If you had a one-way ticket to Jan 1, 1999 that departs on Jan 1, 2024, and you are allowed to bring whatever fits into a backpack with you, what would you bring to use to take over the world, and how
Assume that the future can change based on your actions, so any historical information that you bring along with you from the intervening 25 years may quickly drift out of the new realities history.
Edit: also assume that you can be given a healthy 21-year-old body if you want or take your previous self's place.
Further, identification will be provided for you if you were not born at that time.
A computer with lists of winning lottery numbers, stock prices by day of all major companies, archived copies of webpages or, preferably, scanned in newspaper articles of all world events from 1999 until now, and lists of every politician and individual with net worths over $300 million.
Also patents for LCD screens, the microchips in use in the 10's and now, the efficient solar panels China cranks out if I can get a hold of that information, modern efficient wind turbines, etc. Also important scientific papers written between then and now, especially for Ozempic and Wegovy.
Also, this might be the one practical use for dumb shit like Chat GPT and its ilk, so we're bringing along a couple of GPUs and copies of each major open source AI I can scramble up.
I use this information to:
Hopefully prevent 9/11
Become filthy fucking rich
Infiltrate the elite and start bumping off motherfuckers one by one Count of Monte Cristo style
Distribute my ill gotten gains to the masses and use the rest to stop climate collapse
If you put it on a scale between bruising Timmys face with the butt of a pistol and saving 3,000 lives on one day and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives in the interim between due to the post 9/11 increase in American policing and military actions in other countries, then not pistol whipping him would be a crime against humanity for which you should be tried at the Hague and hung.