[_huayra_]

Easy: buy media companies to sow political division and pollute the discourse, buy political influence to restrict access to open and unbiased education to ensure the populace cannot engage in critical thinking, then poison the environment in myriad ways until people in their 20s require a dozen rounds of IVF to have kids (or more likely, just giving up because of the ruinious state of inflation compared to incomes).

[ydnaclementine]

good thing even parts of this would never really happen haha

[EA-3167]

Come on... endlessly wealthy and wants to do harm? There's only one real, obvious answer: Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans. Make something as contagious as measles that kills a third of people reliably, spread it multiple global focal points at once, and you could topple the world pretty effectively. If you attacked the economy and food supply at the same time I don't think there would be any coming back from that.

It would be insane, an apocalyptic fantasy that few could afford outside of (hopefully somewhat) accountable or at least pragmatic governments. But a very rich person could afford it.

And as much as information warfare is terrifying, biological warfare is much worse. I get your "it's already here" point, but lets really take the question at face value and run with it.

edit: Consider that a group MUCH less wealthy than Elon Musk was able to experiment with nuclear weapons, and managed to carry out a sarin attack.

[IAmGraydon]

I don't think you actually read the assignment. Please try again.

[senordevnyc]

The thought experiment was to do maximum harm entirely legally

[saagarjha]

Just doing that seems like you will likely be arrested.

[EA-3167]

I think that's more of a concern for people who aren't genocidal maniacs out to destroy the species. Like I said, we already have examples of people who wanted to usher in an apocalypse, some of them even gave it the good old college try, but they lacked resources. If you gave Shoko Asahara a few hundred billion to play with, who knows what Aum would have come up with. At the very least their sarin would have been pure.

[viraptor]

> could do entirely legally.

> Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans.

I think you missed a constraint there.

[Peaches4Rent]

What do you mean I only have 256 GB of memory on my server?