Some of the items carry over from Spend Bill Gates Money, some are different. How did you think about the best mix of options to give people?
This time I was going for more tangible things, so you can visualize it. It’s honestly hard to think of items; once you get to $100 million, there are only so many things out on the market that you can buy. So we have the Las Vegas Sphere in there, and aircraft carriers.
After a point it’s kind of interesting that you’re like, OK, I could buy 1,000 more tanks, what would that really get me? Part of the fun of this one is just the futility of it. At a certain point, what more could a person need?
For sure. I just bought 1,000 monster trucks, and I still have $999,650,000 left.
There were a few different ideas. One is if you had a trillion dollars and just had a stack of money, and as you spend it you see the trillion dollars go down, but it’s actually pretty hard to render a trillion dollars in bills on the page.
I had thoughts of more abstract things. Once you get to a trillion dollars you’re really buying power, so how many companies you could buy or how much influence you have. But for most people, that’s a harder way to visualize things than, like, oh, that is a million racehorses I just bought.
Did you run into any technical challenges building this?
Initially I wanted everything to be 3D models on the site. But if you try to get your laptop to render a million monster trucks, it’s just going to freeze. So I had to do a lot of trickery to get this 3D effect without actually using 3D models.
It doesn’t just tell us about Elon Musk, it tells us about the things we’re buying. I looked back at the original Spend Bill Gates’ Money, and the Big Mac was $2. It’s $6 now. For anything where there’s a direct parallel, you’ve captured a real price jump.
