It’s the classic post-prandial question, or the one you ask your next-desk colleague when the afternoon heat weighs down on your eyelids like an extra-large post-it note and you need some conversation to keep you awake: what would you buy with one million euros?

Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping- Bo Derek

But last week, we upped the stakes to $20.4 billion (I’m not going to bother with the euro conversion – there’s enough money there to buy Greece).

Why $20.4 billion? Because that’s exactly the value of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook shares at the end of the social platform’s first day as a public company. And let’s not forget that the Facebook founder is just 28 years old – at that age, most of us can’t even buy a house with our own money.

But back to the original question – what would you buy with $20.4 billion?

Actually, I’m not really interested in what you would buy – being a billionaire affords me an unhealthy dose of arrogance. So let’s just focus on what I would buy.

Let’s start with the $0.4 billion.

First, I would fatten myself on so many celebratory meals that I would start looking like the human equivalent of a medieval platter.

I would live in a hotel. Let me rephrase that – I would buy a hotel and live in it with a staff: guest ratio of 100:1 on my payroll. That’s because there is no greater joy in life than to walk away from a pile of dirty towels and find, on your return, that someone has replaced them with a clean, folded stack of pure cotton heaven.

I would buy myself presents. At first glance, that doesn’t make any sense – but it does because, as all men know, you never get what you ask for. Whenever my wife asks me what I would like for my birthday, and I answer that I would certainly appreciate a Lamborghini Aventador, I end up with a pair of embroidered pillowcases.

And I would do one stupid thing every day, like buying Lionel Messi and have him teach my dog some new ball tricks.

But that still leaves me with a lot of change. In truth, I’ve only just spent the change and there are still 20 very large ones to go through. The problem is that there’s nothing big enough that warrants a $20 billion price tag. Actually, there is – I’ll just buy Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook shares.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com