HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE TO KILL BILL GATES WITH AN AXE?

Finally! Confirmation that Bill Gates is just the baddest mofo ever.

I was talking with L&E game guru Rory the other day and we remembered that according to the rules of that super-complicated but 100% accurate life simulator, Dungeons and Dragons, your character gets experience points for all the money he can obtain. (Experience points, in turn, mean an increase in power, levels and hit points--the sex, drugs and rock and roll for the guy who's too nerdy for real sex, drugs and rock and roll, whose only experience with sex has to do with a giggled conversation with his DM about what his character is saying to the pretend hooker, and whose drugs experience rhymes with "zibuprofen zabuse.")

It's no surprise to anyone that money is power. That's just good sense. The amazing thing is that D&D gives you a way to quantify that power. We decided to put this system to the ultimate test by figuring out exactly how tough Bill Gates is. We'd assume he got most of his experience through earning money, and has never personally killed more than one or two guys (Apple employees, worth no more than 150 experience points each).

Here's the character sheet we drew up:

The results astounded us. Given his personal fortune and Microsoft shares, Bill Gates' level is over 300,000. To put this in perspective, you start falling off the end of the D&D rule book after you reach about level 12.

A HERO TESTED

The next obvious question was: How long would it take to kill Bill with a gigantic axe?

That's something we've all asked. There's something undeniably moving about the thought of Bill Gates getting attacked with an axe. What's that word Aristotle uses for tragedy? Catharsis. While you're watching it, you're moved by the scene of human tragedy, but after it's finished, you feel spiritually emptied out. Purified. It's that same kind of thing.

Rory estimated that with an axe, you could do about 4 points of damage a minute, assuming you hit every time you swung: a reasonable assumption, since Bill Gates is usually just wearing an oxford shirt and a sweater vest, and he's probably not jumping around or anything; while you're hacking away, I picture him holding a Nintendo controller and a cheeseburger, just like he is in this retarded publicity picture:

Under those circumstances, it would take over 100 days to kill him with an axe. That's assuming you didn't sleep or eat, but just hacked non-stop. If, on the other hand, you treated it like it was your job, and hacked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it would take about a year to kill him (assuming Microsoft's stock doesn't go up significantly during that time).

Clearly, one man can do little against Bill Gates. An active team effort, conducted, for instance, by anti-trust prosecutor Joel Klein (right) and 5 Department of Justice investigators, all armed with axes, would take significantly shorter to polish him off: they'd kill him in only a month, if they worked 12 hour days with no weekends.

A THEORY VINDICATED

This all proves my initial theory that Bill Gates is the most kickass guy on the planet. Don't come whining to me about your precious Bruce "Die Hard" "Unbreakable" Willis. I saw him in "The Sixth Sense." One bullet in the stomach and he was down for the count. And Arnold Schwartzenegger is undeniably very strong, but a simple lava flow or bath of liquid nitrogen can do for him. It is estimated that Gates, on the other hand, could survive a direct hit by three 100-megaton hydrogen bombs. In the event of a nuclear war, there will be nothing alive on earth except cockroaches, Bill Gates, and perhaps J. K. Rowling.

In fact, I propose we totally get rid of our entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, and in fact, disband the army and navy. As long as our economy is even marginally stable, we're better protected by the combined might of the Forbes 500. Imagine this: Russia (or, more likely, 1980's Cold War Russia, which is pulled into this time-dimension by supermagic) (or, more likely, Pakistan) totally wipes us out with its nuclear weapons. From the radioactive wreckage arises a super-mutated Bill Gates, even more powerful than before! He walks across the sea floor (I don't know how much damage drowning does, but I'm sure he can manage a simple Atlantic crossing without even feeling a twinge) and homes in on the bad guys, inexorably following them like a Harvard-dropout avenging angel. When he reaches opposition, he can simply wear it down with his astonishing staying power. Even with his wimpy little Bill Gates punches, which are no more effective than yours or mine, he can eventually punch through solid steel or the sides of mountains. Meanwhile, Mutant Donald Trump is catching the foe in a pincer movement and vanquishing them by having sex with them, in the eventuality that our enemy is some whores.

For comparison, here's how long it would take to kill other billionaires with an axe: