Fiction writers literally have the power to make someone rich beyond their wildest imagination. But how far actually these writers have gone in their proverbial wildest imagination? We did a quick evaluation of who is the richest fictional character based on how much are they worth in today’s value.
Scrooge McDuck from Duck Tales
Whenever someone mentions Scrooge McDuck, we immediately recall the iconic image of Scrooge diving into his massive pile of gold coins. How much is that gold worth? According to an article that appeared in Forbes Magazine in 2013, Scrooge McDuck’s net worth is $65.4 billion. This seems awfully less for the richest duck in the world. Even Scrooge McDuck’s rival and the second richest duck Flintheart Glomgold is worth much more than that.
So how rich actually is Scrooge McDuck? In one episode, Scrooge loses his lucky hourglass and starts losing one billion dollar every hour. He gets all worked up about how at that rate he will go broke in 600 years. Now, when you calculate for one billion per hour for 600 years, you will get to a figure larger than three quintillion dollars. This is over and above Scrooge McDuck’s most identifiable asset – his money bin. Given the size of his vault which is supposed to be as big as an entire block, and also the fact that the coins are packed loosely so that Scrooge McDuck can take his daily swim, the worth of the pile could be anything between $50-100 billion.
Any other businesses and properties own by him can be considered as loose change after this.
Smaug the dragon from The Hobbit
If anyone can come close to Scrooge McDuck’s fortune, it is Smaug, the villainous dragon from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The size of Smaug’s pile of gold is explained in the book terms of the size of the dragon so the size of the dragon is a topic of much debate in the online communities. Taking a conservative estimate of about 65 feet as the length of the dragon and about 12 feet high (more than twice the height of Bilbo the hobbit) we have about 1500 cubic feet of gold and silver. Accounting for air and dragon droppings, treasure of its sleeping mould is valued at about $15 billion.
However that is not the only mould of treasure the dragon had in its lair. If we assume there are at least four different mounds in four corners of the place and each are about half the size of the dragon’s favorite sleeping mound, we will have about $30 billion in gold and silver and another $8 billion in diamonds. There is another $4 billion worth of diamonds that protect the dragon’s soft underbelly. And last but not the least, the Arkenstone of Thrain was valued as 1/14th of the total treasure which makes its value closer to $5 billion making the total worth of Samug’s treasure at around $65 billion.
