Bernie Sanders could ball out like Jay-Z and Floyd Mayweather on a rollercoaster with all the money he just raised for 2020

Bernie Sanders is living large — or at least his campaign is.

The presidential candidate announced on Tuesday that he and the grassroots movement he has created — the very one that made the small dollar figure $27 famous in 2016 — has raised a whopping $18m during the first quarter of the year.

That’s compared to the other chumps like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg who have also publicly announced their fundraising tallies so far. Harris brought in $12m — okay, that’s nothing to scoff at, I guess — while Buttigieg surprised the political media with an announcement that he raked in $7m during the first quarter.

Sanders finds himself in a pretty comfortable place now. He can spend that $18m on opening up offices in key primary and caucus states, as well as conducting internal polling to help figure out the next best move to beat out the competition. He can also make some important hires to make sure his team is in tip-top shape.

But what if he decided to have some fun with it instead?

Here are a few of the things he could buy if he stole all his campaign’s money and completely sold out his belief system.

Sanders — or as he is often lovingly referred to as, Bernie — has a signature hair style already. It’s unruly. It’s ghost-white. It generally looks like he doesn't care at all what you think about it.

That’s all fine and well; nobody is judging. But Bernie's hair could live the life of a sultan's hair's life with the money that 525,000 individual donors just gave to his campaign.

Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei reportedly pays an average of $31,000 to his favourite barber every time he goes in for a haircut.

Bernie could get a pretty sick perm with that kind of dough, and still have plenty left over to talk about the excesses of the world's wealthiest classes.

Bernie wouldn’t be able to build the world’s biggest rollercoaster, but he could make do with a budget amusement park ride.

While Disney World’s Expedition Everest rollercoaster takes the cake as the most expensive coaster at $100m, Bernie could cut costs and make a much smaller and less ornate one that would still impress the hell out of his grandkids.

It’s probably pretty obvious that prices vary for these custom fun machines, so it is hard to say how much real-life Rollercoaster Tycoon the Vermont senator could actually play. But one engineer says that you can expect to shell out between $10m and $30m for your “average coaster”, depending on length, the firm hired to build and design it, and the costs of building the thing. With all those ups and downs, he could call it Capitalism and use it as a visual aid for his speeches about the dangers of the unfettered free market as well.

That’s right! Assuming the boxing champion is willing to part with the $18m Jacob & Co custom watch he bought last year (and assuming he sells it for the same price he bought it at), Bernie could be rocking some serious bling soon.

The watch, dubbed the “Billionaire”, may be exactly the type of thing that Bernie rails against during his stump speeches, but is a sight to behold with 260 carats of emerald-cut diamonds in an 18-carat white gold case and band. Could he be convinced that the benefits of getting noticed outweigh the risks of selling out?

This is oddly one of the more affordable things on this list. Indeed, it seems that you can buy your very own modest island for around $100,000.

That sum is actually pretty close to how much Richard Branson paid for his famed island in the Caribbean back in the 1970s. Branson paid $180,000 after low-balling the original owner, who was looking for $6m, but later agreed out of desperation to the much lower cost.

Buying an island in and of itself isn't very socialist. But if it had fully open borders and instituted its own utopian government, Bernie could be onto something.

This may sound crazy at first, but hear me out. Bernie is from Brooklyn, and he has been known to shoot hoops on the campaign trail.

Regardless of the fact that Bernie now lives in Vermont and the Nets did not play in Brooklyn when he was growing up, the presidential candidate could invest a good sum into the basketball team (or perhaps a different, struggling team), and could maybe even turn a profit.

That’s exactly what fellow Brooklyn-native Jay-Z did with the Nets in 2004, when he put $1m into the franchise to become the owner of one-fifteenth of one per cent of the organisation. He later sold the stake in 2013 for what was at the time called “Warren Buffet” levels of returns. Profitable and giving back to the community — isn't that exactly the sort of thing Sanders might stand for?

During Manafort’s federal trial last year on charges stemming from the special counsel investigation run by Robert Mueller, prosecutors submitted evidence that the former Trump campaign chairman spent a whopping $1.3m on clothes as a part of a scheme to avoid taxes.

Among the pieces of clothing purchased was a $15,000 ostrich jacket with bespoke trousers. It was also claimed that he spent millions on rugs and other home goods.

You know what is much more than $1.3m? That’s right, $18m. Go wild, Bernie. Maybe then you will never have to explain to reporters again that you have an “ample supply of underwear”.

In fact, technically speaking the $18m wouldn’t even be necessary — at least not according to one particular finding in a study looking at Sanders’ 2017 Medicare-for-All bill, which found it would save the US economy roughly $2 trillion over a 10-year period.

That study was based on the assumption that the senator’s Medicare-for-All bill would reduce drug costs, administrative costs, and reduce reimbursement rates given to health care providers if the US switched to the universal healthcare system Sanders promotes.

The author of the study has since said that he believes those assumptions are fairly unrealistic — the study also takes into account other potential cost assumptions, which had different outcomes. But Sanders has consistently argued that universal healthcare would ultimately reduce costs for the US government.

“Let me thank the Koch brothers, of all people, for sponsoring a study that shows that Medicare-for-All would save the American people $2 trillion over a 10-year period,” Sanders said in a video after the study came out. Even if he needed a short-term $18m boost to institute his plans, then, that'd be a secure investment.