What would you do if you had a billion dollars? I know what most of us who are not currently billionaires say we would do.
We say that we would retire and relax, that we would give a bunch of it away to charitable causes, that we’d invest in our communities, that we’d try to make a difference in this world — that we’d use our money to do some good. And there are billionaires who have done this. The late Chuck Feeney, who founded Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), spent most of his life anonymously giving away his fortune, dying in 2023 with a net worth of a few million dollars, which meant he’d given away nearly $9 billion in his lifetime.
I think we all like to tell ourselves we’d be like Chuck Feeney. But I’m not sure there’s a lot of existing evidence that most of us really would.
Simply look at most actual billionaires today. Last month, Forbes produced a study that showed the 400 richest people on the planet donated roughly 4 percent of their income to charity last year, and that number is skewed by people like MacKenzie Scott, who gave away $7.2 billion in 2025, the most any single person has ever given to charity in a single year. Forbes found that 80 percent of those 400 richest people gave less than 5 percent of their wealth to charitable causes. They’re not spending their billions on worthwhile causes. They’re spending it on themselves.
Billionaires are (mostly? partly?) human beings like the rest of us, and most human beings, in the end, just want to be happy. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for any human to buy happiness — though I’ll confess that the gulf between Boarding Zone 1 and Boarding Zone 6 on an airplane has become rather profound — but it’s not surprising that billionaires nevertheless try. Now, everybody has their pet hobbyhorses, but I suspect a lot of you, readers of The Athletic, sports obsessives you are, would be very tempted to spend a good portion of it on your preferred college sports team if you had a billion dollars. It’s not the most altruistic thing; you can make a rather persuasive argument that giving a fortune to a college football team over, say, your local public schools, or a food bank or, you know, anything other than a college football team is a morally vacant choice. But people are not always altruistic when it comes to their own happiness, even if they know they should be. The lizard brain can win out.
Think about the things in this life that you know would make you happy. “My team winning a championship” is super high on that list, right? Of course it is. If you had more money than you knew what to do with, are you sure you wouldn’t spend a good chunk of it — particularly if you wouldn’t even miss this big chunk — to try to get your team a championship? I personally believe I wouldn’t. But I am also in no danger of ever becoming a billionaire. So I can’t truly know, and neither can you.
Read the rest here for free: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7727410/2026/10/27/cody-campbell-texas-tech-billionaires-college-football/?unlocked_article_code=1.L1E.yW90.bP0dayQktv21&source=emp_shared_article&smid=url-share-ta
