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Fiction 500
aka: Fiction Five Hundred

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Some people make mountains out of molehills.
Scrooge makes mountains out of money.

Kerchak: Do you have any more of that money?
Petey: I have a team of accountants whose job it is to count the accountants who keep track of my accountants.

Fiction is loaded with Wish-Fulfillment, and being rich enough to bend reality is one of them. These are characters whose wealth is almost impossible to quantify. More Money Than God is the bare minimum.

Now this could happen in Real Life, like royalty who owned literally thousands of Pimped Out Dresses, or a man in India who built a private skyscraper for his family, staff, and fleet of cars, or Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had three times as much money as Bill Gates and personally funded the reconstruction of the Roman army. But in fiction, that's on the lower end of this scale.

Stuff that generally does not qualify you to be a member of the Fiction 500: Big Fancy House, Cool Chair, Cool Boat, Cool Plane, Cool Car, Battle Butler, Maid Corps, or even simply having assets in the billions.

Stuff that generally does qualify you to be a member of the Fiction 500:

  1. You have become a cultural symbol for absurd wealth, and the story leaves no doubt your reputation is completely justified.
  2. You routinely spend money on a scale normal super-rich people might do once or twice in a lifetime, whether it be major investments or mere Conspicuous Consumption. If a real amount is given, even if in the hundreds of millions, or billions, it's chump change to these characters.
  3. You personally fund projects associated with major corporations, governments, aliens, etc. This includes Crimefighting with Cash.
  4. You have the resources of a global superpower without yourself ruling a global superpower.
  5. You personally fund projects that apparently break the rules of physics using only wealth and the Rule of Cool, or sometimes Rule of Funny. In other words, Screw The Universe; I Have Money! But if some other convenient fictional trope makes something possible, it doesn't count. You don't buy sound in space when Space Is Noisy. It's not impressive to have Infinite Supplies when everyone else does. Building a Humongous Mecha is not noteworthy when any random scientist can make five in a weekend.
  6. You're surprised to discover your latest project's market success has not increased your net income because you have a monopoly on the product it's competing with. In fact, it may have underperformed or come as a slight loss because you're running up an unnecessary expense accidentally competing with yourself, and you haven't noticed because "losses" don't register when it comes to your money.
  7. You can do any of the above without leaving a paper trail or an electronic footprint. Many of these Fiction 500 rich characters operate either clandestinely or under a secret identity, especially if they are Crimefighting with Cash, The Chess Master or Evil Mastermind types. They must have methods for secretly diverting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to their schemes (like building that army of Mooks, Elaborate Underground Base, Bat Cave, or Batmobile) while making it seem like a legit and legal expenditure or keeping it out of the books. It should be noted that even if a character uses their personal fortune, these transactions would still typically have to show up somewhere when tax time comes.

Now personality doesn't really matter. You could be a Rich Bitch or Uncle Pennybags. You could be a law abiding citizen and even be Batman, or instead think you can screw the rules.

Name is based on the top 500 grossing companies annually compiled by "Fortune" Magazine. And despite the name implying otherwise, there can be any number of characters here. Also, there is almost no way to objectively rank them, although Forbes tries with their "Fictional 15" list.

Compare Arbitrarily Large Bank Account, Conspicuous Consumption, Undisclosed Funds, Organization with Unlimited Funding, and N.G.O. Superpower.

For real people who are considered the richest in the world, see The World's Billionaires, an annual ranking made by Forbes (which has its own article on The Other Wiki, BTW).


