OK, say you are Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Ross Perot and you’ve got a few billion dollars laying around the house. Do you ever look around at the world and think, “Man, the world is nuts! This terrorism crap is going to ruin my investments. I should do something about it.” Now given that you could fund a small army with your pocket change, why don’t you decide to fund a small army and take things into your own hands? You could have a pretty good intelligence capability by having your world-wide offices support clandestine intelligence gathering. You could do things governments never could. You could either pass intelligence to the government, or you could have your own “trouble shooters” come in to take care of matters. After all, for most businesses, a peaceful world is a profitable world. (OK, not for SOME businesses.) So what’s stopping you?
Then when everything is cleaned up, you can start a Rollerball team.
Were I in that position, the only thing stopping me would be that A) I’d have to keep paying the damn mercenaries whatever they wanted FOREVER to keep them from incriminating me; thusly B) I’d have to kill the mercenaries myself to avoid Situation A. But if I were the kind of person that could/would kill the mercenaries then I’d have to be a hell of a risk taker/adrenaline junkie. That being so, why wouldn’t I use the intelligence gathered and go over there and do the dirty work myself?
sits back in chair, ponderously taps fingertips together ha…mah ha hah…mmMWAaahaa haaa
If I were that rich I would buy an island, build it into a fortress and run my empire from there. It would make the playboy mansion look like a cheap whorehouse. Maybe hold a martial arts tournament every 4 years … wait thats already been done.
Ross Perot, at least, HAS done something like this in the past. Ken Follet wrote a book about how Perot hired mercs to rescue his workers when the revolution occured in Iran. Don’t remember the title - something about Eagles…