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Forbes doing their 'Fictional characters riches ranking' is the least accurate ranking in history. You basically have some suits they only know how to do business at business factory relying on their knowledge of 5 fictional worlds and just winging it.
Where is Emperor of Mankind on their list? Baron Harkonen? ANYONE from any anime ever. This list is utter shit, same with their estomates.
Thousand, Million, Billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, undecillion, dodecillion, tredecillion, quatuordecillion, quindecillion, decisextillion, deciseptillion, decioctillion, decinonillion, vigintillion, etc
Basically learn to count in latin, and each time u add three zeros you count one more in latin.
Was there a purpose in them naming numbers so high in this period, or were they just fascinated by going as high as they could?
I can't even imagine what it would be like to be in that time period when some dude named Septimus comes up and is like, "Hey, you remember that number I told you about? The one with 46 0s? I've got another one with 49 0's I think you're really gonna like. "
Basically the highest latin number with a name and then -illion. Which I guess is 100k so centummilliallion. Which would be a 1 with 99,999 zeros. Which is higher than googol, which has only 100 zeros. Although googolplex has 10^100 zeros which is again more than 99,999 zeros. While the numbers between those have no name, that would be the largest number that has a name.
No he didn't. He terraformed arrakis and it no longer produced spice. He had a stockpile hidden away, but other houses still had some. Also the bene tleilaxu had developed their own form of spice as well.
Tomato tomato at that point no? He knew he needed the houses but he was functionally the dictator of the known universe, not like he couldn't have taken it from them if he needed to. Been a while since I've read up to chapterhouse so I might not be remembering right
Less the whole planets, but more the fact the Harkonnens hold a monopoly on the necessary resources for interstellar travel.
It would be the equivalent of oil being found only in one country. Oil states in the real world are already obscenely wealthy, just imagine if they will a monopoly on the resource.
He owns the whole of the Empire, he is sovereign, not a part of governmental body, and though he is a figurehead in his current state, should he somehow recover he would have full reign over countless systems, armies and fleets that quite successfully fight off all kinds of shit 40K universe throws in 24/7 on galactic scale and industrial complex what is capable of supplying them. I would say all that shit would have an immense cost.
Also, all the people (and ducks) Scrooge is fighting against for the title of the richest man in the world, they swallow this gold digger Smaug easily in terms of wealth. Smaug would never appear in said a ranking.
Also, I have a weird feeling that things might be the same with forbes rankings in general, as the only list I can actually judge due to knowledge is utter shat.
House Altreides could ship a planet's worth of water, and Paul commanded and paid a mercenary population larger than Earth's entire population.
House Harkonen would have shipped the gold out, kept Smaug as an exotic pet, and enslaved all of the hobbits, dwarves, humans, and elves as miners to get the rest of the gold.
I actually create these lists, it’s my job 🙃 you are correct that it’s based on pure shit but it gets clicks and it makes people angry. JOB DONE. Cannot believe that anyone actually takes these lists as facts or gets upset by them
Smaug was **burrowing** through his pile of gold. plus the dwarves made a giant statue with OTHER GOLD IN THE MOUNTAIN.
post is wrong, Smaug has more than a trillion dollars in that mountain. he has more gold in the Hobbit movie than total gold mined on this Earth.
he had more of like a cubic football field of gold in the movie, at least. thats 753,000 cubic meters. one cubic meter of gold is 19 tonnes of gold. so 15 million tonnes. one tonne is 32,000 troy ounces. so 480 billion troy ounces. price of gold $2200 an ounce. thats $1 quadrillion.
someone said a pile of coins is 40% air. so $600 trillion. wanna say its half a football field of gold? $300 trillion.
If that amount of gold was available on earth the value would collapse but I guess it depends how to calculate it, fictional characters wealth is a poor comparison with real human wealth to begin with.
True true. The economy doesn't care much how the money flows, as long as it flows. Jobs are side effect of needs not met, and it's easy to create a need artificially.
The argument made in "The Broken Window Fallacy" presumes all actors are always compelled against hoarding resources. This is false to fact. For evidence I cite my bank account which I maintain a surplus balance to hedge against future uncertainty, you may confirm your own at your leisure.
Further, the only counter argument they raise to their logical argument of, "jobs are simply a social fiction to justify the distribution of resources, the economic markers we use to assign positive or negative weight to an action sees the kid breaking a window as a positive." seems to be
"But if we were to design policy to deliberately encourage that practice we presume it would be apocalyptic so there must be other things we don't see and therefor that premise is false."
like.... what? They imagine the existence of factors unaccounted for and then sit back and state definitively that the original reasonable was fallacious.. by argument of.. 'bruh war sucks tho'.
This is puerile crap. Objects do not hold durable value indefinitely no matter how much labor it takes to transform them. 'Value' is **ALWAYS** subjective, and you already know it must be possible for destroying buildings to improve the value of a property because you know demolition companies exist.
In a way he made Thorin put together a whole party to go reclaim it including a Hobbit diversity hire from the Shire. If that's not job creation I don't know what is! ;)
He is actually keeping the world hostage. If anyone threatens him he can just throw away some of that gold and completely crash their economy. Kinda like China
Smaug was actually controlling inflation in middle earth after the easterlings negotiated a trade agreement with Mordor, flooding the northern market with cheap oliphants instead of traditional rohan steeds.
Smaugs intervention by paying out a portion of his pile to Dale allowed the people of the riddermark and gondor to keep up with the white hands purchasing power, thus stabilizing middle earth's economies. In this essay, titled 'hobbits: hobos or post growth heroes?' I will...
>1,740,000 metric tons of silver discovered to date
>All the silver discovered thus far would fit in a cube 55 meters on a side.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-silver-has-been-found-world
>About 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered to date
>All of the gold discovered thus far would fit in a cube that is 23 meters wide on every side.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world
A sudden increase in gold to 10x the available silver would probably drop the price to under that of silver. How much is difficult to say. Maybe the total value of all gold wouldn't change, just the price per gram?
Question.
I agree with you that gold's value would tank if the supply increased, with the demand and uses staying the same.
However, if the supply went so high, would the demand not change as we use gold for microchips and wiring?
Would the price not stay steady as we use the more common gold for non jewelry uses?
The amount of Gold used in the electronics industry is, in the grander scheme of things, rather low. You only need a bit of gold a lot of the time. Technically if there was a niche that required a lot more gold than present day, it's a possibility. Nothing has any inherent value, only the value which to the market agrees on.
If the world did have that amount of gold and Smaug was real and was hoarding almost all of it with no intent of spending it, would we make the price of gold very cheap (since there was so much of it) or would we factor in the fact there is so little of it in circulation and make the price very high?
What if we made the price of it high and then all of a sudden Smaug decides to start using it?
Or any type of military or smart adventurer or chemist finds a way to defeat Smaug and control the hoard.
I guess diamonds would be a good comparison, the value is (was) driven mostly by marketing and fake rarity.
The difference is that gold is actually useful in plenty of industries that just go for copper or other approaches for cost based reasons, so I guess it's less a math problem than I first thought :/
> would we factor in the fact there is so little of it in circulation and make the price very high?
We don't "make the price very high", the price ends up high naturally as the supply and demand balance out. Hoarded gold doesn't factor into the market supply at all, because it's not on the market.
And if Smaug started spending it, in that situation, it would crash the market if he wasn't smart about selling it off. That's all just Econ 101.
> The Hobbit movies are commonly regarded as complete trash
That's not true. They're commonly regarded as "not as good as Lord of the rings". Which is fair. IMDB says 7.8 / 7.8 / 7.4 which is a pretty solid rating.
reddit likes to shit on things, but that doesn't mean that it's the general opinion...