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Hahari's house is enormous, the hallways have a laser security system to ward off intruders, she was able to get IVF treatment as a teenager, and she employs a legion of housekeepers who are trained to attack any boyfriend her daughter brings home. Once she joins the harem, she buys out their high school to become the "chairwoman" so as to spend time with Rentarou, despite having no teaching credentials, and she's able to have clothes made for the entire harem overnight. Even when she was a baby, the family company was wealthy enough to sponsor a TV show and get them to make changes to both the show and its merchandise.
  • Anime-Gataris: Arisa's wealth is bottomless. $300,000 worth of anime purchased in overnight is nothing to her. She bragged she could buy the school if necessary.
  • Tatsuya Himekawa of Beelzebub may be a delinquent, but he still comes from a wealthy banking family, allowing him to finance some of the group's wilder plans if needed. Apparently his monthly allowance is in the hundred-thousands and he considers spending millions pocket change. To date he has: owned the top seven floors of an expensive high rise apartment complex, converted several apartments on one floor into a giant gaming center, bought an entire gaming company on a whim so he and his pals could win against magically-cheating opponents, and spent several million on a demon-sealer that he always planned to destroy in the end. He also has access to what is assumed to be a very expensive penthouse in a resort location. And his family owns an island shaped like a pompadour whose sole purpose is to produce Himekawa's hair gel.
  • Bleach: Byakuya Kuchiki is apparently ridiculously wealthy. His pre-time skip scarf alone is worth the price of ten mansions... and in Japan, mansions are fantastically expensive. And that's just an item of clothing he wears every day and is willing to wear into battle. After the time skip, he gets a custom captain's haori made, and the gold piping down the edges is apparently insanely expensive, costing as much as three sheets of expensive silk cloth. He wears that into battle, too. Byakuya really does have money to burn.
  • In Boys over Flowers, the parentage of the student body of Eitoku Academy is implied to almost entirely be made up of ridiculously wealthy people, and the F4 are the cream of the crop.
  • Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoyo, Sakura's Muggle Best Friend, is absolutely loaded. She lives in such a Big Fancy House that her bedroom alone is bigger than the entire second floor of Sakura's house, and personally designs the costumes in Sakura's Unlimited Wardrobe, one such costume being composed of rubber to protect against electric attacks. Somewhat justified by the fact that her mother is the CEO of a toy company.
  • In Cat Planet Cuties, Lonely Rich Kid Antonia has an army of maids and a personal aircraft carrier. In Episode 11, though, she really shows how this trope is done.
    Antonia: It's shopping time! I want a rocket! And I want it NOW!
  • Claire Kokonoe from Chronicles of the Going Home Club. In the first episode, it's stated that she has as little chance of running out of money as a tap left on does of running out of water. For example, if she needs an eraser, her immediate reaction is to buy a stationery store.
  • In CLAMP School Detectives, the Imonoyama family founded CLAMP Academy, which acts not just as a school, but as a self contained city in the middle of Tokyo. And they don't even charge the students' families tuition.
  • In [C] – Control, Mikuni has enough money to single-handedly shoulder Japan's national debt. Note that due to the show's premise, a lot of characters can fall into this trope (the protagonist went from a college student struggling to make ends meet to having a bank account of several hundred million overnight), but Mikuni still stands out.
  • In Dance in the Vampire Bund, Mina Tepes pays off Japan's entire national debt, which is around 40 TRILLION dollars and does not seem financially hurt in the slightest by it.
    • Of course, she already controls enough of the world's resources that the odds are pretty good that she was already indirectly Japan's largest creditor, and being able to openly sponsor the current government is likely a fair trade for canceling a bad debt. Given the amount of shifting goods and companies around this would have entailed, and the justification it would have provided for a thorough corporate housecleaning, she might even have come out ahead on the deal.
  • From Death Note, L Lawliet has a hotel built solely to house (and disguise) a heavily secured task force headquarters, pays for everyone on the task force's life insurance, hands them gadget belts, can afford to hire a professional con man and an international thief, and still has enough left over that his successor can just pour a waterfall of hundred-dollar bills out the top of a building.
  • The five girls of Debutante Detective Squad are said to each have wealth greater than the annual gross national product of Japan.
  • In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, the Ubuyashiki family, creators and lords of the Demon Slayer Corps, have said corps as a private army in the ever difficult secret war against demon kind; the first databook states the Ubuyashiki family is extremely rich without ever going into specifics, however, the fact a single family can personally pay for a personal army of hundreds, and give each slayer a very generous fee - where the lowest ranked member is paid 20,000 yen (a very good amount at the early 20th century) and 10 ranks above that, the Hashira, are literally said to be "paid as much as they want" - shows that the Ubuyashiki are absurdly rich as the series never shows money is of any issue to them. After the end of the series a special oneshot chapter, contained within the second databook, even goes an extra step to show Kiriya Ubuyashiki casually gave enough money to Tanjiro and Nezuko, as a token of eternal gratitude, for them not to ever work a single day in their lives again.
  • In Dragon Ball, the Briefs family owns the Capsule Corporation. Capsules are a perfect miniaturization technology, and the Briefs have a monopoly. The exact extent of their wealth isn't made completely clear. However, their mansion is so huge it has its own internal forests, and building a spaceship to meet their friends' interstellar travel needs, free of charge, is apparently a trivial act. Word of God also says their company owns half of the worldwide vehicle market, and they also sell everything from refrigerators to houses.
    • Taken to extremes in Dragon Ball Super, where Bulma owns a private cruise ship large enough to house an entire literal castle with room to spare. In that same series, Goku described having her give away a few million Zeni is like taking a little pee. And in the final arc, Bulma goes even further by giving away said ship as if it was nothing.
  • In Eden of the East, all twelve of the Seleção are given magic cell phones that they can use to make any request from the "concierge," whether material goods or to cause any event to happen — essentially a technological Genie in a Bottle. The cost for these "wishes" are automatically billed against a 10 billion yen limit (that's about $100 million). And all of it was arranged by the mysterious "Mr. Outside", who can apparently just give 12 people 10 billion yen each without it mattering overly much.
  • In Gankutsuou, the Count of Monte Cristo's wealth is measured in trillions of francs. It's suggested he might be able to buy and sell less important planets!
  • Golgo 13 charges three million dollars a job, and has done at least one job a month, every month, since 1968 (and that's assuming there aren't more assignments that aren't in the manga). Even if he spent half of that on operational expenses he'd still be a billionaire. At one point he bought an entire apartment building and blew it up just so he'd have a clear firing lane to his target.
  • In Gravion, Klein Sandman has the resources and cunning to build a bleeding edge deep space detection system and a bleeding edge Combining Mecha all without the notice of any major organisation on Earth. He also has a par-for-the-course gigantic castle that can house and train a veritable army of maids to pilot and provide logistical support for said giant robot. At least one of these maids was initially brought into the castle against their will and no one questions it. Oh and, just to prove it wasn't a fluke, he builds another one.
    • Of course, he is a Human Alien and what is bleeding edge for Earth is only cutting edge for him.
  • Hanaukyo Taro of Hanaukyō Maid Team, in addition to his mansion and army of maids, has enough budget to create a weather-altering machine and a computer that can manipulate all the world's markets when it's completed.
  • In Haruka Nogizaka's Secret, Gentou Nogizaka bought an island, complete with castle and resort, as well as supersonic jets, for the express purpose of celebrating his daughter's birthday. Beyond that, he has his own private army and ninja maid staff, and apparently spends most of his time with world leaders and intelligence agencies. His father-in-law is retired, but remains outrageously influential: according to The Other Wiki, "If he wants, all great leaders in the world will gather at one place for a high level conference within three hours."
  • Hayate the Combat Butler:
    • Mikado Sanzenin. By his own account, his wealth measures in the hundreds of trillions of yen (several trillion dollars at least). His granddaughter Nagi is wealthy in her own right, but not enough to maintain the smallest Sanzenin secondary residence (which includes a theme park and fully stocked lake) by herself.
    • Athena Tennos, as head of the Tennos family, is said to have wealth to rival the Sanzenins'.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • To say nothing of the ever helpful Speedwagon, who, in between parts Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency, makes it big as an oil tycoon in America. He becomes so successful that he establishes the Speedwagon Foundation, which while primarily having a focus on medical research and wild animal and plant protection, also has a "supernatural research department" which looks into, among other things, Stand users and Vampires; the foundation provides the entire Joestar lineage with all the information and supplies they need for the better part of the next century, meaning Speedwagon's legacy as a supporting character lives on all the way until the end of part 6. The Speedwagon Foundation created portable, weaponized UV-lamps in the 1930's, has provided submarines for the Joestar descendants twice, and looked after Holly with some of the finest doctors in the world, at no expense to the Joestars.
    • Rohan Kishibe from part 4 earned enough money from writing his hit manga "Pink Dark Boy" that he could buy things like Gucci, Armani and even entire mountain ranges like a kid buys candy.
  • Jormungand: The Hekmatyar family running H&C Logistics International are fantastically wealthy as their company is essentially an N.G.O. Superpower. They have their own private army, private satellites and Koko Hekmatyar has the funds necessary to pursue bleeding edge technology in the fulfilment of her secret plan "Jormungand" which involves putting over 126 satellites in the sky to prevent aircraft from ever taking off the ground. A massive undertaking to the point where every global player is scared shitless of it, the sanity of doing something like this is questioned in-universe.
  • Junjou Romantica: According to Usami Akihiko, one billion yen is cheap change.
  • Kiryuin Ragyo from Kill la Kill probably qualifies. Literally 100% of ALL clothing on the planet is manufactured by her company, REVOCS (which is a bad thing, since this clothing is made of parasitic aliens). Ragyo is rich and influential enough that even her teenage daughter pretty much owns an entire city and a personal army of superpowered students powerful enough to take over other cities, and nobody can do squat about it.
    • Also Kaneo Takarada from the same anime even more so, who pretty much owns the whole city of Osaka and whose family is the main rival of the Kiryuins. His troops have weapons that fire money, and his personal mecha seems to be made of (or at least plated with) gold. This is eventually subverted, as the Takaradas are implied to have lost most of their fortune — but they did so investing into a Cool Ship that proves instrumental to defeating the aforementioned Ragyo and saving the Earth.
