You can’t. That’s not enough money.

Make the lives of your community better instead.

You’d start by attending $10,000 plate dinners, and shaking hands with candidates and expressing views. Hire a few $60k a year idealists for a think tank to publish papers. Pick 1-2 issues and hammer them. Pay lobbyists to set up meeting and propose/write legislation and amendments.

As some of your (hopefully idealistic) candidates win, you ask them to help drive your issues through. Get them to make concessions to other people’s proposals for support on theirs, helped by your lobbyists. Use your think tank to drove issues and provide talking points and legislation.

That’s the traditional view. A better approach might be to create a 501c3 and run positive message ads that give you a warm feeling about america in general, say nothing of substance, and include a candidate you like’s name sometimes. Then another pac showing pictures of the candidate you don’t like and chanting “hate hate hate” behind them. Play to your audience.

My first move is to think about safety and longevity. I’m going to need a private island as a base of operations. Caution also dictates having a few backup homes, so my enemies never really know where I am. Beyond that, I need to spread my message, so I’m going to need a private plane. Something modest and a few years old is fine. This is a charitable effort. It isn’t about me. And in the name of charity and effectiveness, let’s go ahead and add a boat on there, too. Now, to really clear our heads before we get going and make sure we’re enacting the right policies, we’re going to want to bring in some girls…

Relentless advertising the week before the election. Any sooner than that and you’re wasting money. The electorate has the collective memory of a goldfish so wait until the few days, and especially the weekend, before the election and dump it all into an overwhelming advertising campaign. Every other commercial that comes on TV should be one of your attack ads listing everything horrible the candidate you oppose has ever done wrong.
Buying politicians won’t work, that kind of money will either buy one for a few years or many for a few months. But $500m is less than a million dollars a year for just the house of representatives and when that money dries up their normal donors will be there with big fat checks ready to change policies back to the way they were before.
In order to enact real change you’ll need to actually replace the people in power. And even then the major sticking point is making sure that the candidates you endorse actually make the changes that would limit future corruption.

Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion to run a distraction campaign, taking headlines from Bernie Sanders’ repeated wins in the early 2020 Democratic primary. Bloomberg spent $500M the first week to flood the internet with influencers and meme makers being absolutely distracted by the low torrent of low effort shit post memes about Bloomberg. It was so obviously an astroturf campaign built on fake sentiment that everyone forgot Bernie won 5 states in a row and was crushing Biden. By the end of the month, Elisabeth Warren also bowed out and took her progressive voters to Biden.

So for $500 Million you can ruin a grassroots campaign! Buy bad memes and pay influencers to distract people.

change the political situation in America?

Change for the better or for the worse?
(hint: the latter comes cheaper)

You could do what Mike Bloomberg did in 2020 and try and buy your way into an election. Then again when he spent $500,000,000 on his campaign that got him no where.

You’d be competing against multi-billionaires and huge corporations. It wouldn’t be enough, even though it’s a ridiculous amount of money for one person.

Changing the US would probably be impossible. Maybe changing your state would be possible. Changing your local community would be much more realistic.

Helping people get homes and food would likely help reduce crime.

Helping people get educations would help some people escape certain situations.

If you’re fixed on changing the US political situation and you think there’s a party that can change the situation, you can go with political donations. I believe whichever party spends the most money on their campaign is the one that wins more often than not.

Could probably buy enough congressmen to pass a few laws. Not sure what the best ones would be.

$500 Million? How long can you rent a Supreme Court Justice for that much? That might be your best chance at positive change.

Now, if we’re looking for Quantity of change over quality of change, you could actually cause the MOST CHANGE by putting that money towards a drone strike on the Capital while Congress is in session.

Just hypothetical answers to a hypothetical question. I’m not advocating anything. No need to put me on any more lists.

Y’know, I don’t think that’s enough to make any significant change. It takes more than money - it takes generations. Nothing will change until things get so bad that the comfortable (I assume they’re comfortable if they’re not engaged) majority get involved at all levels. I’m not pessimistic…

I think the best thing you could do with that amount of money would be to start a community organizing non-profit. Things like registering voters, tenant advocacy, helping people gain access to benefits, etc. etc. Basically, just organizing and connecting people to the system.

If you’re restricting things to just electoral politics, though, I’d say focus on close elections at the state level. A half billion dollars isn’t much in the context of a modern presidential election but it’s an absurd amount for state legislature elections. You’re probably not going to turn Mississippi blue or Massachusetts red (or whatever your goal is) but control of a swingy state like Virginia usually comes down to a handful of close elections. You could probably make a meaningful difference in 20 states just with get out the vote funding.

Don’t bother. Enrich the lives of those around you. Feed homeless. Help friends start small businesses. Fix single mother’s cars. Ensure your own stability first, though.

I really like the idea of testing alternative business and corporate structures and definitely not developing a model library for medical devices to print.

Since there no other comments yet, I’ve always had the idea to pick anyone running across any race in the US under the democratic socialist party and donate the max amount to each of them individually. I think all the max values are under $2,500 per individual but so many races are in small towns and whatnot where that could go a long way. I mean folk like Bernie Sanders would also get the max value per individual but it will go further for the downstream races. I have zero background or knowledge in this area so maybe that is just super naive.

Well, playing the same game as rich guys will result in you losing. But it’s important to remember the October revolution was funded with much less…