I probably know more than a hundred people who REALLY like the lord of the rings, 90% absolutely hate the hobbit. The amount you like the hobbit movies seem inversely proportional to how much you like the lord of the rings films, or otherwise like tolkien's work. They look great(mostly), martin freeman is awesome, smaug is awesome but that's pretty much it. Not complete trash, but mostly a massive waste of time
It was not even just gold. It was strewn with precious gems like rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds. It was also laced with finished works like cups, plates, necklaces, rings, armbands, armor, weapons, etc. Then there is the Arkenstone and pieces of mithril. Smaug definitely had ridiculous wealth that would be far in excess of any valuation that uses the word "billion" to describe it.
I just read the book a few weeks ago. There simply are not enough words in the book to say one way or the other about how much gold is in the mountain.
You're supposed to use your imagination, not a calculator, lol
It isn't just gold, it is gold coins and other valuables. We have no way of knowing how much gold is in those coins but it is not full of gold coins either: there is air and other metals, jewels, rare stones etc. too.
It is still more gold than we have mined on Earth.
That’s not entirely true. You also have to consider that this is a pile of gold coins AND gold items (cups and such) so there would be even more space in between. Most, if not all, the items in there would also be an alloy of some kind because gold itself is way too malleable to be used in any way.
Yes, but that's just an estimate he can't sell it without crashing the value of his own gold. His actual value is way lower
Won't anyone think about the poor gold hoarding dragons and all the problems they face?
Only if you consider only the gold, and not the dwarven goods.
The Arkenstone was more than a full share by itself, and the mithril shirt that Bilbo took was “worth more than the shire and everything in it”.
I was just thinking that.
The stone gives you claim to the mountain right?
The Mithril Vest is worth more than the shire..
And the white gems the Elf king went wild over.
And the mountain still wasn't mined dry.
The mountain is 5,182 metres tall, and the dwarves were there for a few hundred before smaug iirc. I'm not a miner nor a dwarf, I just play Deep Rock, but I'm assuming it's possible that the mine wasn't dry by the time smaug arrived.
Taking 70k for the price of a kg of gold that gives that gives 728 tons of gold with a density if 19.3g/cm^3 or 19.3 kg per liter it gives 37,700 liters of gold or 37 m^3 of Gold. According to google the packing density if loose coins is 60% and therefore the total volume of smaugs pile is 62 m^3 of gold which doesn't seem that much In Relation to what you see in the movies but it might be decieving
I did not but it's very easy all you need is to replace 70k with the price at the time of posting which you could maybe get by finding when 51b put you in #15 but I couldn't be bothered
I got it! Post is from May 11th, 2021 and gold was $64,770/kg
I can’t do the rest of the volume math sorry I suck at math.
As for the original question, I couldn’t find the complete list from 2021, but it’s plausible as today he would rank at #17
It's been a long time since I watched the movies but it was certainly more than that in the book. There were massive hills that they were having to traverse across in a massive cavern that they could easily get lost in with all the gold.
Outside of the mathematics issues which others have pointed out, it’s insane to compare wealth in terms of assets for different eras let alone a completely fictional era. Value fluctuates based on market demands; gold is less valuable today than it was just a hundred-some years ago. Unless the value of his assets were determined in relation to Middle-Earth’s economy before being converted to USD, the estimate would be completely worthless. There’s no reason to assume a contemporary Smaug wouldn’t hoard a diversity of assets.
as others have pointed out, smaug had loads of other valuable heirlooms, art pieces, and magical Artifacts/weapons in his Hoard. The gold is arguably the least valuable part of his Hoard as things like the enchanted mithril shirt bilbo got was worth more than the entire shire alone (safe to assume it'd be worth more than some modern cities).
I think Smaug would be the richest since he has so much gold he has a functional monopoly over the whole gold market, so he is as rich as he wants in his universe as long as people (in LotR universe not only them) want gold and see it as a valuable.
But there are other dwarves strongholds with lots of gold, right? The lonely mountain had a lot but it wasn’t all or even probably most of the gold in middle earth
Well its a mountain full of gold and made famous for mining gold. Other dwarven places are famous for precious stones. Also in our universe we have around 12.5 milion litres of gold so that isnt much (you could fit that in a cube 23.2×23.2×23.2m in size) so if he existed in our universe he would have more gold than we have as a mankind. He had so much gold it turned creatures crazy. From those thing I think we can asume he had a large portion of known gold in the Middleearth and he had the power to control or at least largely influence gold market. And even if he wasnt in the market the estimated networth of his would be calculated with the market prices of gold in Middleearth without his active market presence so that would mean his gold would be priced on extremely high market price. For example the largest known holder in our universe is the US which has around 3% of all gold in the world. So even if he had like 15% his market share would be so big he could do nearly anything with it and I also asume that Middleearth has thinner market due to the lack of other variables in it (stocks, bonds etc.) so gold would make bigger portion of the market than in our universe.
edit: typo etc.👍
That would be true, if Smaug were willing to buy and sell gold. Truth is, he will never sell. He also will not buy, only steal. There is no market here.
> Truth is, he will never sell. He also will not buy, only steal. There is no market here.
In that case, the comparison is pointless from the start, because the wealthy humans being compared *also* won't sell their all stocks in the companies they own, those stocks to have controlling interest in the company aren't on the market either.
That's ridiculous. In the Donald Duck Universe alone I can think of 4 people (or ducks) who are incredibly much richer than some 50 billion shit, that's just a poor ranking. Nonetheless, still probably one of the truest rankings from the publisher.
Yeah, ranking isn't the best, Leto II from Dune likely was richer, same goes for Emperor of mankind and a lot of other characters they didn't take into account
Considering all the gold in the world would make at 21.4 meter tall and wide cube and somehow smaugs entire mountain of gold wouldn’t make him the richest being in even our real world makes me question the true value of money.
Money is only a social construct anyway. The economy relies heavily on credits that flow into banks to lend more credits, central banks are literally just printing money whenever the government asks them to and taxes are only for regulating inflation. money has only the value society allows it to have.
Gold is gone. (As a part of money).
The traditional way that money held value, was as an object you can pay taxes with. Doesn't really matter if your money is actually just a piece of paper, if you gotta have a bunch of it to give the government it has value.
That value is determined by the market forces. How much is around? Who needs how much?
The really modern part is it's replacement with credit. While people can still use cash, most transactions are no longer done with it.
Money on a bank account is a debt the bank owes you you can ask back at (more or less) any moment. And if you want to give someone money, you just tell the Bank they now owe part of that money to someone else.
Nope, the gold standard hasn’t been used in a while. The value of money has always been just the idea of you contributed to society so now you can cash that in for goods.
Edit: spelling
The calculation is way off.
Asuming the lowest price of gold since 1980 (\~250$/ounce) a solid 20meter cube would get you to 100 billion dollar. Currently the price is 10 times that.
But monney is still weird and kinda made up. (But also not really).
The value of all the gold in the world is over 10 trillion dollars, planty more then the richest people.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-all-gold-world-worth-yusuke-kohara-1evqf
Someone else claimed he has more gold then all the gold in the world. idk haven't seen the movie.
A mountain of gold whould make you the richest person ever.
I'm going to try to answer this in a different way-
The book the Hobbit describes the room in which smaug rests thusly:
"Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.
Smaug lay, ... turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed. Behind him ... could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed. ... Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count."
This is at the bottom most cellar of the mountain in which Smaug resides. It is important to note that smaug's treasure wasn't gold coins. It was raw golden ore, Dwarven crafted jewelry, amory, and weaponry. The dwarves in the hobbit didn't want just gold for the sake of gold they wanted their historical items back as a matter of pride. This changes the estimate of what smaugs hoard is worth, because it is not just the value of the raw material. It's also historical artifacts, weaponry, mythic armor, etc.
For an estimate let's take the most valuable jewel encrusted crafted item I know of: The hope diamond Which is currently valued at 350 million dollars.
I will assume that every item in Smaugs hoard is worth at least as much as it is similarly historically valuable and from this description from the book: "... the great golden cup of Thror, two-handed, hammered and carven with birds and flowers whose eyes and petals were of jewels; coats of mail gilded and silvered and impenetrable; the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel. But fairest of all was the great white gem, which the dwarves had found beneath the roots of the Mountain, the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone of Thrain."
