As of March 2009, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world at around $40 billion. If that’s what a pants wearing man can make, how much could a fine feathered duck possibly be worth? There’s no dispute Scrooge McDuck is the richest duck in the world, richer than Flintheart Glomgold and wealthier than John D. Rockerduck. But exactly how wealthy is Scrooge McDuck? Scrooge has unlimited fictional resources that include Gizmoducks and time travel, deep sea diving and outer space exploration, but these resources vary from writer to writer, so determining the precise wealth is a gray area.
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa claims “Five multiplujillion, nine impossibidillion, seven fantasticatrillion dollars and sixteen cents.” For some reason, that number seems slightly on the fictional side. But a fictional duck has fictional wealth, why not, right? Forbes Magazine in the famous Forbes Fictional 15 states that Scrooge is the wealthiest of fictional characters but at a measly 28.8 billion. Nearly half as much as Gates, I don’t think so. I don’t even know where they’re getting this number from, I mean, they have Ming the Merciless on the list and I’m fairly certain his wealth cannot be measure by Earth standards, he’s got space bucks or moon dollars. The fans of Wolf Gnards insist, nay, demand that I show the work, and Forbes should be held to the same standards. It’s as if people think that Forbes is a more trusted and dependable institution than Wolf Gnards.
The real answer to Scrooge McDuck’s worth: $ 27 Trillion (That’s Trillion with a “T”)
I’ll break it down for you. Carl Barks ,the creator of Scrooge McDuck, Duckburg, and the Money Bin, states that the Money Bin is three “cubic acres,” now an acre is a measurement of area and not length, but let’s assume Barks meant a length of 43,560 ft. The Money Bin would therefor have a volume of 247,961,850,048,000 cubic feet, or roughly the size of three football stadiums stacked one on top of the other. The McDuck Money Bin is the largest structure in Duckburg, so this sounds about right. We know most of the money in the bin is in coin form, we’ve seen Scrooge swim it, but to find the value we have to assume that each coin is the equivalent to a dollar and is roughly the size of a silver dollar. By finding the dimensions of a silver dollar, we can calculate a silver dollar volume of 2736.22 mm. If we convert the bin to millimeters and divide by the volume of silver dollars, a maximum of 27,621,599,101,910 coins can fit in the vault. Allowing for empty space and different value coins we can round down to $27 trillion, actually $27 trillion and 10 cents (let’s not forget his number one dime).
However, this isn’t Scrooge’s net value, just what’s in his actual Money Bin. This doesn’t count all of McDuck Industries: his mills, gold mines, oil rigs, and islands of diamonds. Whatever his value is, I think it’s safe to say, it’s a little more than Bill Gates.
Forbes, you’ve been gnarded, yo! Leave the useless facts to the professionals.
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Of course, thanks to this post, I now have the Ducktales theme song stuck in my head. I guess that isn’t so bad, yesterday I have the song “A Whole New World” from Aladdin stuck in my head.
You assume that each coin made of solid gold is worth one dollar. Current gold prices fluctuate between $1111.56 and $992.86 USD per troy ounce (as of 10 Sept 2009). The the mass of a silver dollar is 0.260 troy oz. If we use $1000 as the current asking price for gold, each silver dollar sized coin of solid gold would be worth approximately $260. 27,621,599,101,910 coins X $260 per coin = 7.18161577 × 10^15 or 7.18 quadrillion dollars. Not a mere 27 billion.
I used a modern standard for coin value, and set it at $1. Stumbler is right, McDuck’s coins could be any value, but we can’t assume that they’re gold coins just because they’re shinny and yellow.
‘Scrooge is seen in this story attempting to reacquire a magic hourglass that he gave to Donald, before finding out that it acted as a protective charm for him. Scrooge starts losing one million dollars each minute, and comments that he will go bankrupt within 600 years’
There is 315 569 260 minutes in 600 years x 1,000,000 =
315,569,260,000,000