13 Eccentric Projects of the Super Rich

If money were no object, many of us might fix up an old car or remodel the house. Millionaires and billionaires use their fortunes to build spaceships, pursue immortality, create island nations, or mine asteroids. Then there's Tesla founder Elon Musk, who is once again looking to buy Twitter for $44 billion after spending months trying to back out of the deal. And that's not all. The world's richest man took to Twitter to promote his new perfume, named Burnt Hair, which doesn't sound Musk-y at all. Perfume aside, many eccentric projects of the rich tilt toward serious subjects, such as advancing science and environmental efforts, especially in the oceans, or travel in outer space.

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Elon Musk is known for co-founding PayPal, spearheading Tesla and SpaceX, and trying to buy Twitter in an effort to make it more conducive to free speech. In between all that, he's been a multibillionaire who toys with submarines and rockets, sends electric sports cars to space, and most recently ventured into the perfume business with an oddly scented fragrance. Musk says his Burnt Hair perfume sold 10,000 bottles and raked in $1 million in just a few hours after launching. Other flashy things the tech magnate spent serious money on include the tricked-out Lotus Esprit used in the James Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me" for $1 million, and telling reporters in 2019 that he planned to turn it into a real submersible car. 

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Many have daydreamed what it would be like to live forever, but few have the cash to pursue that dream. Dmitry Itskov, a Russian media mogul who at just 31 had a net worth of more than $1 billion, gathered scientists and charged them with developing a way to turn humans slowly into biological robots. The final phase of the project, which involves the brain being downloaded into an immortal avatar, is targeted to be complete by 2045. 

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Most of us watched "Jurassic Park" and thought, "Thank goodness it's just a far-fetched Hollywood flick." Not mining millionaire Clive Palmer, who was inspired to make his own. When the project was announced, there was speculation he might mean cloning real dinosaurs, but the finished product is merely animatronic versions — more than 160 — placed around Australia's Palmersaurus, making it the world's largest dinosaur park. It has since slipped into neglect and decay. 

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"Titanic" and "The Abyss" director James Cameron stops at nothing to bring a sense of realism to his aquatic adventures, though the $10 million he spent building the Deepsea Challenger might be a cap. He used the vessel for a record-setting dive in the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. Then he donated it to Massachusetts' Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

PayPal co-creator and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has his sights set on building a city in the ocean — several micronations, really. These tiny libertarian utopias imagined by his Blueseed project would be on diesel-powered, movable rigs weighing several thousand tons, but residents wouldn't be weighed down by welfare, minimum wage, or regulations. Funding for the project dried up, but the idea of floating cities has attracted renewed interest during the pandemic.

The precious metals we need for our technology overflow in asteroids that pass near Earth, if only we could get at them. Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, James Cameron, and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis launched the Planetary Resources mining company to try — or, rather, to figure out a way to try, since no one really knows what's on those asteroids hurtling around us. Despite the successful launch of two test satellites, the venture ran into financial problems and its assets were sold.

What's with rich people and submarines? Branson, one of the world's most prolific billionaires (he operates some 360 companies), took over a deep-sea project after a friend's death. Virgin Oceanic's DeepFlight Challenger was being built to pilot Branson to the deepest points of the world's five oceans, but safety issues shelved it — and Cameron set the record first, anyway. There's no word of the cost to Branson, but he eventually planned to charge as much as $500,000 for others to borrow the vessel.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is a major bankroller of a $1.3 billion plan to build the world's largest telescope. At 10 times the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, it's known as the Thirty Meter Telescope for its diameter, but is also 18 stories high. The plan has been to build it on Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano, but that's been slowed by legal challenges over sacred lands. The ongoing dispute has led to consideration of a different site in the Canary Islands.

Dennis Tito, a former NASA scientist, paid Russia $20 million in 2001 to become the first space tourist. Tito must have been impressed, because he soon made plans to send two people on a 501-day journey around Mars in 2018, though that trip never got off the ground. Billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk, meanwhile, expects his SpaceX company to land humans on Mars by 2026.

Schmidt and his wife Wendy have used a reported $94 million for the creation of an ocean vessel called Falkor, which researchers can use for free so long as they share information with the public, and if selected in the first place. Falkor's first excursion located a polar exploration vessel that sank off Greenland in 1943. In 2020, a team aboard the Falkor found a coral reef taller than the Empire State Building in Australia's Great Barrier Reef. 

Amazon's Jeff Bezos contributed $42 million for the construction of a clock — designed to tell time for 10,000 years — to be placed in a mountain in Texas. The purpose is a little hazy, though Wired magazine described it as ideally changing how humanity thinks about the future and purpose. 

Robert Klark Graham became a millionaire by inventing shatter-proof plastic eyeglass lenses, then set his sights on less well-received goals. From 1980 to 1997, he ran a eugenics-themed sperm bank, the Repository for Germinal Choice, for donations only from Nobel Prize laureates. With donors scarce, he expanded his criteria, reportedly accumulating donations from about 19 men. More than 215 children were born through the program.

They may be singing "Fly Me to the Moon" when Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his fellow travelers take off for a trip around Earth's nearest neighbor. In 2021, the fashion tycoon announced an invitation for eight people to join him on a SpaceX flight scheduled for 2023. Successful applicants would ride for free.