Can you have too much money?

On Wednesday, Athina Roussel turns 18 and becomes one of the world's richest people, when she inherits a whopping £2.5bn ($4bn) chunk of the Onassis family fortune. But can one person be too rich?

Despite fleeing Greece with just $60, Aristotle Onassis made his first million by the age of 25. He died possessing a shipping fleet larger than the navies of many nations.

His sole heir, teenage granddaughter Athina Roussel, is about to get her hands on the first £2.5bn ($4bn) tranche of the family fortune - making her one of the world's richest people overnight.

What to do with Aristotle's billions?

While she is no stranger to opulence - even Athina's dolls wore Dior dresses - the inheritance is a big step up from her existing £5m annual allowance.

Athina once threatened to relinquish the fortune, which brought little happiness or stability to anyone in her family - least of all her mother, Christina, whose death was linked to a huge dose of diet pills.

The teen has since reconsidered. So what can she fruitfully spend such a vast amount of money on - especially in Belgium (where Athina has set up home with a boyfriend 12 years her senior)?

While enjoying dizzying wealth is the dream of many people, in practice, deciding exactly what to buy with a huge disposable income appears to be a bit tricky.

Back in the infancy of the UK's National Lottery, one jackpot winner was asked what she would spend her £9m windfall on.

SILLY MONEY PURCHASES

A £15,000 platinum mobile phone (as owned by Madonna)

A £32 New York hamburger (with black Perigord truffle and foie gras trimmings)

A £44,000 liquid lunch at London's Petrus restaurant (as enjoyed by five wine buff bankers last year)

Of course, her first thought was to buy a new stair carpet for her existing home - a building which could generously be described as being modest. Not much of a dent in £9m.

Even those more used to their riches seem to flounder as their bank accounts stubbornly refuse to diminish under a barrage of spending.

While there is as yet no mathematic formula to explain the phenomena, it seems clear that the more money the super rich throw at a purchase - the sillier, the kitschier and the more laughable the result.

Aaron Spelling - the legendary creator of TV's Charlie's Angels and Dynasty - wasn't stumped by which facility to add to a mansion already housing a doll museum and a dedicated present-wrapping room. He reportedly splashed out on a second present-wrapping room.

Rival computer billionaires Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are reputedly locked in a game of luxury home one-up-manship - trumping one another with new lakes and waterfalls.

'Aaron, are you going to be long in the wrapping room?'

The undisputed champion of such excess was newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. In 1919, he began building "a little something" on a hill in California.

When financial woes halted construction in the 1930s, the man satirised in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane had a rambling castle with 61 bathrooms and the world's largest private zoo.

There's only so much cash you can drop on dry land though, but there's always the sea in which to sink more of your money.

Golfer Greg Norman is just the latest in a long line of millionaires to fit out preposterously luxurious yachts. His £25m Aussie Rules has a spa pool to seat 12, a 200-rod fishing tackle room and a fuel tank big enough to take the craft's 285ft bulk non-stop from pole to pole.

Some tales of repulsive self-indulgence seem too far-fetched to be really true. Many grindingly poor Romanians assumed that reports of their communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu donning a new suit everyday were western propaganda. Not so.

8,000 suits, but tried in his dressing gown

Before being executed in 1989, Ceausescu put on, wore for a bit and then hid away in his wardrobe more than 8,000 suits - according to those charged with assessing his vast estate of ill-gotten gains.

The other end of the super rich spending spectrum can, of course, be equally infuriating to other mere mortals.

The late oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty saved string, helpfully installed a pay phone in his house for use by visitors and washed his own socks rather than splash out on hotel laundry services.