this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 days ago (2 children)

People have run the numbers on this - Bezos is far richer than even the greediest dragons sitting atop their mountains of gold.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I don't know how viable it'd be to get a viable metric.

https://www.goldeneaglecoin.com/Guide/value-of-all-the-gold-in-the-world

Value of all of the gold in the world

$13,611,341,061,312.04

Based on the current gold spot price of $2,636.98

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$227 billion as of November 7, 2024, according to Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index.[3]

So measured in gold at current prices, he'd have about one-sixtieth of the present global gold supply.

However:

It's hard to know what the distribution of gold hoards are. One dragon might have an exceptionally large hoard.

It's hard to know how many dragons we're working with.

It's likely that a world with dragons has a different value of gold.

That gold in our world isn't actually accessible to Bezos at that price. If he tried buying that much, it'd drive up the price, reducing the effective percentage of the global share that he could afford to buy.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

It's worth remembering that much of his wealth is likely tied up in the stock market, so he is probably sitting on a number of vouchers towards a pile of gold, in a addition to the swimming pool at home that he Scrooge McDuck swims in.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The viable metric is literally the volume of gold depicted multiplied by the weight of such a large pile of gold that seems to be damn near limitless in value. That's what we used to calculate that Smaug only has 5 billion to 15 billion USD of gold, minus the Arkenstone.

The rest of the metric comes from the treasure tables of various dragons in various RPG systems that say that the absolute most value of any dragon's hoard is only 500,000 oz worth of gold. That's split between everything. Not just their gold. 500,000 oz of gold is 5,000,000 gold pieces of gold. That's merely 1.2 billion USD, and that's just the richest of the greediest and oldest evil dragons that are required by their goddess to hoard before they are dead of old age.