you don’t want the community to be dependent on someone continually donating money to the cause, in case something should happen to the philanthropist.
Fund the large-scale creation of memes (in the form of games, books, podcasts, literal internet memes, etc.) that not only provide genuine entertainment, but also carry an ideological “payload” of some sort that you believe will improve people’s lives. HPMOR comes to mind as an example from this community of what this might look like. As well as dissemination of rationalism, other ideas worth disseminating might include financial literacy, political theory, increasing empathy towards the Other, etc. This goal can be carried out with pretty much any amount of money, as long as you have connections to good artists (and perhaps good practically-minded philosophers) and can hire even a relatively small marketing team. Obviously the more is spent the more could theoretically be achieved, but I’ve noticed most high-profile attempts of this sort (that I’ve heard about at least) tend to forget about the cultural power of smaller artists, and can even cause a Streisand Effect if the marketing is done in an abrasive or clumsy manner (remember what Mr. Bloomberg’s failed presidential bid was trying to achieve? Me neither, though I sure did grow to hate seeing his face on YouTube ads). As such, if you are a wealthy individual and wish to go down this path, it is absolutely essential that you have the right people on your team, as no amount of money will help you if you don’t. As it happens, creating viable memes is sort of my specialty (I’m a hobbyist game developer and have successfully used viral marketing to overcome my complete lack of budget multiple times in the past), so feel free to message me if you wish to discuss this in more detail or get specific recommendations.
Create a pharmaceutical company, and start off selling generics at the lowest possible price that can still turn a modest profit. Salaries for executives should optimally be capped at a reasonable amount, and great care should be taken to avoid any possible collusion with the rest of the industry (due to the current poor ethical state of most pharmaceutical companies, it is quite likely that attempts will be made to artificially raise prices using any means available). When (or if) the company is ready to create original products, all clinical research and results should be released into the public domain as soon as the initial research and production investment has been regained. As with most other ideas listed here, the goal is not to maximize money for the company, but not for it to operate at a loss, either. Our current medical system is currently quite broken in many areas, and this is in large part due to artificially jacked-up prices by monopolistic corporations with capitalistic rather than humanistic goals in mind. Any work done to ameliorate this situation would be a godsend to millions of people who are at risk of death due to the exorbitant cost of life-preserving medications they can’t possibly hope to cover.
Set up and fund a “depression hotline,” using an organized network of at-home therapists and social workers who communicate over the internet through text, audio, or video (at the patient’s choice) to at-home patients. This already exists to some degree in the form of suicide hotlines, and therapists offering online treatment due to the current pandemic, but due to insurance issues most therapists can only work within the same state, and can cost a prohibitive amount for poor people (who tend to need therapy more badly in the first place). Very few people feel comfortable calling a suicide hotline if they aren’t feeling actively suicidal, and there’s a great need for services that can provide comfort and targeted mental health advice on short notice for those who are “merely” having a tough time. If this is made a free service it would obviously be a drain on philanthropic resources, but the need is great enough that it may very well be worth it in the grand scheme of things.
Fund a task force to remove lead piping/other harmful substances from as many populated areas as possible. Lead pipes cause a vast amount of harm to mental and physical health, and are fairly cheap to replace, yet there are still more than 100,000 lead pipes connected to homes in just 15 states (see https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2018/0827/US-cities-push-to-remove-lead-pipes-but-some-property-owners-resist). Spending even a relatively small amount of money to remove lead pipes and similar sources of toxins would save countless people from needless suffering in the form of medical and mental health problems later on, not to mention the immediate drop in violent crime rates seen when lead poisoning is removed from a community, as well as improvement in education levels in children (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/6/12/18661193/lead-pipes-paint-flint-michigan-usa-cost-fix). Although completely solving this issue would apparently cost roughly half a trillion dollars, which no single individual can possibly afford to cover, a massive amount can still be done with targeted awareness efforts, creating powerful lobbying groups to push for increased regulation and decontamination funding, and directly paying for decontamination in select, high-population and high-risk areas. This issue currently seems to barely register in the national consciousness, but that can almost certainly be changed by someone with enough money or political power.

I hope this list of ideas can be of some use, though for whom exactly I’m still not sure. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments; I’ll try to read through all of them, and I look forward to any criticism you may have :)