  • In Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, female lead Kaguya Shinomiya's family is stated to have assets of 200 trillion yen (~2 trillion US dollars, roughly 20 times what Jeff Bezos has) by way of a mythical giant conglomerate.
  • Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne: Astelia is introduced as the granddaughter of the chairman of Novomundos. She's actually immortal and likely the owner herself. Novomundos is powerful enough that she can force the President of the United States into compliance by threatening to have him replaced.
  • The Kotoura family in Kotoura-san, if the events of episode 6 are any indication. To whit, the discovery of petroleum on the family property only has a small effect on his financial portfolio, and the patriach Zenzou finds it an annoyance.
  • Yai's family, of MegaMan NT Warrior (2002), regularly shows off their wealth in the form of private jets, a submarine, helicopters... And their mansion transforms into a Humongous Mecha. Naturally, she uses these things to help the rest of the gang get to places faster. Her Star Force counterpart, Luna, only has her wealth touched upon once, but her family's estate, her army of servants, and making countless orders to try and see Mega Man again practically puts her into this trope as well.
  • Daisuke Kambe from The Millionaire Detective - Balance: UNLIMITED can easily spend billions of yen to quickly solve a case without blinking an eye. These expenditures are mostly spent on compensating the property damages he incurs while trying to apprehend criminals.
  • In Mission: Yozakura Family, the Yozakuras are wealthy enough to have a mansion, ridiculously advanced spy tools, and have their estate guarded by a massive array of booby traps and drones. None of these things seem to dent their bottom line and their living room is filled with bags of cash from payments and missions. Sound drama clips specify that in addition to mission pay, the Yozakuras maintain a vast network of investments that Mutsumi manages to ensure the Yozakuras' continued financial stability. In the same conversation, Mutsumi mentions buying planes for the family with the same tone as someone listing stuff for their grocery list.
  • Monster:
    • Hans Georg Schubert, also known as the Vampire of Bayern for his seclusion and mysterious nightly outings, is described as a juggernaut whose fortune keeps growing and growing without measure; rumors have it that he singlehandedly manipulates the entirety of the German stock market. His donation of his collection of rare and antique books to the University of Munich attracts local and international business alike.
    • Johan, who started an enormous black market banking operation that made him incredibly rich...at the age of 15. He doesn't care about the money. He did it to see how people would destroy each other because of money and to make it easier for him to murder a lot of people.
  • From Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
    • Ayaka Yukihiro's family owns a MegaCorp and several private islands, and she herself lives in a Big Fancy House that would give the Palace of Versailles a run for its money, and was able to personally finance a massive campus wide war game. Keep in mind that said campus is an Elaborate University High that goes from grade school through university level and has over 30,000 students. She also owns her own private jet and brought roughly half her class to Wales in it when she heard that Negi was going there.
    • Konoka's family comes close, if only because their Shinto temple-esque Big Fancy House would put Ayaka's own to shame in size and complexity. The MegaCorp-owning Yukihiro family still surpasses them in sheer wealth, though.
    • Princess Arika, Negi's mother could probably put Ayaka's money to shame without even trying.
  • Most of the cast of Ouran High School Host Club:
    • The boys in the Host Club belong to insanely rich families, who own private islands, artificial jungle resorts and private armies.
    • Renge decides to make a movie about the club and summons a Hollywood camera crew and a director (a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Steven Spielberg, no less) in one day.
    • Kyouya Ootori is able to threaten others into submission by simply stating that he's able to eject someone from the country if they piss him off. That's not even including the insanely huge indoor water park that had a small rainforest in it. He's also independently wealthy, being able to buy his family's failing company.
  • The Nankyoku family in Penguin Musume is so rich they can rebuild a whole city without putting themselves into financial difficulties.
  • From Perfect Girl Evolution:
    • Tamao Kikunoi AKA 'Princess'. When her fiance asks for help in saving one of his friends from a group of cultists, she shows up with a private army... including full sea-and-air support, elite forces numbering in the tens of thousands, and a butler with a Hyperspace Arsenal. When the same friend needed to be saved from a horde of amorous girls, she was able to make a Humongous Mecha materialize under a city block, complete with gigantic hangar-gates, for the sole purpose of tricking the girls into leaving.
    • Sunako's aunt looks to be EASILY in the top-half of this list, thanks to the inheritance she got from her late husband. She can summon an entire FLEET of military choppers at will — equipped with rose-petal-spreaders. And that's not counting the men she's dated, one of whom had a stretch limo that took nearly a minute to pass a single point — at full speed.
  • In Pokémon: The Series, there's rarely any mention of currency whatsoever, but even by that standard, James's parents are loaded. When they're introduced, their butler brings Ash, Misty, and Brock to their mansion. The property is so large, it takes them hours to get down the driveway. The trio is in awe of the stupendous mansion when they finally arrive, only to be told it's a dog house (for one Growlthe) and the real house dwarfs it. A few seasons later, we find out it's not the only property they own, and while the others are modest in comparison, they're still extremely lavish.
  • Rurouni Kenshin: Yukishiro Enishi is an arms dealer so ludicrously wealthy that not only did he sell the Rengoku, a battleship powerful enough to blow Meiji-era Tokyo to ruins by itself, to Shishio Makoto, but he owns an entire fleet of identical battleships.
  • In Sacred Seven, Ruri. "We didn't want to go to any trouble, so we just bought the school."
  • In Sgt. Frog, Baio Nishizawa's company controls nearly half of the world's economy, he's got his own armed military and black ops brigade, and his daughter Momoka has, among other things, a tiered doll display so tall that it's built into the side of a rock spire and can only be viewed via helicopter. According to Tamama, "If people knew how rich they were, they would lose all faith in capitalism."
  • Sket Dance: Exaggerated. The Unyuu family is so wealthy that they have an entire city built underneath their already vast mansion, because there's not enough space on the surface. Furthermore, their house is practically self-sufficient, and has its own synthetic weather system, farms, malls, etc. Mimori claims that her family's assets are worth 5 quadrillion yen (approximately 47 trillion USD, or almost 10 times the entire nation of Japan's annual GDP).
  • In Special A, almost every single character aside from the Hanazono family is ridiculously and obscenely wealthy, to the point where Kei Takishima slams down a blank check and tells Yahiro to fill in any amount he wants for the house they are currently standing in — and all he wants is his girlfriend back. In another scene, the Takishima Group Headquarters are portrayed as being several square MILES wide. (This is the fourth positively massive mansion to be shown to be owned by the Takishima's — and we're not even counting the manga, here.)
  • In Sonic X, Chris Thorndyke, the child of a superstar actress and a gifted scientist, and his grandfather is The Professor to boot. In the second episode, he can provide the funds and materials for Tails to turn a modified WW1 biplane into a transforming jet fighter.
  • From Tenchi Muyo!:
    • Probably can be safely assumed of the Jurai family given their status as being the royalty of an intergalactic government in a spacefaring society where a bedroom the size of a fair-sized house in Japan is considered working class. In addition, several members of the family own personal space yachts with more firepower than an average galaxy police warship. Note that this applies only to the Emperor and those who live with him; his relatives living on Earth don't fare quite as well — though technically they are considered missing persons stranded on a remote and uncivilized planet. Earth is implied to be an unofficial vacation spot for the royal family (though probably because some of its membersnote  are stranded there), so many of them are simply staying there by choice.
    • The Kuramitsu family owns garden planets, as in planets for the sole purpose of the family and friends to spend nice weekends at. And their wealth is petty change compared to the Emperor. Given the Kuramitsu clan is royalty of the Jurai's rival empire of Seniwa, it's hardly surprising. Or they were royalty prior to Seniwa becoming a republic, but despite no longer holding a royal title the Kuramitsu family are still very much in charge.
  • After the world resets to the 101st loop in Undead Unluck and heroine Fuuko Izumo lands in the 1800s, she uses her knowledge of the future and the power of the artifacts she finds to become unfathomably rich. In the early 1970s, she's able to casually write a check for $25 billion to fund a revolutionary scientific research project, and implies that it's a tiny fraction of her wealth. (By comparison, the richest man in the real world at that time, J. Paul Getty, had a net worth of about $6 billion.)
  • In Urusei Yatsura, Shutaro Mendou. Fanon expands his wealth considerably, though. Mendou has a pretty much private everything. The Mizunokoji family isn't too far behind either (even if Tobimaro doesn't like to show it).
  • In Yes! Pretty Cure 5, Karen Minazuki has her own island, just happens to have multiple empty houses lying around for people who appeared out of nowhere, and once had to clarify that she was only joking about owning a mountain range.
    • Doki Doki Pretty Cure also gives us Alice Yotsuba, or her family at least. Literally, the company owns EVERYTHING.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Seto Kaiba has so much money he can screw the rules on a regular basis. He managed to become owner and CEO of an entertainment company (that until he took over also manufactured high-tech weapons) and his brother's legal guardian without graduating high school. He also built a card game-themed amusement park, and pioneered advanced holographic technology (and repeatedly improved up on it) just to improve a card game. Later, he founds an entire school to teach more about the game. At one point in season 4, he needs a car, so he and Mokuba find one and get in (never mind how they got the keys). As the car comes on, a salesman rushes over, frantic and demanding to know what they're doing. Even as the man rants, Kaiba whips out a checkbook extremely dramatically, scrawls something, and tells the man to keep the change as they drive away. The distraught salesman frets that he's ruined, RUINED... until he looks down at the $500,000 check. While not quite so large a number as this trope normally deals with, the sheer attitude with which this example was done makes it rather noteworthy.
      • By the time of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, Kaiba is pretty much undeniably this; he owns all of the rather large metropolitan area of Domino City and at least one sophisticated space station that exists mostly for personal purposes, suggesting his total wealth to be in the trillions at minimum. This isn't even getting into the tech he's been putting out, including a full-dive massively-online Virtual Reality system invented in 1999.
    • Pegasus is hardly a pauper either, and, given that Kaiba's big break came from making a deal with Pegasus, may actually be richer than Kaiba. Given that fifteen years after he invented his product professional users of it would apparently be as powerful as kings, politicians and CEOs, it's quite likely he'll be sitting pretty for the foreseeable future (in the anime, at least...not so much in the manga ).
  • The Big Bad of the Dark Tournament arc of YuYu Hakusho, Mr. Sakyo, is richer than the entirety of the Japanese government put together.

