Eine Billion Dollar
Andreas Eschbach
 John Salvatore Fontanelli, the son of a shoemaker in New York who works as a pizza driver, is one day invited to the Waldorf Astoria by an Italian lawyer, where he is informed that he inherited a huge fortune simply by being the last male descendant of a wealthy Italian merchant living and working in 16th century Florence. This merchant put a rather small amount of money in a bank account some 500 years ago. Through the magic of compound interest, this sum has now grown into the equivalent of roughly 1,000,000,000,000 US dollars. In one fell swoop, John Fontanelli has become by far the richest person in the world, his net worth being bigger than the GDP of most countries. Yet, his ancestor has charged his heir with the task of using the inheritance to give back mankind its lost future. After some hither and tither, he accepts the role assigned to him by his ancestor and tries to better the world socially and ecologically. On the advice of his mysterious new consultant, Malcolm McCaine, he founds a huge corporation called Fontanelli Enterprises and strategically invests the inherited fortune in a diversified group of projects to grow his power and influence. Starting with the hostile takeover of ExxonMobil, John Fontanelli's orders now decide the fate of other companies, currencies, and even complete countries' economies. With the passing of time, John recognizes that all this will not ultimately lead him to success in mastering his assigned task. To get a better picture of the future development of mankind, he sets up a gigantic and secret scientific project, which uses complex computer models to simulate different future scenarios. When the sobering result is finally announced, Fontanelli and McCaine differ about the correct approach to save humanity from its obvious self-destroying development. McCaine leaves Fontanelli, thinking that mankind is doomed to being minimized down to a small but qualified elite. By using his own money, he sets up another company and tries to entice away leading scientists in the research of the AIDS virus to withdraw their manpower from the development of an effective cure. Fontanelli, on the other side, is setting up a foundation to organize and enforce the election of a world speaker. In his belief, the multi-national companies can only be controlled by global laws to prevent a catastrophe. The opposing and contradictory strategies of Fontanelli and McCaine to save humanity from its disastrous fate culminate in an exacerbated struggle for power. Fontanelli achieves a partial victory: The election of a world speaker finally takes place. The book ends with the death of John Fontanelli, who gets shot by an old friend who gradually came under the influence of McCaine.