17 Better Ways Elon Musk Could Have Wasted $446 Million

He's not even good at being rich!

By Elizabeth Lopatto

The Setup

Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest person and self-styled efficiency guru, managed to burn through $446 million in a way that raises a simple question: if you're going to squander nearly half a billion dollars, couldn't you at least do it with style? The following is a satirical accounting of how that money might have been spent more memorably — and, arguably, more usefully — in the spirit of the AI, policy, and science beat.

The List

1. Fund a rival chatbot with better manners. $446 million would buy a lot of "please" and "thank you" in the training data.
2. Buy every user on X a pony. A literal pony. Delivered. It would still be cheaper than some acquisition deals.
3. Build a tunnel that goes somewhere useful. The Boring Company could have connected two places people actually want to go.
4. Endow a chair in applied humility at a university of your choice.
5. Purchase 446 million $1 lottery tickets and experience the thrill of losing in public, at scale.
6. Fund open-source AI safety research — and let the results speak for themselves.
7. Buy Twitter again, just to prove the point.
8. Commission a statue of yourself — then donate it to a museum that promises to store it in the basement.
9. Give every xAI employee a $1 million bonus and see how morale (and retention) responds.
10. Sponsor a global science prize larger than the Nobel, with a catchier name.
11. Pay for universal broadband in a rural county and watch what happens when people can finally log on.
12. Invest in grid-scale battery storage — the boring, effective kind of climate action.
13. Buy a media company and then, this time, actually leave it alone.
14. Fund a documentary about the perils of impulsive spending.
15. Seed a policy fellowship for people who read past the headline.
16. Buy 446 million books and donate them to libraries; even the shipping is a tax write-off.
17. Just put it in an index fund. The returns would be less exciting, but the memes would be legendary.



The Point




In an era defined by AI arms races, policy battles, and science funding gaps, $446 million is real money with real opportunity costs. Whether it went to a chatbot's compute bill, a litigation war chest, or a vanity project matters less than the fact that, at this scale, waste is a choice. Musk's defenders will call it investment; the ledgers will call it something else. Either way, the joke writes itself — and the invoice is already paid.




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Editor's note: This piece is satirical commentary. Figures and framing are presented for comedic effect; specific spending details should be verified against primary sources.

via The Verge AI