    Comic Books 
  • Archie Comics: While maybe not as over the top as most others here, Hiram and Hermione Lodge, Veronica's parents, still rank high on the social ladder. Evidence would come from (a) Veronica's spending sprees, where she buys out whole boutiques, new cars, vacations, on a whim, and (b) the cost to repair the endless mayhem caused by Archie's visits. Also, according to The Other Wiki, Veronica states that "Daddy has billions," which is likely due to the extreme rise of wealth in the real world since the introduction of the Lodges. In order to maintain the pretense that the Lodges are one of the richest in the world, her parents have to be billionaires.
    • Veronica claims that her father owns a (fictional) country.
    • In an Archie 3000 story, he buys a planet.
  • The Beano: Multy the Millionare, a strip during the 1950s. It plays this trope for laughs and features a character whose only trait seems to be his incredible wealth. Lord Snooty also has aspects of this trope, living in a castle and being a lord and everything, but occasionally he is very poor, even using the Wallet Moths trope. Lord Snooty's 2000s revival as Lord Snooty the Third uses this trope a lot more than the original Lord Snooty, and has never been shown to have any kind of un-absurdly-richness.
  • The DCU:
    • Aquaman: Arthur Curry, although it's not a major part of his character. When he's King of Atlantis, he has his own treasury, and when he's deposed for the nth time, he makes ends meet with his personal secret hoard of pirate treasure. It's a common habit of his to pay in restaurants with solid gold doubloons.
    • Batman: Bruce Wayne can bury the cost of the Justice League Watchtower in his aerospace budget. To put this in perspective, the smaller and far more primitive International Space Station cost over $150 billion by the time construction was completed.note  He is also funding his secret life of fighting crime using assorted wonderful toys. An entire issue of Robin was devoted to delivering a cost-accounting of Batman's arsenal. In Batman Begins, Bruce and Alfred decide that the best way to disguise their purchase of ears for Batman costumes is to buy 10,000 of them.
    • In Teen Titans, Robin (Tim Drake) smuggles a Batmobile from Gotham by hiding it in the Batarang budget. Impulse promptly crashes it, thus notifying Batman.
      Impulse: How'd you get a Batmobile shipped to San Francisco?
      Robin: I hid it in the Batarang budget.
      Impulse: The Batarang budget?
      Robin: It's bigger than you'd think.
    • Green Arrow: As of The New 52, Oliver Queen is one too. While he already had Queen Industries, he was nowhere near the level of Wayne Enterprises or LexCorp. Now, Q-Core, his current financial endeavor, is Wayne Ent.'s main competition in the technology sector and basically the DCU's equivalent of Apple.
    • Doom Patrol: Steve Dayton, AKA Mento. Routinely described as the fifth richest man on Earth in The DCU.
    • The Green Team Boy Millionaires: The only prerequisite for joining the Green Team is one million dollars. The boys paid fortunes to anyone who could offer them a worthy adventure. In their first and only (at the time) published story, they funded the "Great American Pleasure Machine", a sort of roller coaster ride that brings so much pleasure, it drives the villain of the piece insane. As a text page in 1st Issue Special #2 (May 1975) explained, their jumpsuit uniforms had many pockets for money, with special locks, and they carried ticker-tape wristwatches, a chain of keys that would unlock any of their many labs and money vaults in far-flung lands, and a quarter-million dollars each that any of them could whip out at any time in the name of adventure.
    • Prez: Reclusive trillionaire Fred Wayne. This is how rich he is: His corporate headquarters is Delaware. That's not a typo — he bought the entire state outright, and the only people who live there now are him and his employees and their families.
    • Superman:
      • Lex Luthor, since The '80s. At the time, writers finally decided to literally Cut Lex Luthor a Check and made him incredibly rich through making money off his genius. He can also budget in plans to defeat Superman. Lois Lane calculates Luthor's income and determines that he won't stop to pick up a $100 bill from the ground, because it's not worth one second of his time.
      • In All-Star Superman, Leo Quintum is called a zillionaire by Jimmy Olsen, and when he hacked into his company's bank account, he found an infinity symbol.
    • Super Young Team: The Most Excellent Superbat (no name given) states that his power is being rich enough to do anything. This is backed up in story by having his own private island made for him (complete with secret base), inventing an automatic mental Twitter, and in his Moment of Awesome, buying Japan — yes, the entire country — to rebuild it. Do anything indeed.
    • Teen Titans: The team tends to get a few of these too. Some are technical qualifiers such as Starfire being an Alien Princess who doesn't typically tap her stuff from her home due to being captured or exiled several times depending on when. However, in the 2000s, when they were just The Titans, they ended up bankrolling themselves this time, so that brought 2 big investors to the team. First was Jesse Quick, who ran her own company and managed to fight crime in her spare time. And second was the former Aqualad who became Tempest. He goes the route of finding sunken treasure to bankroll stuff. So much so they're able to create an enormous hologram of Titans Tower as well as an underground base without breaking a sweat.
  • Disney Mouse and Duck Comics: Scrooge McDuck's wealth is one of his defining characteristics. He has so much money he can swim in it, which happens to be one of his favorite pastimes. He is the owner of a windowless concrete block, affectionately called The Money Bin, filled with so much cold, hard cash that the bottom layer probably collapsed into electron-degeneracy sometime in the early 1990s. Don Rosa makes a point that the money in the bin is what Scrooge earned before he became the world's richest duck.note  He has dozens of times more, in bank accounts and in investments, but the money in the bin is there because every coin and bill is a mark of victory to its owner; he can actually tell how he earned each one by looking at them, and would never part with one unless the story behind it is not worth remembering. As implied by his name, Scrooge is a satirical take on the idea that one can achieve vast wealth through nothing but obsessive penny-pinching; he always insists that (unlike his rivals) he earned it all "square," i.e. through legitimate work (though he rarely explains any of the details), and usually labels anyone who spends money on anything as a "spendthrift."
    • In one Don Rosa story it's shown that Scrooge has every federal and state organization, including the U.S. Armed Forces, at his beck and call because his taxes comprise about 90% of their income. When you put together all Carl Barks and Don Rosa stories, Scrooge could probably buy out every other person mentioned on this page. And yet he still figures he doesn't have enough wealth to buy even a tenth of a solid gold moon, when engaged in a trade with the wealthiest man from Venus for it. And then he trades it for a handful of dirt.
    • In some Carl Barks stories, it's stated that Scrooge can't transfer the money from his bin to banks because they already have so much of his money, they have no place to guard more.
    • In an early Carl Barks story Scrooge says that if he loses one billion dollars a minute, he'll go bankrupt in 600 years. That would be 315,576,000 billion dollars, or 315,576 quintillion dollars. Needless to say, this is astronomically more than there exists wealth in the entire world (Scrooge would lose that much in less than half a year). This is a variation of a line from Citizen Kane where it was losing a million dollars per year would lead to closing down in sixty years.
    • In one story, Scrooge spends several millions of dollars merely because he has no safe place to keep them. (The Money Bin is already full, and it'd cost billions to build another one.) In the end, it's all for nothing because the money is spent on places that belong to him. He's so wealthy he can't remember all businesses he owns.
      • Although this does contradict one episode of DuckTales (1987) where he says he has actually memorized every serial number on every piece of paper money he owns, a skill that makes him realize that the money that Ma Beagle paid him with was stolen from him. (This is Rule of Funny, of course, but still...)
      • Another story has Scrooge getting screwed by storms on his resorts, because the insurance companies that secure the places are his as well.