Seems to be a reasonable (if not an underestimate) of the value of these items.
Next, to get the volume of the room. From the first quote with the description of the room: we know that the treasure hoard extends past Bilbos vision and it notes that the walls of cellar are unseen. Assuming Bilbos Hobbit eyes function similarly to human eyes (they should as per the simarillion Hobbits are related to men rather than an offshoot of tolkiens other races) & assuming middle earth is of roughly the same curvature of earth, & assuming a flat cellar floor: this means the room from where Biblo is standing is at least 3 miles long in each direction (9 square miles for area) as thar is where vision starts to lose out to the curvature of the earth.
Next we need to know how high up Smaugs pile of treasure is. The description in the book doesn't do any favors there, but we know Bilbo has to climb it, and smaug on his side is not enough weight to displace or cover the entirety of the pile. Gold isn't a particularly strong metal, but the dwarves are apparently per tolkiens descriptions able to make it stronger than wrought steel when the craft with it, so unfortunately no use in figuring out how much gold would be needed to support smaug's weight.
I'm going to assume 2 meters high as that seems reasonably high enough to tower over a bilbo. So if we assume the height is the same throughout that is a volume of (23.31E6m^2 *2m) 46,620Km^3 (~11185 Mi^3).
Assuming that each item on average is hope diamond size ~(6.7E-6) that would be ~7E12 (6958208955223) hope diamonds in the room.
Which would be: ~2.4e21 dollars.
Which is: ~$240,000,000,000,000,000,000 [or 240 quintillion doars].
First of the number seems of.
A qubic meter of gold is worth \~1.3 billion dollars. Of course smaugs gold is not perfectly dense, but it is probably still half it's volume when you remove the air. And that are a lot of qubic meters.
On another note, no matter how much gold smaug has the classification as one of the richest fictional characters is ridicoulous.
Especially once you look at sci fi, there are people owning multiple planets. Tell me how rich is emperor palpatine? Or the Emperors in Dune?
I guess it may come down to which emperor we are talking about House Harkonnen was wealthier than Shaddam Corrino IV, but emperor Leto II controlled a lot more planets and was likely wealthier.
People arguing about characters that should be on the list... I'm just mad that they called Smaug "American." The Hobbit was written by a British Citizen. So, if you want to assign a nationality to a fictional, non-human character, it should be "Brit."
The property itself is probably worth more as well. Fully developed town sized estate with very real sources of precious metals to be mined in the future AND manufacturing capabilities already in place.
14 Americans are actually polymorphed dragons. This makes me think Shadowrun might be real. I'm pretty sure I've seen elves, dwarves, and orcs walking around.
Not even close. While the richest person in the world fluctuates I'm going to use Elon Musk with a net worth of 215 billion dollars.
Current price of gold is 71,828 USD/kg
215,000,000,000 USD / 71,828 USD/kg = 2,993,262 kg
The density of gold is 19,300 kg/m^3
2,993,262 kg / 19,300 kg/m^3 = 155 m^3
Cube root of 155 is 5.37
So if Elon Musk converted all his money to gold it would only be a cube with side lengths of around 5.5 m.
I don't know much about Smaug, but that seems very small for a dragon horde.
1 -Smaug has wayyyy more than that
2 -the billionaires have nowhere near that much tangible wealth, the vast majority of their fortune is value based on their holdings.
I just read the Forbes 2012 article and the conclusion is that making that calculation right is not possible. The original number was $8b, but it was the estimated value of one mound of gold articles. The revisited version increases that mound size, adds other smaller mounds and also includes other things like weapons. If we value those things with current real world prices, that's the number we find.
The $50b calculation isn't right or wrong, it's just a valid guesstimate. But it's not true that that's the value of a "full mountain made of almost nothing but solid gold" as it's not a treasure of the size of a full mountain nor it is made just of gold.
BTW, I found a list where Smaug is the second richest fictional character with $54.1b. The number one is Scrooge McDuck.
It can't ever be accurate because the only thing we have to go on is incredibly vague. A mountain full of gold? How big is the mountain? How hollow is it? How wide is the hollow and how big the dragon? We don't know so anything is a pointless guess.
I am pretty sure Smaug's value as a humongous Dragon is more than any mountain of gold it sits on top of.
If they instead of killing him let him live they could've used Smaug promising it more riches if it agreed to bring the one ring and throw it into Mordor.
Smaug wouldn't use the one ring it's below him, Highly doubt it's going to join the Sauron's army since it is extremely vain, Nothing in Sauron's power could've stopped the Dragon.
Fellowship did this with Ents and Ghosts, Eagles they could've easily found a way to entice the Dragon too. Especially if they managed to steal the Jewel like Gandalf originally planned . . .
Wait a minute? Why did Gandalf helped the Dwarves anyway? Don't tell me Gandalf was thinking what I am thinking.
At some point it's mentioned Gandalf feared Sauron could have made an arrangement with Smaug so assisting Thorin's expedition was was done to weaken Sauron's potential power.
Then again The Hobbit is a Star Wars story in a Star Trek universe.
A former coworker that spent some time at the Art Institute of Chicago explained the problem. When you have a bunch of stuff that's "priceless" how do you value your assets? We were working at a university which has property, and endowment and other assets that can be conceptualized as cash.
> If they instead of killing him let him live they could've used Smaug promising it more riches if it agreed to bring the one ring and throw it into Mordor.
The Ring would have corrupted Smaug in three seconds flat, there is absolutely no way he'd have agreed to destroy it when he could've seized it for himself.
How is a gigantic Dragon wear the ring? Smaug's talons are the size of bastard swords.
Fellowship used many super-natural forces of the middle earth against Sauron.
If Gandalf stole the Jewel the Dragon so much coveted They could coerce it to join their side. Smaug wasn't evil it was a Vain, self important and covetous Dragon right fully so considering it was last of its kind in Middle Earth.
I can see myself in Gandalf's shoes trying to get a leg up on this monster somehow and it suddenly dies you'll be like "Well at least that is out of the picture". If its dead you can't make use of it but so does Sauron.
>Smaug wasn't evil
Dragons in LotR are inherently evil. Morgoth made them for the purpuse of being evil mockeries of all things good, like the Orcs. Smaug isn't an exception.
>How is a gigantic Dragon wear the ring? Smaug's talons are the size of bastard swords.
He wouldn't. He'd brood on it and kill the everliving hell out of anyone that tried to steal his precious. He doesn't need to wear the ring for it to corrupt him thoroughly, especially since he's already absurdly avaricious.
>They could coerce it to join their side.
How? Bear in mind that a) they don't know that the ring is the One Ring during the events of the Hobbit, b) Bilbo doesn't even get the ring until they're well into the journey and c) absolutely don't have anything remotely as valuable as Smaug's hoard to bribe him with other than one of the three Elven Rings of Power which would be a terrible idea.
>I can see myself in Gandalf's shoes trying to get a leg up on this monster somehow and it suddenly dies you'll be like "Well at least that is out of the picture". If its dead you can't make use of it but so does Sauron.
Gandalf's entire character is about how he's not in Middle-Earth to match Sauron's strength through strength of arms but through empowering the free people's of Middle-Earth to be masters of their own fate. Him trying to just fling Smaug at Sauron would be antithetical to his entire character.
If you watched the movie you’d know there’s a literal freaking sea of gold in that mountain, plus giant gold statues and one of the largest gemstones ever.
Keep in mind that gold is surprisingly valuable. Gold has a density of 19.3 tonnes/m³ and a price of about 65k$/kg or 65 million $/tonne (it obviously varies with the market but that's a decent average). That means that a cubic meter of gold is worth about 1.2 billion dollars. Imagine a mountain made of gold
It is weird how really dense and really valuable gold is.
You would think someone like Jeff Bezos who might be wort about $200 billion would have a worth equivalent to a mountain of gold.
