If you've got $30B in personal assets, it's hard to imagine any investment situation short of the complete collapse of the monetary system that wouldn't leave you as immensely wealthy until you die.

Putting it all in any one thing could be bad. Its easy to imagine ridiculous phrases like "Put it all in Twinkies".

But yeah any halfway sensible plan will leave a billionaire fantastically wealthy even in failure.

With that much money, you could literally shovel cash into the furnace every day, and probably never run out.

Indeed. I've always preferred using one billion seconds as a way of understanding just how much a billion is (hint: it's 31 and change years).

The average American lifespan is 2.4 billion seconds.

If you were shoveling 100 dollar bills, you could actually do some damage in the relatively short term (you could probably reasonably shovel $5k-10k/10s, or $500-1k/s, so you could burn through a billion every 1.5-3 weeks (assuming you never sleep or eat).

If you were working a 40hr week shoveling hundreds, it would take 6-12 weeks to burn through a billion.

If you were doing the same but with singles it would take 6-12 _years_ to burn through a billion.

So if you started with $30B - it would take between 180 and 360 years to get rid of all that money by shoveling it into a furnace.

You could literally have a few generations of heirs whose job is shoveling money into a furnace and they would be considered significantly wealthy for most of those generations.

Of course. It's a ludicrous amount of money, you could just keep it in cash and not worry about it. That wasn't in any way the topic of conversation - it was why is it difficult to beat the market (or even match the market) managing that much money for one person as a money manager.

Sure, and my point was that it was a pointless consideration.