    • Scrooge was the top person in the Forbes Fiction 15 for 25 years running, until he lost a round-the-world race to Flintheart Glomgold, where the prize was Scrooge's money bin. This was enough to knock Scrooge out of the Fiction 15 and put Glomgold at #2 in 2012 behind Smaug, with just the Money Bin). Total worth: 5 multiplujillion, 9 impossibidillion, 7 fantasticatrillion dollars and 16 cents. So rich, they make up numbers for it.
    • Someone quantified it down to 25 trillion dollars in real life. Forbes put it at 65.4 billion dollars as of their last list, in 2013 (with Scrooge back at #1).
    • Not to be forgotten are his two billionaire rivals, Flintheart Glomgold (mostly in DuckTales (1987)) and John D. Rockerduck (mostly in the comics), both of whom are trying to surpass his fortune. In the case of Rockerduck, spending a lot instead of being a tightwad like Scrooge.
    • In fact, especially in the European comics, Duckburg is usually portrayed as having a literal billionaire's club. Since there are usually only several hundred billionaires on the entire world, one wonders why they all decided to huddle together.
      • Most European currencies are worth quite a lot less than the American dollar, and since translations usually use the local one instead of the latter, it is often entirely plausible for a literal billionaire's club to exist in a real-life major city such as New York from that perspective. To give a couple of examples, 1 billion Polish złoty is about $270 million and 1 billion Swedish krona is about $110 million. Sometimes the numbers become ridiculously low, like in Hungary where you only need $3.6 million to get 1 billion forint, or Italy, where the popular Paperinik New Adventures comics originated and whose pre-euro currency lira made anyone able to muster up just north of half a million dollars a billionaire.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • Black Panther: T'Challa was an example until Doctor Doom pulled some crap. T'Challa is king of Wakanda, meaning he legally controls the trade and distribution of Vibranium (Captain America's shield is made of that stuff and Adamantium), and according to the comics, Vibranium costs $10,000 per gram. According to Doomwar #1, the Wakandan vaults have 10,000 tons of it. Do the math: it's all worth $9.7 trillion, more than the GPA of the nonfictional world. Unfortunately, a plot by Doctor Doom to loot the Vibranium forced T'Challa to use a failsafe that rendered the stockpile inert and potentially worthless, but that doesn't mean it will always be. While not quite as loose with his money as Iron Man or Angel, he's also used his wealth to make a few pretty significant contributions over the years. Case in point: he provided the Avengers with their first Quinjet, and continued to provide more advanced versions of the craft for a number of years.
    • Fantastic Four: Reed Richards. You can miss it because it's not part of his character like Tony (or even Angel, who flaunts it some), but it's there. The Baxter Building is huge and super-luxurious, and the materials needed to make his many tools and vehicles and scientific equipment don't grow on trees (and sometimes require Unobtanium that is ridiculously hard to come by.) Making another of something that blows up is never a problem, and he'll always pull out bigger and better versions of any of the team's signature gear. Basically, it turns out that Reed Richards is NOT useless, and money from selling inventions that don't endanger the planet (sorry, no pocket Negative Zone portals) as well as the Four's celebrity status (they get cash from every film, action figure, etc.) - not even counting the stuff he gets paid not to release since it would single-handedly render the entire industry irrelevant resulting in millions of people losing their jobs - has made him rich enough that a trivial little problem like "doing this would require ten times the amount of money that exists in the world" will never hold the Four back. Reed is so rich that he rakes in more money than the entire US GDP.
    • The Incredible Hercules: The title character is able to purchase entire bars with gold he has in his pocket, and his diverse portfolio requires two superheroes a full week to even gather, let alone settle, in the wake of his (temporary) demise. One example alone that qualifies for this list: he was one of the initial investors in Stark Enterprises, whose founder is listed below. When the size of the investment was calculated, a second line of zeroes was required. Assuming 1.25 inch margins on each side of the page and a 12-point font, this investment would come to at least 10 novemdecillion (10^61) dollars. (Though after the fourth novemdecillion dollars, who's really counting?)
    • Iron Fist: Danny Rand is pretty fabulously wealthy too. He notably replaced Tony Stark as the bankroller of the New Avengers during the period where they were branded fugitives after Civil War.
    • Iron Man: Anthony (Tony) Edward Stark. Even without any funds, he's a gadgeteer genius who managed to build the Iron Man suit out of, basically, tin cans and string. That said, having loads of spare suits, many built in a lab in his own house most definitely counts. As does having a fully automated production facility in his garage that can build him another one in 5 hours. Case in point: Spider-Man thinks they should all get armor. Tony responds by asking if Spidey has seven billion dollars. And in Mini-Marvels Tony does give everyone powered armor just to prove how awesome he is. He also keeps fully working versions of previous armors in a trophy room, has destroyed them to keep them out of enemy hands, and apparently rebuilt them for the unlikely occasions when they'd come in useful in the future. Tony's ridiculous fortune is lampshaded in the pages of Avengers Vol. 4:
      Steve Rogers: I thought you were broke.
      Iron Man: My broke is not the same as your broke.
      • The Avengers can be quite the Destructive Saviours. When buildings get knocked over, streets get blown up, and cars get pitched at Killer Robots, who gets the bill? And never misses that money? That alone would make Tony one of the more impressive examples.
    • The Mighty Thor: As Prince and sometimes King of Asgard, Thor is pretty well off. He once purchased an entire steel mill to forge battle armor by walking into the owner's office and dumping a bag of gold on the table, stating "The Rhinegold of myth is quite real". And years later, when Thor restored Asgard after suffering its latest "Ragnarok", he purchased a huge plot of land to place the city on, and he did this by leading the land owner into the Royal Treasure Chamber with literal MOUNTAINS of gold and precious gems, telling the man to "take whatever you want and leave". The man got help and filled his pickup truck, making no discernible dent in the treasure. Balder and even non-royals like The Warriors Three routinely buy things on Earth or make reparations for damage (or worse, pay for Volstagg's food orgies) with sacks of gold that they hand out freely.
    • Spider-Man:
      • Norman Osborn/Green Goblin is so rich and well connected that he can get himself out of any charges as the Goblin, get a political position with ease, and form his own evil SHIELD army, HAMMER. An alternate version of him, the Ghost Goblin, from Jason Aaron's Avengers run described himself as "the richest man in the multiverse", with enough cash to bribe Elder Gods.
      • Come The Amazing Spider-Man (2015), Peter Parker joins the upper crust, having turned Parker Industries, a company Doc Ock started while hijacking Peter's body in Superior Spider Man, into a massively successful company around the globe. While he has some help with the fact that his step-uncle is John Jameson Sr. (that's J. Jonah Jameson's dad), it does give him a lot more freedom and the chance to enhance his webs. However, an interesting thing about this is that, while he does have a successful business, he's completely out of his league and has become a massive target for other foes, such as the Zodiac and the Ghost. It ultimately gets so bad that Peter ultimately decides to destroy everything to keep it out of Doctor Octopus' tentacles in Secret Empire, financially destroying him.
    • Sub-Mariner: Namor technically owns all the treasure on the sea floor (are you going to tell him otherwise?). If he ever needs cash, he's never found wanting.
    • The Ultimates: Ultimate Iron Man is as rich and wealthy as mainstream Iron Man. He also has an evil brother, Gregory Stark, and they grew up with a huge Sibling Rivalry. Whatever Tony did, Gregory always did something better. Including, of course, raising an even higher fortune of his own. Their rivalry grew into Cain and Abel levels in Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates, and he died at the end of the conflict. And his huge fortune? It was inherited by his closest living relative... Tony Stark!
