Put 80,000 people out of work and take a chunk of of everyone's retirement account. Not to mention the second order effect on other tech stocks. It's right there in the comment you're replying to.

But that's boring. Let's pretend Gozilla is real. He's been around for a hundred years, pops up once in a while and wipes out a chunk of a coastal city before swimming back to the deep. Killing Godzilla once and for all would be a clear benefit, save thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of property damage. Governments and militaries and smart people work hard developing death rays and mega bombs and Kaiju-specific viruses and, oh I don't know, really big spears. Perhaps one will succeed.

But, he's been around for a hundred years. A whole industry has grown up around him to mitigate the effects and deal with the fallout. There's rapid-response evacuation blimps and self-erecting submerged delay walls and monster insurance. There are collateralized collateral damage obligations to securitize and spread the cost of compensating property owners for military weapons that miss their target. The financial system does what it does well: taking an existential risk, sticking a price on it, and turning it into profit. And it's not just white collars cashing in: there's entire companies that do nothing but quickly rebuild bridges that he chews up, or recycle building rubble into new skyscrapers. There's a whole smorgasbord of mom-and-pop operations that do things like scraping up and disposing of the gallons of his stinky saliva that clog the streets after a rampage (with a little refining, it proves to be a surprisingly effective self-adhesive sealant for leaking pressure vessels). Others specialize in filling in claw-shaped potholes in asphalt. Yet more insulate small buildings against fire damage. Satellites monitor him; subscription services forecast his movements; one company is developing a promising body armor based on studies of a scute found after an attack in Montevideo.

And then one particularly wild plan actully works. Trapped in a constricting net made of nano-scale monofilament and engineered spider silk, Godzilla dies in the shallows outside Cape Town, South Africa. The world celebrates. The next morning, hungover, everybody defaults on their Godzilla insurance. The value of those securitized policies goes to zero. The CCDOs blow up too: finance's innovation is exceeded only by its myopia. Investors take a beating. It's not 2008, but pretty damn close. The business was actually insanely profitable given that everyone in a coastal city anywhere in the world was at risk. The specialist construction and recycling giants lay off people by the thousand. All the independent niche remediation companies shut up shop. Tens of thousands are out of work.

Same thing, innit.

> Tens of thousands are out of work.

Instead of dead. Killed regularly. With survivors knowing that it will happen again, the buildings they put up will come back down, and that is the least of their worries because the buildings can indeed be put back up. Unlike the rest of society Godzilla stomped into ruins.

Godzilla is real. It turns populations into needless wastes and flattens entire communities, cities, countries. We're talking about war. You're countering the desire for peace with "but think of Raytheon's profits."

That would be offset by a one-time surplus of Godzilla meat.

I enjoyed your short story, but not quite the same thing. The employees are the Godzilla, not protecting us from it or cleaning up the damage it causes. Not really sure why we're supposed to be hellbent on preserving the jobs of 80,000 that are actively detrimental to the rest of society. If you work for Godzilla Corp, getting paid a real cushy salary to destroy everything you can, I'd rather you don't have your job, actually. It's not like it's hard to find a new job with Godzilla Corp on your resume, it just might not be as well-paying or cartoonishly evil, to which I would say, suck it up.