SubscribeI don’t know how the people at Forbes came up with this figure. I don’t know how a reporter of Capitalism justifies Santa as the richest fictional character, either. Santa Claus is a humanitarian non-profit. I mean, duh.
The list ranks Scrooge at fourth, which is an insult. Even the vaguest glance at anything related to the mythos of Scrooge McDuck will place him far and above the richest of all fictional characters- more then Richie Rich, more than Daddy Warbucks, more than Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor combined. (I’d like to point out I have no beef with Bruce Wayne. He’s Batman. That by itself makes him the most awesome person ever. But right now, we’re comparing salaries.)
So, to the editors of Forbes, here’s a little bit of help from someone with, granted, slightly more than a vague glance at the McDuck mythos:
Scrooge McDuck is the richest living being, with a net worth so high it is incalculable by rational terms. His last official tabulated net worth was, to the decimal, five multiplujillion nine impossibidillion seven fantasticatrillion dollars and sixteen cents. (A multiplujillion, written in numerical form, is a one followed by about 164 zeros, greater than the googol, the highest rational number calculated by man.)
The list identifies his source of income as “mining.” This is grossly inaccurate. McDuck earned his original wealth as a Klondike gold prospector, procured after he bought miner’s equipment upon the sale of his great-grandfather’s gold teeth, later to be found as the source of inheritance identification on a massive business deal involving the delivery of two century-old horseradish. Look, I didn’t come up with this, it’s all in the books, people. McDuck’s business practices are wide and numerous, including oil wells, railroads, gold mines, farms, factories, steamships, theatres, ping-pong ball manufacturing, automotive plants, sawmills, radio stations, canneries, fisheries, race horses, experimental ice cream research, space travel, and newspapers.
McDuck also possesses investments which are, ironically, so valuable that the only person able to afford them is McDuck himself, thus rendering their value as not merely priceless, but literally incalculable. These assets include the remnants of the Trojan Horse, the Kaffer De Gaffer African diamond mines, the world’s only candy-striped ruby, the world’s only living unicorn and Egyptian Sebek crocodile (the rarest and second-rarest living animals, respectively), the only 1916 U.S. quarter in circulation, the Incan gold of Pizarro, rare chickens that lay square eggs, and a small moon composed of 24-karat gold, which in itself would be worth vastly more than $8.2 billion were it not for the fact that actually delivering the moon somehow to earth would cripple the entire gold standard.
This level of business and acquisition prowess, combined with the fact that McDuck has never, to any know report, willingly expended any extra money, accounts to a being that has so much soft money on hand that he needs a money bin large enough to hold its volume of 3 cubic acres. (Assuming a cubic acre is the square root of 640 square feet to the third power, that would make the volume of the money bin over 48,000 cubit feet.)
Let us also not forget, everyone, that South African businessduck Flintheart Glomgold is currently tabulated as the second-richest Duck in the World, as his last official net worth calculation is so incrementally close to that of Scrooge McDuck’s that the ranking is literally due to McDuck owning twelve inches of string more than Golmgold. Again, folks, this is all there in the books if you bothered to read them.
So you’re telling me that a duck who has 3 cubic acres of liquid assets and a fucking moon made of gold isn’t the richest fictional character ever created?
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posted by delmoi at 6:52 AM on December 5, 2005