    • X-Men: Charles Xavier's inherited fortune made him able to turn the basement of a mansion into an Elaborate Underground Base with an absurdly advanced holodeck room, as well as building various vehicles, including helicopters and a really advanced jet. Plus the Cerebro. Those can't come cheap. note 
      • Eventually, his even richer girlfriend, Shi'Ar Empress Lilandra (who owned an entire galaxy) provided upgrades to much of Xavier's facilities.
      • Note that the jet in question was a custom-modified SR-71 Blackbird, bought straight from Lockheed. Lockheed in real life never sold Blackbirds to anyone except the US government, since the technology was largely top secret. This illustrates that Xavier is both ludicrously rich and even more ludicrously well-connected. Or he just used his psychic powers to convince whoever was responsible to get him what he needed.
      • Also, everything on this list — Cerebro, the mansion, the Blackbird, and other smaller planes and helicopters — gets destroyed whenever the plot requires them not to have it or wants to show "this villain is serious." And everything on this list will be replaced, often with a better version that more closely matches whatever it looks like in the most recent film, by the next time it's needed. This in addition to the sprawling facilities and Star Trek-level gadgetry. That places Professor X in Tony Stark's tier, but unlike the other characters with unlimited resources, we never hear about his business ventures, or trouble with any companies of his during the times Xavier is in space or believed by all to be dead. Was his dad so rich that the X-Men can keep this up indefinitely without it being replenished, or is there an unseen Xavier Industries comparable to what Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark has?
      • Emma Frost (who herself is a case: she's grown wealthy, and inherited the family business even if she ran away from home for her own safety) is known to have used her telepathy to get insider information for playing the stock market. Given that in his younger years, Xavier was decidedly less ethical about invading (and even altering) people's minds, one wonders if he did the same thing in order to enhance his wealth. Simply being heavily invested in other people's companies could give Xavier vast wealth without having to run a company of his own, if he picked the right companies.
      • Angel's no slouch either. While his fortune is not flaunted to the degree that Tony Stark's is, he's able to say "Oh, don't worry, I'll just write a check" to expenditures that would boggle the mind. He's also financed several of the teams he's been a part of (such as the Champions, the New Defenders, X-Factor and X-Force) out of his own pocket.
      • Now in the Krakoan Age, Mutants have a monopoly on certain pharmaceuticals that can only be produced on Krakoa. It's also demonstrated that Xavier used his family fortune and Moira's foreknowledge to invest in a wildly diverse and incredibly lucrative portfolio from entertainment to waste management, finally explaining where the money comes from.
      • Oneshot Cable foe Jackie Singapore is noted to be richer than both Stark and Bill Gates, and 17% of Singapore's population thinks the country is named after him. It's also implied that entire countries make decisions based on his word, and that he can, among other things, get the two Koreas to actually agree on something.
      • Arcade is so rich that, in Avengers Arena, he personally bankrolls the construction of a Death Course the size of a small country, locates it on a private island off the coast of Antarctica, and packs it with so much ridiculously advanced technology that he is essentially a Reality Warper within its borders. In an early appearance, Arcade is able to steal Shi'ar technology from the Xavier Mansion, but having a sample of alien super-tech is one thing. Having the resources to reverse-engineer and duplicate it requires serious cash. Especially on the scale that Arcade does it. And prior to Avengers Arena, Arcade has been doing the same thing for decades on a smaller scale with dozens of iterations of "Murderworld". Whenever superheroes shut him down in one city, he buys his way out of jail time (whether through hiring top lawyers or just outright bribery is never specified) and sets up a new Murderworld somewhere else. Every Murderworld is a combination Elaborate Underground Base and Amusement Park of Doom, and he somehow has the resources to build such sprawling facilities undetected beneath New York City, among other places.
      • Roberto da Costa, a.k.a. Sunspot, is another example. His father was an extremely wealthy and influential Afro-Brazilian businessman, and when he died, Roberto inherited his company and all his wealth. While an Avenger, Roberto famously defeated A.I.M. not through violence, but by simply buying them out and firing all of their villainous higher-ups. He now funds the New Avengers out of his own pocket, and is not shy about flaunting his wealth to motivate his "employees"; when one of his scientists comes up with a successful plan to save the day, he rewards her by buying her a new Lexus.
  • Nintendo Power: The Magnate from Star Fox comics, being the CEO of the Starship Corporation in a universe where spaceships are the most-used means of travel, funds research for a super-advanced fighter out of his own pocket and single-handedly supplies most of the Cornerian fleet. For a price, naturally. If he switched sides they'd be screwednote .
  • ORPHANIMO!!: Hari Vallalkozo (the series initial Big Bad) is the richest man in the world, and Douglas Zemeckis (who takes over the Big Bad role later) the second richest. Their exact fortunes are never given, but in the final album (while deciding if she still wants to Marry Zemeckis or not) Ursula mentions the fourth richest person has only 30 billion dollars.
  • Richie Rich: Richard and Regina Rich, and their son, Richie. Richie apparently receives his allowance in stacks of $100 bills (for some time, the canon was a weekly allowance of $100K). Their personal maid, Irona, is a Do-Anything Robot which the Rich family paid scientists to invent. One of Regina's hobbies is collecting gemstones — not to wear for jewelry, or keep in a vault or museum, but to display on her dresser.
    • Parody blog Occupy Richie Rich deconstructs this, painting a Crapsack World where the working class is bullied endlessly by the Rich family, and Richie himself often commits questionable acts for the sake of a bad money-related pun.
    • In the movie, their wealth is stated at $70 billion, which in 1994 would put them #1 on Forbes' richest person list in a walk. (At the time, Bill Gates's net worth was about $10 billion.) It took 20 years for a single individual to break the $70 billion barrier (Carlos Helu, Jr.), and the current richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has about $113 billion. This means that if the Riches were only as successful and philanthropic as Bill Gates in the past 20 years, they'd have over $500 billion to their name.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Drift is loaded. He buys the Lost Light outright for a cool one billion shanixnote  and still has enough cash left over to bankroll Rodimus's entire mad plan to track down the Knights of Cybertron - at least until he takes the fall for something big and has to leave the ship. Unusually, it's not a key pillar of his character - IDW's Drift is mostly notable for devout religiosity and mostly seems to view his ample supply of what are implied to be stolen Decepticon war funds as just a useful thing to have.
    • Fellow crew member Cyclonus invested in Tetrahexian real estate before a several-million-year-long disappearance, and is now a multi-billionaire “or something.” Like Drift, it’s not a major aspect of his character.
    Tailgate: No, he just thinks possessions are a weakness. Actually, he thinks everything's a weakness. I like him, but he's phenomenally stern.
  • Watchmen: Adrian Veidt became absurdly rich on the patent for the spark hydrants that power the electric cars of the Watchmen world. He also owns dozens of other companies, but his ultimate money-wasting venture is that of creating a massive "alien" creature on a private island which he then teleports into New York City and "saves the world" from. Oh, and he owns a palace in Antarctica, too. The funny thing is that he was already rich as a teenager, then gave away the wealth and, starting from scratch, built a second fortune. The movie features Veidt on the cover of Forbes magazine, and the company included him in a "fictional 500" list of richest fictional characters on their website.

