Bonus question: How many names would one need to right down?
Real bad luck some chud hog like Light Yagami found the Death Note before anyone else did. By killing only criminals reported on in the news, he effectively made himself into a weapon of execution that could be freely wielded by the cops at almost entirely their own discretion. I wish the anime would have explored that idea a bit more, but I'll settle for the very pathetic way Light Yagami got caught by a 12 year old, threw a tantrum, and then died. That was unironically a great ending.
So say a communist found it instead. How much damage could this baby do to the global capitalist nightmare we live under?
The key here is that you could have people do things before they died according to the in-universe rules. "Capitalist turns all of their companies into workers cooperatives and then dies quickly and painlessly of an aneurysm at the time they would have originally died" times the amount of notable capitalists probably works, but Im also probably forgetting more rules
That would never work. One person can't just turn a massive company into a workers' co-op unless they have insane voting shares like Zuckerberg
And if you try to make them do something that isn't possible, they just skip that part and either complete the other items or get a heart attack
you can get the name of the board, and give all 10 board members the same pre-death instructions about turning microsoft or w/e into a fully unionized co-op.
Yeah, this, although you might have to include a "standby while (author name) finishes writing the next 9 lines and then execute the following:"
Lemme go use the bathroom while my god of death is compiling.