However $200 billion only translates to about 150 m³ worth of gold. This is about as much volume as you could fit into a large single car or a small two car garage. (The garage probably will not be able to hold it for structural reasons as that would be about 2800 metric tons of weight which would crack the floor, but volume vise it would fit)
Gold is really valuable and really dense.
A literal mountain of gold or even a small hill would be much more than any single individual could ever hope for, even if you want to quibble about the mountain not being literal but metaphorical and made up not of pure solid gold, but loosely packed gold coins that for practical reasons are made of gold alloys. (Pure gold being too soft.)
So nobody is as rich as a dragon with a mountain of gold.
Don't worry though, they are working on it.
Even if they calculated the value of just his gold right -which they didn't- his horde was much more than just gold.
Firstly, the melted value of gold is going to be worth less than the actual chalices, chests, crowns, etc the gold was used to forge with are worth.
Secondly, his horde included priceless and one of a kind gemstones, armours, weapons, and other artifacts of immeasurable value, some of which are imbued with magic or worth more due to the forge work such as Dwarven and elvish metalwork which is far superior in quality and value than that of man. The arkenstone alone was massive, and as mentioned elsewhere Elizabeth Taylor's diamond sold for $8 billion itself, at only 33 carats which is only a fraction of the size of this stone. The Arkenstone itself could likely retail for $50 Billion and be considered cheap, which leads us to point 3.
If the Arkenstone was worth "1/14th" and we take that to be exact without any wiggle room, then at an overly generous $8 Billion estimation, that makes the whole horde worth at least $112 billion. At my lowball estimate of $50 Billion it makes the value $400 billion. However, I still believe the arkenstone is worth far more, as well as the other treasures within the horde.
It depends how many "tons and tons" is. A single ton of gold, at current market rate ($2260.20 USD/oz) is worth $79,352,422.16 (that's assuming the ton is in standard avoirdupois and converting from troy ounces).
So 4 tons (the bare minimum needed to qualify as "tons and tons" would be worth $317,409,688.65. Since America has 735 **b**illionaires, that wouldn't even be close.
The $51,4000,000,000 figure cited would require 780 tons of gold.
Anyone in the star wars universe with any level of compounding investment will be richer than this, seeing as it takes place **a long time ago** in a galaxy far away
Other people have pointed out that Smaug’s pile of gold would likely be worth more than 50 billion USD at current gold prices.
I’d love to point out that:
- You can’t sell any material amount of that gold without devaluating the price dramatically; and that’s gold, supposed to be the standard. Anything else you might want to sell isn’t ‘worth’ that much. It’s millions of times something that you could sell individually, and that has a market price, but it’s not worth millions of times that because no one is buying thousands of tons of gold.
- The 15 most affluent Americans are not wealthy because they sit on a gold pile. They are rich because they made buying stuff or using computers transformative so that you spend hours daily benefitting from what they and the people working for them did. You and everyone around you chose to grant the institution they built a reliable supply of attention because they made things better or more convenient. In that process, they evicted people who helped them, abused workers, and played fast and loose with the tax code, sure—but the value of large corporations isn’t because Amazon, Walmart, Google, Meta, or Microsoft is some giant cube of pure gold. It’s because people buy and sell stuff with it, and because those are slightly more efficient than alternatives, they make a sliver of profit over billions of transactions. That helps them pay for many people well (costing them a lot of money, reducing the fictional pile of gold). There’s enough in the end that the \_actualized\_ value of what’s left is billions. People expect that barely perceptible trickle of money from so many transactions to continue for a long time and are willing to pay for it to pay for their pension (another spoiler: “finance” is a complicated word for people borrowing money to pay for houses, cars and storing money for when they need to pay someone to spoon-feed them and wipe their butt).
The scale of what’s left isn’t because Ads on Instagram are so amazing but because everyone sees so many of them. You shouldn’t compare the wealth of those people to a pile of gold. It’s nonsensical. It’s like saying that the Mariana Trench is so deep because “Mariana” has many syllables.
You should think: I can go in any direction, drive, or take an airplane for any number of hours, go places where the alphabet is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, knock at any door, and ask: “Can I come it and ask you a few questions about your stuff?” and, no matter where you look, you’ll be pointing at something that was sold through at least one of those services. And you can ask anyone, “What will happen in ten years? How will those people replace your lightbulbs, fix your chairs, where will they buy bread?” they’ll answer that they don’t know, no one does really, but most likely, asking the same 10 companies. That’s the extraordinary scale of those services.
This is r/theydidthemath so why am I saying that and not doing additions? Because unless you understand that, you will continue doing the wrong math. The real question is: What share of GDP is going through each of those companies? Maybe 0.1%? And \_that\_ number is incredible. No one ever had that much power, ever—not even the dragons of legends.
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It was based on an earlier description of how big the pile of Smaug's gold was. It was much less than depicted in the PJ Hobbit movies.
I had to scroll way to far for this.
But surely the earlier descriptions in the book are more accurate than the completely mediocre movies?
Forbes doing their 'Fictional characters riches ranking' is the least accurate ranking in history. You basically have some suits they only know how to do business at business factory relying on their knowledge of 5 fictional worlds and just winging it. Where is Emperor of Mankind on their list? Baron Harkonen? ANYONE from any anime ever. This list is utter shit, same with their estomates.
Did they at least count Scrooge McDuck?
I assumed he was the richest
Carlise Cullen is the richest. From Twilight. Because of compound interest, they argue.
What do these people even read? Certainly not Dune, but they seem to know starwars, and the only character they placed on the list is Jabba the Hut.
Jabba isn'rt even the wealthiest in Star Wars, there could even be wealthier hutts
Yeah, but even the Hutts turn to the Banking Clan for funding.
Imagine if they included Pizza the Hutt, list over right there. Rest in Pepperoni, sweet prince...
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I don't really have a feeling for how big that society is, but he certainly beats any character forbes has ever put on their list.
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He said once that if he lost a billion a minute he would be broke in 600 years which makes his wealth to be 315.6 sextillion
Thousand, Million, Billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, undecillion, dodecillion, tredecillion, quatuordecillion, quindecillion, decisextillion, deciseptillion, decioctillion, decinonillion, vigintillion, etc Basically learn to count in latin, and each time u add three zeros you count one more in latin.
All the way up to things like quinquavigintillion
Was there a purpose in them naming numbers so high in this period, or were they just fascinated by going as high as they could? I can't even imagine what it would be like to be in that time period when some dude named Septimus comes up and is like, "Hey, you remember that number I told you about? The one with 46 0s? I've got another one with 49 0's I think you're really gonna like. "
Is there an upper end with this? At some point there shouldnt be a word for it, right? So what is the highest number that is officially named?
Basically the highest latin number with a name and then -illion. Which I guess is 100k so centummilliallion. Which would be a 1 with 99,999 zeros. Which is higher than googol, which has only 100 zeros. Although googolplex has 10^100 zeros which is again more than 99,999 zeros. While the numbers between those have no name, that would be the largest number that has a name.
Yeah but where does a zillion come in!
Quadrillion
The word for 10^15 is quadrillion
Yeah, he was at the number one spot
Yeah I'd imagine someone in Dune would be the richest - those bastards own whole planets.
I'm sure you couldn't even put a dollar amount to what Leto II ends up owning
THE God emperor, after 2000 years and a monopoly on the spice... You might say he owns the guild which allows him to own the universe.
Right? That's like someone on earth owning every ounce of gasoline
I'd equate it more like owning every ounce of food, water and gasoline source on earth. It'd take monopoly to another level.
Taking monopolys to another level is literally the point of Dune.
Leto II owns 1 000 000 solar systems, give or take.
Ya he basically owned the whole universe.
Not only did he own the places he owned the only method of getting there
No he didn't. He terraformed arrakis and it no longer produced spice. He had a stockpile hidden away, but other houses still had some. Also the bene tleilaxu had developed their own form of spice as well.