    Comic Strips 
  • Angus Og: At one point the island of Drambeg is purchased by an Arab Oil Sheik who is so rich he plans to have the entire island broken up and shipped piece by piece to the Persian Gulf and reassembled there. He doesn't object to taking the people too though.
  • Daddy Warbucks of Little Orphan Annie, a workaholic who eventually built an industrial complex, first out of making ammunition in World War I. His wealth was estimated at ten billion dollars back when the strip started, an inimaginable amount given it was the 1920s. Was in the top 3 in the first three editions of the Forbes Fiction 15, topping it all in the last one.

    Fan Works 
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: Kasumi Lee is acknowledged In-Universe as the richest woman in New York, and it shows. She owns a Big Fancy House with its own backyard pool and an onsen, and in the chapter Adventures in Babysitting, she's able to pay off a man's $20,000 debt to Hun.
  • In the Love Hina fanfic Contract Labor, it's revealed that, as a princess of Molmol, Su is so ludicrously wealthy that she's able to help produce hentai doujinshi manga and finance a vanilla (romantic non-violent) hentai translation group to post said doujinshi online with nothing more than her lunch money.
  • It's generally held as fanon that Weiss Schnee is loaded. Hey, when your family is the leading source of the Applied Phlebotinum, and said Phlebotinum is needed to fight the endless armies of Grimm, and is implied to be the only fuel source for everything, you'd have a lot of cash.
  • There are numerous Harry Potter fics out there where, in addition to his already sizeable inheritence, Harry inherits even more money from Sirius Black (and often several fortunes from other ancestors such as Merlin and Gryffindor that weren't included in his original inheritance for some reason). It's not uncommon for him to have more gold in his vault than exists on planet Earth, mined or still in the ground (Though that’s probably more because fanfic writers don’t know how few gold atoms actually exist on Earth, rather than to invoke this trope.) Some stories also have 'Potter family investments', which tend to be very long-term investments in very profitable companies. Though it's also common for fics to have the Potter wealth to be not nearly as large as it ought to be, on the premise that James Potter personally bankrolled the entire war against Voldemort until his murder.
  • In Child of the Storm:
    • Tony Stark bankrolls the Avengers, having paid for the ridiculously advanced Avengers Tower, then the just as ridiculously advanced Avengers Mansion (after the Tower gets destroyed in chapter 74 of Book 1), which includes overhauling his father's security measures and an entire cobbled together subway escape line.
    • Harry finds out that he's ridiculously rich — he never really looked into the extent of the Potter vaults before, but Thor (formerly James Potter), did when he reclaimed them, with them being estimated at £1.5 billion. It helps that Potter senior was an early investor in Stark Industries (he met Howard Stark during WWII and was impressed by him) and, among other companies, Wayne Enterprises. Unlike most examples, however, neither Thor nor Harry does anything with them — Thor is Crown Prince of Asgard, so doesn't really need to and is perfectly happy to let the goblins manage his investment portfolio and Harry use the vault. Harry finds it personally embarrassing and doesn't mention it to people, unless, say, he wants to offer to replace the X-Men's heavily customised Blackbird (a casualty of the fight between Magneto and the Red Son in the second book) - which cost the equivalent of nearly $285 million per unit, even without customisation, and only 32 were ever made.
      • This also implies similar things about Xavier's fortune, since Xavier casually waves it off.
    • Asgard is stupidly wealthy, to the point where money means very little to them. Given that even before their ascension to godhood a million years earlier, they were a galactic scale empire of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens compared by Word of God to Time War era Gallifrey, and there's very little now that they actually need, the wealth has been piling up.
    • The Wayne family are exceptionally rich, sufficient to casually support Harry Dresden after he saved their lives (Joe Chill tried to and rob them when Dresden was a) passing, b) in a bad mood. This did not go well for him). While this support is relatively limited even considering that Dresden is effectively Bruce's mentor and personal minder, due to Dresden's personal pride, it keeps him in the black and covers the maintenance costs for his Walking Techbane effect. Bruce's allowance alone supports his personal studies into magic, anti Techbane shielding on technology, acquisition of a flashbang grenade, and at one point, use of a Tumbler, which he partially wrecks. In general, it's implied that they're in the same league as the Starks, if not on the same level.
    • Peter Wisdom a.k.a. Regulus Black, Director of MI13, becomes this in the second book - albeit by proxy. This is because he's the one controlling a newly created mountain, formerly a volcano, whose insides were transmuted into a vast mine of Vibranium and Mithril, by far the largest store of the former outside of Wakanda. No wonder he spends a good few chapters in an uncharacteristically good mood.
  • In The Minkiad, we get inside the inner workings of Minkus Technologies/Minkus International including the stockholders, employees, business associates, clients, and personnel difficulties. Minkus and his associates climb higher in the business world from small beginnings to a multi-International conglomerate; As they ascend higher, Alvin Meese becomes a greedy self-serving yuppie, Ingrid and Elliot Iverson-Smackle become disenchanted and leave for the academic world, and Stuart Minkus remains with the company internally torn between ethics and profit; He later becomes overwhelmed by the role of “Big Money CEO” and feels smothered by others’ expectations. Such discussions include buying out of shares, insider trading, merging with other companies, small businesses vs. big business, the role of the CEO, corporate takeovers,locating stockholders and clients, a business’ public image when the employees have problems, ecommerce stores, and having and sticking to a company’s core values.
  • In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, the story's equivalent of Most Excellent Superbat, Most Excellent Wonder Bat, casually buys up Mt. Fuji to use as the Super Young Team's base after its market value reached an all-time low since Izuku's spaceship crashed there fifteen years ago. He's smug about this and the purchase apparently didn't even dent his finances, since he claims that his Quirk is to be so rich that he can do anything he wants.
  • White Sheep (RWBY): Jaune mentions early on that his family is rich, but it takes a while for his friends to realize just how rich. When Yang's father Taiyang asks how he would provide for Yang if she (hypothetically) got knocked up, Jaune casually says "I have a few million lien." And context makes it clear he's not talking about his family, but him personally. Turns out that Dust, the super valuable material that people use for everything, grows in huge spires in the Grimmlands. It can be found elsewhere, but it only grows in the Grimmlands. Salem makes disgusting amounts of money just from the Dust that is cleaned off her tower every once in a while.
  • In Ben 10: Omniharem 10, Ben reveals that when he was ten years old, he used Grey Matter to file a high successful, multi-million dollar cease and desist lawsuit against the creators of Super Alien Hero Buddies for illegally using the likeness of Heatblast, Four Arms, and Wildmutt. Add in the fact that Ben still regularly uses Grey Matter to handle and increase his fortune, and you have Ben Tennyson as one of the most (if not the most) wealthiest people on the planet.
  • Jonathan Long in American Loaded Dragon: Jake Long is the owner of Long Enterprises, a billion dollar company that specializes in, well, just about everything, which makes Jonathan one of the wealthiest men in the country, maybe even the world. A minor example of how rich the family is is that Jake's "allowance" allows him to replace a broken vase worth several hundred dollars.
  • My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic: The human version of resident Big Good Celesto is a retired billionaire astronaut who owns part of the island the protagonists live on (including the school they attend), has adopted the human counterparts of Starfleet, and owns a limousine that can turn into a rocket.
  • Corporations and their owners practically embody this trope in Boop the Snoot for Critical Damage! given how ludicrous their investments and overall stocks are. Handsome Jack, as the owner of Hyperion, makes 80 quadrillion on a quarterly basis. The Schnee family used to own their own planet and the garden of their mansion had its own mini-mansion according to Weiss. Angel, despite no longer being with Hyperion, siphoned a few hundred billion dollars in seed money to start her own business. Oh, and she also legally owns the entire planet of Pandora.
  • My Driver Academia: In the sequel Decimo Either Way, the Midoriyas are obscenely wealthy. In addition to the wealth Momo brings in, several of the other parents have successful and highly-profitable companies. There's also all the royalties that comes in.

