Tough times we live in
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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All of the gold in the world would make a 23 meter cube. That amount is valued at 12 trillion, which is over 25 times more than the wealthiest American.
Smaug’s hoard would be valued probably in the quadrillions or quintillions, which is to say, more than all of the wealth in the world.
Smaug hordes the gold too – making it scarce and so increases his wealth.
Smaug has way more gold that there is in earth so wtf is Forbes on about
You could argue gold is more valuable than unliquidated stock
I mean, he owns the mountain too.ย
Let’s assume that all the coins and weird-shaped objects bring it down to an average density half that of solid gold. I can’t actually *find* the math Forbes did to determine the volume of his hoard, but let’s say it’s roughly a hemisphere with a radius the length of Smaug’s body (430 feet) for him to comfortably sleep on. Hemisphere volume is 2/3 ฯr^2, so ~387,000 cubic feet. Half the density of gold (~9650 oz/cu. ft.) gives a mass of 3,734,550,000 ounces or 233,409,375 pounds of gold. Price of gold currently is around $25,000 per pound. That puts a *low estimate* for Smaug’s gold hoards at $5,835,234,375,000. Five trillion dollars. Elon Musk’s current net worth is about 500 billion. Smaug is worth 10 Elon Musks.
Smaug is British
And he didn’t make the money himself, but profited off the labours of Dwarven workers who were left with basically nothing after he stole their earnings…
Wouldn’t he hoarding Gold increase the Gold prices since there would be less Gold in circulation?
Isn’t uncle scrooge the wealthiest? I have always wondered. In my first language they invent numbers to quantify his wealth.
I don’t know how they valued Smaug’s hoard but if we go by the depiction shown in the Peter Jackson films there is no way that he is only worth 51 billion. Especially if you adjust for inflation since that forbes calculation was probably done decades ago at this point.
And I dub thee Luigi Mangione with the Title of Dragon Slayer…
I doubt there’s only 590 tons of gold in that mountain.
What are we supposed to do to dragons folks?
Smaug should have bought Tesla stocks, or Bitcoin in 2015.
1 that math must be made using book smaug
2 if it isn t it s real trash
3 inflation not accounted. Gold value would tank if movievamaug is considered
I love socialist lotr fans
Sounds like someone should tell Smaug
Wouldn’t this also make Thror that wealthy
The time for slaying dragon draws near
He couldnโt catch thee!
Anybody got this Forbes article at hand?
forbes doesn’t know a lot of fictional characters
Yes, it’s amazing. This is the best time in human history to be alive. By the standards of virtually all of our ancestors, almost everyone in a developed country is immensely rich.
I can’t find the original-original Forbes Fictional 15 article ranking Smaug, but for the curious [here is a followup to it](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2011/04/06/how-much-is-smaug-tolkei-dragon-worth/) discussing how to calculate the worth of Smaug’s hoard, and a [followup to the followup](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/04/23/how-much-is-a-dragon-worth-revisited/)
Which fictional character is richer? Scrooge McDuck?
The difference being, he’s the only one to physically have that much money in liquid assets, the others have it in stocks and ownership.
Gold is 80,000 dollars per killo, so 80,000,000 dollars per ton.
One single cubic meter of gold is 2 tons, so 160,000,000
Fuckin’ Steve from minecraft made out of gold would be worth 320,000,000 dollars.
For Smaug to only have 50 billions, he would need 300 cubic meter of gold.
For reference, an Olympic swimming pool is 2,500 cubic meters.
So forbes basically calculated that an entire mountain of gold, which houses a dragon, is about ten times smaller than a swimming pool. Great job forbes
They failed to take into acount gems are mithrill jewelery silver and all other metals and valuables dwarfs mined and produced.
1. There’s no way to precisely figure out how much gold Smaug had.
2. Last time the price of gold crashed was 2013 so this must be a crusty ass meme
Sounds like we need to start training dragon slayers.
Yโall just made up a fucking number to try to make a point.
First place is Scrooge Mc Duck
It just baffles my mind that everyone seems to be resistant to the fact that rich people don’t have that amount of money laying around on their bank account…
Totally unrelated, but killing dragons is a good thing, yes? People should keep that in mind.
Smaug: and if those Americans were in Middle Earth, I would reclaim my number one spot!
Whoever made those calculations is an idiot. You don’t need to lie about a fictional dragon’s pile of gold to make a good point of the wealth inequality in the world.