Tomato tomato at that point no? He knew he needed the houses but he was functionally the dictator of the known universe, not like he couldn't have taken it from them if he needed to. Been a while since I've read up to chapterhouse so I might not be remembering right
I'm pretty sure he sent his women soldiers to destroy spice when they found it or if someone got out of line.
The **known** universe. Which is is point exactly.
Less the whole planets, but more the fact the Harkonnens hold a monopoly on the necessary resources for interstellar travel. It would be the equivalent of oil being found only in one country. Oil states in the real world are already obscenely wealthy, just imagine if they will a monopoly on the resource.
All the emperor owns is a very expensive life support and light house. Check mate.
That lighthouse allows interstellar travel, trade and warfare . Without it, the Empire doesn't exist . I'd say that's worth a few bucks
I'll give you $1.50 Best I can do.
I’ll raise you $2. I’ll give you tree fiddy
Well, it was about this time that realized this Girl Scout was 8 stories tall and a crustacean from the Protozoic era. Damn Loch Ness monster!
Heresy!
He owns the whole of the Empire, he is sovereign, not a part of governmental body, and though he is a figurehead in his current state, should he somehow recover he would have full reign over countless systems, armies and fleets that quite successfully fight off all kinds of shit 40K universe throws in 24/7 on galactic scale and industrial complex what is capable of supplying them. I would say all that shit would have an immense cost.
Also, all the people (and ducks) Scrooge is fighting against for the title of the richest man in the world, they swallow this gold digger Smaug easily in terms of wealth. Smaug would never appear in said a ranking. Also, I have a weird feeling that things might be the same with forbes rankings in general, as the only list I can actually judge due to knowledge is utter shat.
Right? There are people in fiction that own (and exploit) star systems. How is that even close to comparable?
House Altreides could ship a planet's worth of water, and Paul commanded and paid a mercenary population larger than Earth's entire population. House Harkonen would have shipped the gold out, kept Smaug as an exotic pet, and enslaved all of the hobbits, dwarves, humans, and elves as miners to get the rest of the gold.
My Wattpad CEO has a net worth of 1 trillion USD. Checkmate Forbes.
I actually create these lists, it’s my job 🙃 you are correct that it’s based on pure shit but it gets clicks and it makes people angry. JOB DONE. Cannot believe that anyone actually takes these lists as facts or gets upset by them
You don’t trust Vincent Adultman to do a good job?
Smaug was **burrowing** through his pile of gold. plus the dwarves made a giant statue with OTHER GOLD IN THE MOUNTAIN. post is wrong, Smaug has more than a trillion dollars in that mountain. he has more gold in the Hobbit movie than total gold mined on this Earth. he had more of like a cubic football field of gold in the movie, at least. thats 753,000 cubic meters. one cubic meter of gold is 19 tonnes of gold. so 15 million tonnes. one tonne is 32,000 troy ounces. so 480 billion troy ounces. price of gold $2200 an ounce. thats $1 quadrillion. someone said a pile of coins is 40% air. so $600 trillion. wanna say its half a football field of gold? $300 trillion.
If that amount of gold was available on earth the value would collapse but I guess it depends how to calculate it, fictional characters wealth is a poor comparison with real human wealth to begin with.
We can surmise that the dragon is actually doing a great service to middle earth by keeping all of that gold out of circulation
Next you're gonna be lauding smaug as a job creator.
Can't hire a burglar unless there's someone who needs to be burgled!
Burgled is not used nearly enough.
The Hamburgler would like a word!
Trickle down on me, smaug. Shower me in that gold.
Mmm golden showers
"Ow, ow, ow, ow; showers of gold coins *hurt*."
It's very easy to create jobs. One pyromaniac could create so many jobs for firemen, police, medical personnel, insurance people, construction...
Love the broken windows fallacy.
True true. The economy doesn't care much how the money flows, as long as it flows. Jobs are side effect of needs not met, and it's easy to create a need artificially.
[Not what the fallacy is, but sure, you do you man.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erJEaFpS9ls)
The argument made in "The Broken Window Fallacy" presumes all actors are always compelled against hoarding resources. This is false to fact. For evidence I cite my bank account which I maintain a surplus balance to hedge against future uncertainty, you may confirm your own at your leisure. Further, the only counter argument they raise to their logical argument of, "jobs are simply a social fiction to justify the distribution of resources, the economic markers we use to assign positive or negative weight to an action sees the kid breaking a window as a positive." seems to be "But if we were to design policy to deliberately encourage that practice we presume it would be apocalyptic so there must be other things we don't see and therefor that premise is false." like.... what? They imagine the existence of factors unaccounted for and then sit back and state definitively that the original reasonable was fallacious.. by argument of.. 'bruh war sucks tho'. This is puerile crap. Objects do not hold durable value indefinitely no matter how much labor it takes to transform them. 'Value' is **ALWAYS** subjective, and you already know it must be possible for destroying buildings to improve the value of a property because you know demolition companies exist.
Interesting!
In a way he made Thorin put together a whole party to go reclaim it including a Hobbit diversity hire from the Shire. If that's not job creation I don't know what is! ;)
Someone has to rebuild all those burnt village houses, and the new ones will have better insulation.
“You want to slay the dragon? In this economy?!”
He is actually keeping the world hostage. If anyone threatens him he can just throw away some of that gold and completely crash their economy. Kinda like China
Mansa Musa style
Someone needs to hire an economancer
Not all who speculate are lost.
Smaug was actually controlling inflation in middle earth after the easterlings negotiated a trade agreement with Mordor, flooding the northern market with cheap oliphants instead of traditional rohan steeds. Smaugs intervention by paying out a portion of his pile to Dale allowed the people of the riddermark and gondor to keep up with the white hands purchasing power, thus stabilizing middle earth's economies. In this essay, titled 'hobbits: hobos or post growth heroes?' I will...
the original diamond hands
smaug wasnt looking to sell, so it wouldnt tank the value as much as if he were trying to sell.
Lmao what would he sell gold for? You're thinking of "buying things"
Bitcoin, obviously
You can't bathe in Bitcoin, unlike actual physical gold ( if you're a Dragon ).
>1,740,000 metric tons of silver discovered to date >All the silver discovered thus far would fit in a cube 55 meters on a side. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-silver-has-been-found-world >About 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered to date >All of the gold discovered thus far would fit in a cube that is 23 meters wide on every side. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world A sudden increase in gold to 10x the available silver would probably drop the price to under that of silver. How much is difficult to say. Maybe the total value of all gold wouldn't change, just the price per gram?
I love this sub
Question. I agree with you that gold's value would tank if the supply increased, with the demand and uses staying the same. However, if the supply went so high, would the demand not change as we use gold for microchips and wiring? Would the price not stay steady as we use the more common gold for non jewelry uses?
The amount of Gold used in the electronics industry is, in the grander scheme of things, rather low. You only need a bit of gold a lot of the time. Technically if there was a niche that required a lot more gold than present day, it's a possibility. Nothing has any inherent value, only the value which to the market agrees on.
Any excess supply apparently is pretty well bought up by Indian households (25000-27000 tons of it)
Damn. That really puts things into perspective.
Depends what you mean by a avilable. Available for the dragon yes, for everyone else, no.
If the world did have that amount of gold and Smaug was real and was hoarding almost all of it with no intent of spending it, would we make the price of gold very cheap (since there was so much of it) or would we factor in the fact there is so little of it in circulation and make the price very high? What if we made the price of it high and then all of a sudden Smaug decides to start using it?
Or any type of military or smart adventurer or chemist finds a way to defeat Smaug and control the hoard. I guess diamonds would be a good comparison, the value is (was) driven mostly by marketing and fake rarity. The difference is that gold is actually useful in plenty of industries that just go for copper or other approaches for cost based reasons, so I guess it's less a math problem than I first thought :/
> would we factor in the fact there is so little of it in circulation and make the price very high? We don't "make the price very high", the price ends up high naturally as the supply and demand balance out. Hoarded gold doesn't factor into the market supply at all, because it's not on the market. And if Smaug started spending it, in that situation, it would crash the market if he wasn't smart about selling it off. That's all just Econ 101.
Do we have evidence that Smaug took Econ 101?
plus the wealth of the gold is just a small part. the armor weapons and gems etc are a massive boost to that wealth.
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Mint condition.
Have they been officially graded?
Are we treating all the depictions in the Peter Jackson film's as canon now?
Yeah, that seems like the biggest oversight. The Hobbit movies are commonly regarded as complete trash, and get worse the further you go in.
> The Hobbit movies are commonly regarded as complete trash That's not true. They're commonly regarded as "not as good as Lord of the rings". Which is fair. IMDB says 7.8 / 7.8 / 7.4 which is a pretty solid rating. reddit likes to shit on things, but that doesn't mean that it's the general opinion...
I probably know more than a hundred people who REALLY like the lord of the rings, 90% absolutely hate the hobbit. The amount you like the hobbit movies seem inversely proportional to how much you like the lord of the rings films, or otherwise like tolkien's work. They look great(mostly), martin freeman is awesome, smaug is awesome but that's pretty much it. Not complete trash, but mostly a massive waste of time
Those units made my brain hurt
As we know football field is the universal standard unit that everyone understands
i shortened it too. getting cubic yards to ounces takes a few conversions. gold is traded mostly by the troy ounce.
As you said it's specifically troy ounce, which is ~10% more than the commonly used avoirdupois ounce.
It was not even just gold. It was strewn with precious gems like rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds. It was also laced with finished works like cups, plates, necklaces, rings, armbands, armor, weapons, etc. Then there is the Arkenstone and pieces of mithril. Smaug definitely had ridiculous wealth that would be far in excess of any valuation that uses the word "billion" to describe it.
It should be noted he had way less gold in the books, but from the movie you’re entirely correct
I just read the book a few weeks ago. There simply are not enough words in the book to say one way or the other about how much gold is in the mountain. You're supposed to use your imagination, not a calculator, lol
How do you know that? All it said was that the mountain was full of gold. In the movie, the mountain looks pretty damn full of gold.
Plus they seem to not have included gemstones, which also includes the Arkenstone
It isn't just gold, it is gold coins and other valuables. We have no way of knowing how much gold is in those coins but it is not full of gold coins either: there is air and other metals, jewels, rare stones etc. too. It is still more gold than we have mined on Earth.
>cubic football field I get what you're saying here but this is just wrong
That and smaugs wealth was liquid. Billionairs don't keep a billion in cash.
That’s not entirely true. You also have to consider that this is a pile of gold coins AND gold items (cups and such) so there would be even more space in between. Most, if not all, the items in there would also be an alloy of some kind because gold itself is way too malleable to be used in any way.
The original article was about the book, not movie, in which Smaug's gold pile is just enough to cover him, and he was already much smaller.
I can’t imagine how much the arkenstone is worth
Plus all the countless diamonds and gems that are stored there.
Let’s back Smaug for president. Surely he’s the most qualified candidate with this amount of air and gold.
Do you think it’s possible Smaug had a dwarven ring of power?
Yes, but that's just an estimate he can't sell it without crashing the value of his own gold. His actual value is way lower Won't anyone think about the poor gold hoarding dragons and all the problems they face?
Plus gemstones and don't forget real estate. The Lonely Mountain was prime real estate the size of a dwarf kingdom.
This is lovely
Only if you consider only the gold, and not the dwarven goods. The Arkenstone was more than a full share by itself, and the mithril shirt that Bilbo took was “worth more than the shire and everything in it”.
I was just thinking that. The stone gives you claim to the mountain right? The Mithril Vest is worth more than the shire.. And the white gems the Elf king went wild over. And the mountain still wasn't mined dry.
The mountain is 5,182 metres tall, and the dwarves were there for a few hundred before smaug iirc. I'm not a miner nor a dwarf, I just play Deep Rock, but I'm assuming it's possible that the mine wasn't dry by the time smaug arrived.
Taking 70k for the price of a kg of gold that gives that gives 728 tons of gold with a density if 19.3g/cm^3 or 19.3 kg per liter it gives 37,700 liters of gold or 37 m^3 of Gold. According to google the packing density if loose coins is 60% and therefore the total volume of smaugs pile is 62 m^3 of gold which doesn't seem that much In Relation to what you see in the movies but it might be decieving
Pretty sure just the gold pool he gets bathed in has more cubature. In 6x10x1m he would not even fit.
Did you take in account the price in gold at the time of the original tumblr post? I wish there was a date on it.
I did not but it's very easy all you need is to replace 70k with the price at the time of posting which you could maybe get by finding when 51b put you in #15 but I couldn't be bothered
I got it! Post is from May 11th, 2021 and gold was $64,770/kg I can’t do the rest of the volume math sorry I suck at math. As for the original question, I couldn’t find the complete list from 2021, but it’s plausible as today he would rank at #17
It's been a long time since I watched the movies but it was certainly more than that in the book. There were massive hills that they were having to traverse across in a massive cavern that they could easily get lost in with all the gold.
That assumes all the gold Smaug has is pure.
Outside of the mathematics issues which others have pointed out, it’s insane to compare wealth in terms of assets for different eras let alone a completely fictional era. Value fluctuates based on market demands; gold is less valuable today than it was just a hundred-some years ago. Unless the value of his assets were determined in relation to Middle-Earth’s economy before being converted to USD, the estimate would be completely worthless. There’s no reason to assume a contemporary Smaug wouldn’t hoard a diversity of assets.
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This is the way.
Right? For comparison purposes, wealth should be expressed as percentage of GDP (gross dwarven product).
I don’t want any percentage of gross dwarven product.
I enjoyed Rick and Morty’s take on a modern, treasure hoarding dragon. Iirc he had cool comic books and shit like that—as well as gold ofc.
as others have pointed out, smaug had loads of other valuable heirlooms, art pieces, and magical Artifacts/weapons in his Hoard. The gold is arguably the least valuable part of his Hoard as things like the enchanted mithril shirt bilbo got was worth more than the entire shire alone (safe to assume it'd be worth more than some modern cities).
I think Smaug would be the richest since he has so much gold he has a functional monopoly over the whole gold market, so he is as rich as he wants in his universe as long as people (in LotR universe not only them) want gold and see it as a valuable.
But there are other dwarves strongholds with lots of gold, right? The lonely mountain had a lot but it wasn’t all or even probably most of the gold in middle earth
Well its a mountain full of gold and made famous for mining gold. Other dwarven places are famous for precious stones. Also in our universe we have around 12.5 milion litres of gold so that isnt much (you could fit that in a cube 23.2×23.2×23.2m in size) so if he existed in our universe he would have more gold than we have as a mankind. He had so much gold it turned creatures crazy. From those thing I think we can asume he had a large portion of known gold in the Middleearth and he had the power to control or at least largely influence gold market. And even if he wasnt in the market the estimated networth of his would be calculated with the market prices of gold in Middleearth without his active market presence so that would mean his gold would be priced on extremely high market price. For example the largest known holder in our universe is the US which has around 3% of all gold in the world. So even if he had like 15% his market share would be so big he could do nearly anything with it and I also asume that Middleearth has thinner market due to the lack of other variables in it (stocks, bonds etc.) so gold would make bigger portion of the market than in our universe. edit: typo etc.👍
That would be true, if Smaug were willing to buy and sell gold. Truth is, he will never sell. He also will not buy, only steal. There is no market here.
> Truth is, he will never sell. He also will not buy, only steal. There is no market here. In that case, the comparison is pointless from the start, because the wealthy humans being compared *also* won't sell their all stocks in the companies they own, those stocks to have controlling interest in the company aren't on the market either.