    Films — Animated 
  • In Incredibles 2, The Deavors head DevTech, one of the world's richest telecommunications companies. As a result, Winston and Evelyn are able to provide Elastigirl with cutting-edge technology, own several "spare" houses, and produce the Everjust hydrofoil, the Cool Boat on which the climax takes place.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Peter Weyland, CEO of Weyland-Yutani in Alien: Covenant and Prometheus, bankrolled the expensive space missions, the development of the David androids, and has Michelangelo's statue of David as a private ornament in his house.
  • In Back to the Future Part II, one of the alternative realities sees Biff Tannen amassing a vast fortune thanks to Gray's Sports Almanac. He is one of America's richest and most powerful men, owns a MegaCorp, controls the police, and can get away with murder.
  • Citizen Kane: Charles Foster Kane is a media tycoon who has more than enough money to spend on constructing Xanadu (which is described in-universe as "the world's largest private pleasure ground") and filling it with exotic animals and priceless art from around the world. One early scene has his adoptive father Mr. Thatcher argue with him over how much money he's losing on running a newspaper and Kane's response?
    We did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.
    • The above quote is said when he is still just starting out, and he's currently #5 on the Forbes Fictional 15. $1 million at the time is approximately $27 million today; thus, "starting out" and thanks to his family's gold holdings (and his mother's management), Mr. Kane is worth at least $1.6 billion.
  • Crazy Rich Asians: The crazy rich Young clan owns major corporations and real estate throughout East Asia, as well as a private estate with grounds in otherwise densely urbanized Singapore. The film opens with unseen father Philip Young taking ownership of a 5-star hotel in London immediately after his family is slighted by the hotel’s front desk staff.
  • Mrs Teasdale in Duck Soup has enough money to bail out a small country. Twice.
  • In Contact, S.R. Hadden lives on a private jet that reportedly never lands, and funds a SETI expy out of his own pocket on a whim. In the finale, it's revealed that he bought up undisclosed numbers of other major corporations purely to obtain the plans to build a backup to the interstellar teleporter, which nearly bankrupted a consortium of world governments, and that he's manipulated nearly every terrestrial person or event in the film purely through use of his bank balance. Carl Sagan's novel goes into thorough detail about the ingenious ways he acquired his fortune, starting with a machine that automatically changes the TV channel the second a commercial starts and culminating in essentially a futuristic city-sized brothel based on ancient Babylon crossed with Las Vegas.
  • In Inception, Saito buys an airline (the timeline of the film is implied to be over the course of a few weeks) because he thinks it's the simplest way to keep the crew out of their hair. It is implied that the Fischers' empire is far greater than his. The Inception team is visibly stunned by this display of wealth, but do not comment on it.
  • Many James Bond villains are apparently quite wealthy, though exact figures are rarely given. In fact, there likely isn't even one Bond villain that does not fit the Screw the Rules, I Have Money! trope.
    • In all of his appearances in the franchise, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the ruthless leader of SPECTRE and 007's biggest Arch-Enemy, has a vast amount of resources to rival developed nations and likes Playing Both Sides of the Cold War into slowly destroying each other via False Flag Operations, despite being of humble origins. All of his appearances have at least one Supervillain Lair. Also, being the head of what in essence is a shadow empire operating through various Front Organizations gives him enough clout into tilting geopolitical events through his proxies, all while stroking his Right-Hand Cat in his Cool Chair and threatening to condemn the world to chaos if he doesn't get what he wants.
    • Goldfinger is another example, being that he's obsessed with gold, has a gold-plated gun, drives a gold-plated Rolls-Royce Phantom III, and part of his Evil Plan is to nuke Fort Knox to corner the gold market.
    • Mr. Big (Live and Let Die) and Franz Sanchez (Licence to Kill)'s drug empires secretly control entire countries (nominally fictional, but they're blatantly Haiti and Panama).
    • Hugo Drax from Moonraker is the world's foremost manufacturer of space shuttles, and builds an entire space station apparently with his own money.
    • Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies is noted by supplemental materials to be the most powerful man in the world at the time of the film. His media empire can send a government crashing down with a single news story.
  • In The Magic Christian, Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) is the richest man in the world who with his adopted son Sir Raymond Grand (Ringo Starr) goes out to prove how capitalism corrupts. The Magic Christian itself is an ocean liner that Sir Guy heavily invests in prior to its ill-fated maiden voyage.
  • In The Man Who Would be King, the heroes become part of it when they find out about the treasure of Alexander the Great.
  • In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tony Stark. It was estimated that his Power Armor suits alone already cost billions of dollars, but as of Avengers: Age of Ultron, he's personally footing the bill for the Avengers as a team, complete with a massive base of operations and several Cool Planes. By Captain America: Civil War he agrees to finance the research projects of an auditorium full of MIT grad students who all came out to attend his keynote speech where he demonstrates a several hundred million dollar pair of glasses that can project memories from his brain.
  • In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy, Bruce Wayne starts out on the list. In Batman Begins, he buys a five-star luxury hotel just to help establish his billionaire playboy cover (the two models he was "dating" wanted to swim in its fountains).
  • The DC Extended Universe also has a few cases of Batman's wealth in Justice League ("What is your power?" "I'm rich."), such as making sure Ma Kent's debt is finished off by buying the bank.
    Clark Kent: How did you get the house back from the bank?
    Bruce Wayne: I bought the bank.
  • The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982):
    Sir Percy: [taking two stacks of bills from the safe] I'll be gone two days... [takes two more stacks] ...perhaps four...
  • In the film Shrimp On The Barbie, Alex's father Sir Ian is so rich that he can order a plane that is already taxiing for takeoff to return to the boarding gate.
  • In Wall Street, Gordon Gekko is regarded as a ruthless corporate raider whom protagonist Bud Fox idolizes. Partway through the movie he confronts his rival, Larry Wildman, who during a tense negotiation tells Gekko, "I could break you, mate. In two pieces over my knees. You know it. I know it. I could buy you six times over. I could dump the stock just to burn your arse!"
  • Watchmen features former superhero Adrian Veidt, who franchised his Ozymandias identity and made a fortune, which he poured into developing revolutionary technologies such electric cars and dirigibles, which multiplied his prodigious wealth into ridiculous levels. Veidt was so rich, during an argument about how to handle the world's energy crisis, he told a group of captains of industry (including Ford Motors owner Lee Iacocca) that he was "worth more than all their corporations combined", in all seriousness and without a hint of hyperbole. And as they all immediately cowed, it is likely that Veidt was not exaggerating.
  • X-Men Film Series: Professor Charles Xavier comes from Old Money, and his inherited fortune must be ludicrously vast because he has the financial means to operate and maintain his Superhero School, which appears to house hundreds of students (can you imagine how high the food bill alone must be?). Moreover, he can fund the necessary research and development for high-tech vehicles, equipment and facilities that his Badass Crew requires. And the guy still has cash to spare because he enjoys some of the trappings of his upper-class upbringing, such as his expensive suits, plus he owns several horses (naturally they're cared for in a well-stocked stable), has a large personal plane which is beautifully furnished, and a collection of vintage cars that are in perfect working order. In other words, money is no issue for him whatsoever.

    Gamebooks 
  • In Bloodsword, you can coerce a genie into giving you 3 wishes. Among these wishes, you may try to wish for riches beyond the dreams of avarice. The genie can't do that because human greed has no limit, but he'll do the next best thing. He'll give you tens of millions of gold coins and a free castle, which will make you richer than any king or Merchant Prince.

    Literature 
  • Charles Adair of Super Powereds. