Billionaires are greedier than dragons. The richest greediest dragon in all of fiction is Smaug, and he has an obscene amount of wealth. I’ve seen estimates of his wealth ranging from 5 billion dollars of gold on the low end, all the way up to 15-20 billion dollars of gold on the high end.
However, Smaug is an incredible outlier. He’s basically the Musk of Dragons. The absolute most gold you’ll find on a dragon in any video game or ttrpg is 5 million gold pieces. That’s only if RNGesus smiles on you, and rolls as high as it could. The average is more like 3.5 million gold pieces of wealth.
1 gold piece = ⅒oz of gold. So we are looking at 350,000 - 500,000 oz of gold for the upper 50% of all red elder worms. Any other dragon type doesn’t hoard that much.
That comes out to a real world value of between $800,000,000 to $1,200,000,000. That’s for the richest dragons out there.
Most dragons aren’t billionaires.
Therefore, billionaires are literally greedier than the anthropomorphic caricaturization of greed from legend, namely dragons. The greediest fictional thing we could come up with isn’t greedy enough to accurately portray these people’s mental illnesses.
Shadowrun probably throws these assumptions off a bit. Dunkelzahn’s net worth is hard to pin down but I think the listed cash dispursements in his will exceeded 1 billion nuyen, plus all the real estate and the establishment of several foundations, several items of extreme power and a number of ‘wishes’.
Lofwyr owns a AAA megacorp that he assembled out of purchases made within about 30 years of waking up. My personal he’d cannon is that he ate Musk at some point in this process.
Even the less well known ones have serious stock portfolios and including multiple point shares in megacorps. Dragons took to business rather well as soon as they worked out what share certificates were.
2050s for 1st edition, I think current edition is 2070s. Dragons started waking up in the early 2010s though. There has also been significant geopolitical upheaval, especially in the Americas and Europe. The general assumption is that a nuyen being about 1 modern dollar is about the right ballpark.
“Greed is not the issue here” - actual dragon sitting on literal pile of gold.
Billionaires are greedier than dragons. The richest greediest dragon in all of fiction is Smaug, and he has an obscene amount of wealth. I’ve seen estimates of his wealth ranging from 5 billion dollars of gold on the low end, all the way up to 15-20 billion dollars of gold on the high end.
However, Smaug is an incredible outlier. He’s basically the Musk of Dragons. The absolute most gold you’ll find on a dragon in any video game or ttrpg is 5 million gold pieces. That’s only if RNGesus smiles on you, and rolls as high as it could. The average is more like 3.5 million gold pieces of wealth.
1 gold piece = ⅒oz of gold. So we are looking at 350,000 - 500,000 oz of gold for the upper 50% of all red elder worms. Any other dragon type doesn’t hoard that much.
That comes out to a real world value of between $800,000,000 to $1,200,000,000. That’s for the richest dragons out there.
Most dragons aren’t billionaires.
Therefore, billionaires are literally greedier than the anthropomorphic caricaturization of greed from legend, namely dragons. The greediest fictional thing we could come up with isn’t greedy enough to accurately portray these people’s mental illnesses.
Shadowrun probably throws these assumptions off a bit. Dunkelzahn’s net worth is hard to pin down but I think the listed cash dispursements in his will exceeded 1 billion nuyen, plus all the real estate and the establishment of several foundations, several items of extreme power and a number of ‘wishes’.
Lofwyr owns a AAA megacorp that he assembled out of purchases made within about 30 years of waking up. My personal he’d cannon is that he ate Musk at some point in this process.
Even the less well known ones have serious stock portfolios and including multiple point shares in megacorps. Dragons took to business rather well as soon as they worked out what share certificates were.
Fair enough. Never played Shadowrun, and didn’t know there were dragons in that system.
I would be curious what year it is set in, and how inflation may affect their currency value vs current real world currency values.
2050s for 1st edition, I think current edition is 2070s. Dragons started waking up in the early 2010s though. There has also been significant geopolitical upheaval, especially in the Americas and Europe. The general assumption is that a nuyen being about 1 modern dollar is about the right ballpark.
Wow! Thanks for the perspective!