Grandpa's Hands
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Grandpa's Hands
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http://businessnews.za.msn.com/gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=158314158
Meet the world's richest fictional characters: from a miserly old duck and a grim nuclear mogul to a vampire and a hillbillie, these characters' net worth is $9.7 billion: an increase of 20% from last year.
Forbes
The Forbes list for the wealthiest fictional characters sees an aggregate worth of $131.6 billion, which is more than the gross domestic product of New Zealand, making the fictional 15 quite a superpower in their own right.
It's a good thing they're fictional, otherwise Donald Trump might have to fight for his wealth...
In order to qualify in the Forbes fictional universe, the characters need to be well-known in their fictional worlds and by the audience for being rich.
The characters' worth is determined by analysing details about their life and source, and these details are valued against known commodity and share-price movements in the real world. The figures apply as of market close on April 1 2011.
15. Jeffrey Lebowski - Jeffrey Lebowski, from the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski, is worth $1 billion, and appears to live off the funds that his deceased wife left to the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers programme.
14. Gordon Gekko - Gordon Gekko is from Oliver Stone's Wall Street films and is worth $1.1 billion. He is legendary in the fictional world, famously boasting "greed is good" in 1987, and made billions at Gekko & Co, a pioneering investment firm.
He was convicted of insider trading and securities fraud, but was released from prison in 2001 and became an author and lecturer. He predicted the bursting of the credit bubble. He also sank his estranged daughter's trust fund into a new London-based hedge fund, and this saw his personal net worth increase.
13. Chuck Bass - Chuck Bass comes from the Gossip Girl television series and is known as the resident bad boy in the series. The billionaire, who is worth $1.1 billion, is embroiled in a battle with his late father's business rival Russell Thorpe for the control of Bass Industries.
Real estate insiders in Manhattan believe Bass will prevail, as he is "manipulative, deceptive, arrogant, greedy and shallow".
12. C. Montgomery Burns - Known as Homer Simpson's cut-throat employer from the television series The Simpsons, C. Montgomery Burns is worth $1.1 billion. He is the long-time owner and operator of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. He is known for his tyrannical management style and for personal habits like stealing candy from babies, taunting immigrant labours and releasing his dogs on unwanted houseguests.
11. Jo Bennett - The Office's Sabre Corporation CEO Jolene "Jo" Bennett is worth $1.2 billion. She is known for turning a small Tallahassee computer parts manufacturer into a major supplier of printers, fax machines and scanners.
In May 2010, a whistleblower revealed that the GH400 printers had a tendency to burst into flames, but Bennett handled the PR crisis so well that stock was unaffected.
10. Arthur Bach - Arthur Bach, know from the Arthur series of films, is worth $1.8 billion. Also known as a scamp, he is spotted with a gaggle of different women every so often. He is also known for his radical fashion sense, as he favours Victorian-style top hats, hand-made shirts and foppish ties.
He is also the oldest man in New York to still have a nanny.
9. Mr Monopoly - Mr Monopoly from Hasbro's game of the same name is worth $2.6 billion in real estate. Having once won second prize in a beauty contest, there is always a whiff of scandal surrounding the man, where he is alternately accused of misappropriating funds from the bank and misusing his "get out of jail free cards".
8. Bruce Wayne - Worth a massive $7 billion, Bruce Wayne (also known as Batman, but don't tell anyone) is famous for his playboy lifestyle. He disappeared from the scene in 2009 amid rumours of his death, but when he gatecrashed Wayne Enterprises Gotham City had to admit that the rumours were just "batty".
Shares of Wayne Enterprises, a company that has made its money through defence products, have increased due to the leadership of CEO Lucius Fox, but this has not silenced rumours about his habit of keeping teenage boys as "wards".
7. Smaug - Smaug's fortune has been amassed as a result of years of plundering, and he keeps his fortune at the Lonely Mountain. The character from JRR Tolkein's The Hobbit, the red-gold dragon Smaug is known as "the Tremendous", "the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities" and "the Unassessably Wealthy".
He has no idea of the point of investment however, preferring to use his fortune as bedding.
6. Tony Stark - Tony Stark from the Iron Man comics and films is the engineering genius at the head of Stark Industries. His inventions, which are impressive and unqiue, are, however, outshone by his ability to create controversy.
He has refused to surrender the Iron Man technology to government - not telling them that it was simply because he was Iron Man - and is also plagued by rumours of heavy drinking and erratic behaviour.
5. Jed Clampett - Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies television series is worth $9.5 billion as a result of some lcuk in coming across some "black gold" while hunting on his land. He managed to turn the source into an international energy company, and Clampett Oil went public in 1984.
He and his family are living a life of luxury on the returns from their oil mine - the price of oil alone has increased over 30% in the last year.
4. Richie Rich - Richie Rich from the comic series of the same name has a fortune of $9.7 billion. Although Rich Industries stock slipped after making costly forays into fashion, transportation and kitchen appliances, Rich is still splashing out with his philanthropy.
He was recently supplanted as the richest kid in the world by Artemis Fowl II.
3. Artemis Fowl II - Artemis Fowl, from Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels, is worth $13.5 billion, although it isn't certain how much of his fortune is legitimate after a lot of it was stolen or is simply forged.
Artemis comes from an Irish crime family that has been in existence since the Norman Conquest. After his father was kidnapped, he had to take over the family business, but the child genius took it in his stride, using his new authority to invent a palm-sized computer that can read information in any format and send calls over any network.
His worth boomed recently after he created Facebook under the alias "Mark Zuckerberg", which is one of many he has employed during his life of crime.
2. Carlisle Cullen - The now-famous vampire, revealed to the world in the Twilight series of novels, is worth $36.2 billion, and it's all the result of some clever investing on his part.
The small-town doctor has amassed one of the largest fictional fortunes as a result of banking a small amount of his money in 1670, and allowing the interest to grow.
One would hope that he didn't use the future-seeing abilities of his daughter Alice to cheat the system...
1. Scrooge McDuck - The hero of Duck Tales is still the richest man in the fictional world. Worth $44.1 billion amassed by penny-pinching, mining and treasure hunting, he keeps most of his fortune in a massive bin on the top of the hills of Duckburg. Smaug must envy his ability to swim through his gold coins.
He is known as a frugal spender - he still has the first dime he ever earned, never gives money to charity and even travelled back in time to use an expired coupon, although opening his heart to his great-nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie resulted in the discovery of some amazing treasures and adventures.
He is known for marking his anniversary by calculating his net worth as a percentage of the value of the gold in Fort Knox, which currently stands at 21.4%.