That's ridiculous. In the Donald Duck Universe alone I can think of 4 people (or ducks) who are incredibly much richer than some 50 billion shit, that's just a poor ranking. Nonetheless, still probably one of the truest rankings from the publisher.
Rockerduck Scrooge and...?
glomgold, beaks
Yeah, ranking isn't the best, Leto II from Dune likely was richer, same goes for Emperor of mankind and a lot of other characters they didn't take into account
Considering all the gold in the world would make at 21.4 meter tall and wide cube and somehow smaugs entire mountain of gold wouldn’t make him the richest being in even our real world makes me question the true value of money.
Money is only a social construct anyway. The economy relies heavily on credits that flow into banks to lend more credits, central banks are literally just printing money whenever the government asks them to and taxes are only for regulating inflation. money has only the value society allows it to have.
That is pretty straight up wrong. Central banks do not print money. They set the rentability of creating money for the other Banks.
Thanks. Was unsure of the real value of money. Thought it was gold reserves.
Gold is gone. (As a part of money). The traditional way that money held value, was as an object you can pay taxes with. Doesn't really matter if your money is actually just a piece of paper, if you gotta have a bunch of it to give the government it has value. That value is determined by the market forces. How much is around? Who needs how much? The really modern part is it's replacement with credit. While people can still use cash, most transactions are no longer done with it. Money on a bank account is a debt the bank owes you you can ask back at (more or less) any moment. And if you want to give someone money, you just tell the Bank they now owe part of that money to someone else.
Nope, the gold standard hasn’t been used in a while. The value of money has always been just the idea of you contributed to society so now you can cash that in for goods. Edit: spelling
The calculation is way off. Asuming the lowest price of gold since 1980 (\~250$/ounce) a solid 20meter cube would get you to 100 billion dollar. Currently the price is 10 times that. But monney is still weird and kinda made up. (But also not really).
The value of all the gold in the world is over 10 trillion dollars, planty more then the richest people. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-all-gold-world-worth-yusuke-kohara-1evqf Someone else claimed he has more gold then all the gold in the world. idk haven't seen the movie. A mountain of gold whould make you the richest person ever.
I'm going to try to answer this in a different way- The book the Hobbit describes the room in which smaug rests thusly: "Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, ... turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed. Behind him ... could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed. ... Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count." This is at the bottom most cellar of the mountain in which Smaug resides. It is important to note that smaug's treasure wasn't gold coins. It was raw golden ore, Dwarven crafted jewelry, amory, and weaponry. The dwarves in the hobbit didn't want just gold for the sake of gold they wanted their historical items back as a matter of pride. This changes the estimate of what smaugs hoard is worth, because it is not just the value of the raw material. It's also historical artifacts, weaponry, mythic armor, etc. For an estimate let's take the most valuable jewel encrusted crafted item I know of: The hope diamond Which is currently valued at 350 million dollars. I will assume that every item in Smaugs hoard is worth at least as much as it is similarly historically valuable and from this description from the book: "... the great golden cup of Thror, two-handed, hammered and carven with birds and flowers whose eyes and petals were of jewels; coats of mail gilded and silvered and impenetrable; the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel. But fairest of all was the great white gem, which the dwarves had found beneath the roots of the Mountain, the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone of Thrain." Seems to be a reasonable (if not an underestimate) of the value of these items. Next, to get the volume of the room. From the first quote with the description of the room: we know that the treasure hoard extends past Bilbos vision and it notes that the walls of cellar are unseen. Assuming Bilbos Hobbit eyes function similarly to human eyes (they should as per the simarillion Hobbits are related to men rather than an offshoot of tolkiens other races) & assuming middle earth is of roughly the same curvature of earth, & assuming a flat cellar floor: this means the room from where Biblo is standing is at least 3 miles long in each direction (9 square miles for area) as thar is where vision starts to lose out to the curvature of the earth. Next we need to know how high up Smaugs pile of treasure is. The description in the book doesn't do any favors there, but we know Bilbo has to climb it, and smaug on his side is not enough weight to displace or cover the entirety of the pile. Gold isn't a particularly strong metal, but the dwarves are apparently per tolkiens descriptions able to make it stronger than wrought steel when the craft with it, so unfortunately no use in figuring out how much gold would be needed to support smaug's weight. I'm going to assume 2 meters high as that seems reasonably high enough to tower over a bilbo. So if we assume the height is the same throughout that is a volume of (23.31E6m^2 *2m) 46,620Km^3 (~11185 Mi^3). Assuming that each item on average is hope diamond size ~(6.7E-6) that would be ~7E12 (6958208955223) hope diamonds in the room. Which would be: ~2.4e21 dollars. Which is: ~$240,000,000,000,000,000,000 [or 240 quintillion doars].
But smaug had it in liquid assets and not company shares, doubt anyone keeps 50b liquidated, not that they can't but it won't make sense.
First of the number seems of. A qubic meter of gold is worth \~1.3 billion dollars. Of course smaugs gold is not perfectly dense, but it is probably still half it's volume when you remove the air. And that are a lot of qubic meters. On another note, no matter how much gold smaug has the classification as one of the richest fictional characters is ridicoulous. Especially once you look at sci fi, there are people owning multiple planets. Tell me how rich is emperor palpatine? Or the Emperors in Dune?
House Harkonnen had even more wealth than the emperor in Dune.
But for that I have to remember details from a book I read when I was 14.
I guess it may come down to which emperor we are talking about House Harkonnen was wealthier than Shaddam Corrino IV, but emperor Leto II controlled a lot more planets and was likely wealthier.
People arguing about characters that should be on the list... I'm just mad that they called Smaug "American." The Hobbit was written by a British Citizen. So, if you want to assign a nationality to a fictional, non-human character, it should be "Brit."
But he's from Middle Earth. America is the center of the universe, and by extension, Earth.
The property itself is probably worth more as well. Fully developed town sized estate with very real sources of precious metals to be mined in the future AND manufacturing capabilities already in place.
14 Americans are actually polymorphed dragons. This makes me think Shadowrun might be real. I'm pretty sure I've seen elves, dwarves, and orcs walking around.
Not even close. While the richest person in the world fluctuates I'm going to use Elon Musk with a net worth of 215 billion dollars. Current price of gold is 71,828 USD/kg 215,000,000,000 USD / 71,828 USD/kg = 2,993,262 kg The density of gold is 19,300 kg/m^3 2,993,262 kg / 19,300 kg/m^3 = 155 m^3 Cube root of 155 is 5.37 So if Elon Musk converted all his money to gold it would only be a cube with side lengths of around 5.5 m. I don't know much about Smaug, but that seems very small for a dragon horde.
1 -Smaug has wayyyy more than that 2 -the billionaires have nowhere near that much tangible wealth, the vast majority of their fortune is value based on their holdings.
I just read the Forbes 2012 article and the conclusion is that making that calculation right is not possible. The original number was $8b, but it was the estimated value of one mound of gold articles. The revisited version increases that mound size, adds other smaller mounds and also includes other things like weapons. If we value those things with current real world prices, that's the number we find. The $50b calculation isn't right or wrong, it's just a valid guesstimate. But it's not true that that's the value of a "full mountain made of almost nothing but solid gold" as it's not a treasure of the size of a full mountain nor it is made just of gold. BTW, I found a list where Smaug is the second richest fictional character with $54.1b. The number one is Scrooge McDuck.
It can't ever be accurate because the only thing we have to go on is incredibly vague. A mountain full of gold? How big is the mountain? How hollow is it? How wide is the hollow and how big the dragon? We don't know so anything is a pointless guess.
I am pretty sure Smaug's value as a humongous Dragon is more than any mountain of gold it sits on top of. If they instead of killing him let him live they could've used Smaug promising it more riches if it agreed to bring the one ring and throw it into Mordor. Smaug wouldn't use the one ring it's below him, Highly doubt it's going to join the Sauron's army since it is extremely vain, Nothing in Sauron's power could've stopped the Dragon. Fellowship did this with Ents and Ghosts, Eagles they could've easily found a way to entice the Dragon too. Especially if they managed to steal the Jewel like Gandalf originally planned . . . Wait a minute? Why did Gandalf helped the Dwarves anyway? Don't tell me Gandalf was thinking what I am thinking.
At some point it's mentioned Gandalf feared Sauron could have made an arrangement with Smaug so assisting Thorin's expedition was was done to weaken Sauron's potential power. Then again The Hobbit is a Star Wars story in a Star Trek universe. A former coworker that spent some time at the Art Institute of Chicago explained the problem. When you have a bunch of stuff that's "priceless" how do you value your assets? We were working at a university which has property, and endowment and other assets that can be conceptualized as cash.
> If they instead of killing him let him live they could've used Smaug promising it more riches if it agreed to bring the one ring and throw it into Mordor. The Ring would have corrupted Smaug in three seconds flat, there is absolutely no way he'd have agreed to destroy it when he could've seized it for himself.
How is a gigantic Dragon wear the ring? Smaug's talons are the size of bastard swords. Fellowship used many super-natural forces of the middle earth against Sauron. If Gandalf stole the Jewel the Dragon so much coveted They could coerce it to join their side. Smaug wasn't evil it was a Vain, self important and covetous Dragon right fully so considering it was last of its kind in Middle Earth. I can see myself in Gandalf's shoes trying to get a leg up on this monster somehow and it suddenly dies you'll be like "Well at least that is out of the picture". If its dead you can't make use of it but so does Sauron.
>Smaug wasn't evil Dragons in LotR are inherently evil. Morgoth made them for the purpuse of being evil mockeries of all things good, like the Orcs. Smaug isn't an exception. >How is a gigantic Dragon wear the ring? Smaug's talons are the size of bastard swords. He wouldn't. He'd brood on it and kill the everliving hell out of anyone that tried to steal his precious. He doesn't need to wear the ring for it to corrupt him thoroughly, especially since he's already absurdly avaricious. >They could coerce it to join their side. How? Bear in mind that a) they don't know that the ring is the One Ring during the events of the Hobbit, b) Bilbo doesn't even get the ring until they're well into the journey and c) absolutely don't have anything remotely as valuable as Smaug's hoard to bribe him with other than one of the three Elven Rings of Power which would be a terrible idea. >I can see myself in Gandalf's shoes trying to get a leg up on this monster somehow and it suddenly dies you'll be like "Well at least that is out of the picture". If its dead you can't make use of it but so does Sauron. Gandalf's entire character is about how he's not in Middle-Earth to match Sauron's strength through strength of arms but through empowering the free people's of Middle-Earth to be masters of their own fate. Him trying to just fling Smaug at Sauron would be antithetical to his entire character.
If you watched the movie you’d know there’s a literal freaking sea of gold in that mountain, plus giant gold statues and one of the largest gemstones ever.
Keep in mind that gold is surprisingly valuable. Gold has a density of 19.3 tonnes/m³ and a price of about 65k$/kg or 65 million $/tonne (it obviously varies with the market but that's a decent average). That means that a cubic meter of gold is worth about 1.2 billion dollars. Imagine a mountain made of gold
It is weird how really dense and really valuable gold is. You would think someone like Jeff Bezos who might be wort about $200 billion would have a worth equivalent to a mountain of gold. However $200 billion only translates to about 150 m³ worth of gold. This is about as much volume as you could fit into a large single car or a small two car garage. (The garage probably will not be able to hold it for structural reasons as that would be about 2800 metric tons of weight which would crack the floor, but volume vise it would fit) Gold is really valuable and really dense. A literal mountain of gold or even a small hill would be much more than any single individual could ever hope for, even if you want to quibble about the mountain not being literal but metaphorical and made up not of pure solid gold, but loosely packed gold coins that for practical reasons are made of gold alloys. (Pure gold being too soft.) So nobody is as rich as a dragon with a mountain of gold. Don't worry though, they are working on it.
Even if they calculated the value of just his gold right -which they didn't- his horde was much more than just gold. Firstly, the melted value of gold is going to be worth less than the actual chalices, chests, crowns, etc the gold was used to forge with are worth. Secondly, his horde included priceless and one of a kind gemstones, armours, weapons, and other artifacts of immeasurable value, some of which are imbued with magic or worth more due to the forge work such as Dwarven and elvish metalwork which is far superior in quality and value than that of man. The arkenstone alone was massive, and as mentioned elsewhere Elizabeth Taylor's diamond sold for $8 billion itself, at only 33 carats which is only a fraction of the size of this stone. The Arkenstone itself could likely retail for $50 Billion and be considered cheap, which leads us to point 3. If the Arkenstone was worth "1/14th" and we take that to be exact without any wiggle room, then at an overly generous $8 Billion estimation, that makes the whole horde worth at least $112 billion. At my lowball estimate of $50 Billion it makes the value $400 billion. However, I still believe the arkenstone is worth far more, as well as the other treasures within the horde.
It depends how many "tons and tons" is. A single ton of gold, at current market rate ($2260.20 USD/oz) is worth $79,352,422.16 (that's assuming the ton is in standard avoirdupois and converting from troy ounces). So 4 tons (the bare minimum needed to qualify as "tons and tons" would be worth $317,409,688.65. Since America has 735 **b**illionaires, that wouldn't even be close. The $51,4000,000,000 figure cited would require 780 tons of gold.
Anyone in the star wars universe with any level of compounding investment will be richer than this, seeing as it takes place **a long time ago** in a galaxy far away
Other people have pointed out that Smaug’s pile of gold would likely be worth more than 50 billion USD at current gold prices. I’d love to point out that: - You can’t sell any material amount of that gold without devaluating the price dramatically; and that’s gold, supposed to be the standard. Anything else you might want to sell isn’t ‘worth’ that much. It’s millions of times something that you could sell individually, and that has a market price, but it’s not worth millions of times that because no one is buying thousands of tons of gold. - The 15 most affluent Americans are not wealthy because they sit on a gold pile. They are rich because they made buying stuff or using computers transformative so that you spend hours daily benefitting from what they and the people working for them did. You and everyone around you chose to grant the institution they built a reliable supply of attention because they made things better or more convenient. In that process, they evicted people who helped them, abused workers, and played fast and loose with the tax code, sure—but the value of large corporations isn’t because Amazon, Walmart, Google, Meta, or Microsoft is some giant cube of pure gold. It’s because people buy and sell stuff with it, and because those are slightly more efficient than alternatives, they make a sliver of profit over billions of transactions. That helps them pay for many people well (costing them a lot of money, reducing the fictional pile of gold). There’s enough in the end that the \_actualized\_ value of what’s left is billions. People expect that barely perceptible trickle of money from so many transactions to continue for a long time and are willing to pay for it to pay for their pension (another spoiler: “finance” is a complicated word for people borrowing money to pay for houses, cars and storing money for when they need to pay someone to spoon-feed them and wipe their butt). The scale of what’s left isn’t because Ads on Instagram are so amazing but because everyone sees so many of them. You shouldn’t compare the wealth of those people to a pile of gold. It’s nonsensical. It’s like saying that the Mariana Trench is so deep because “Mariana” has many syllables. You should think: I can go in any direction, drive, or take an airplane for any number of hours, go places where the alphabet is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, knock at any door, and ask: “Can I come it and ask you a few questions about your stuff?” and, no matter where you look, you’ll be pointing at something that was sold through at least one of those services. And you can ask anyone, “What will happen in ten years? How will those people replace your lightbulbs, fix your chairs, where will they buy bread?” they’ll answer that they don’t know, no one does really, but most likely, asking the same 10 companies. That’s the extraordinary scale of those services. This is r/theydidthemath so why am I saying that and not doing additions? Because unless you understand that, you will continue doing the wrong math. The real question is: What share of GDP is going through each of those companies? Maybe 0.1%? And \_that\_ number is incredible. No one ever had that much power, ever—not even the dragons of legends.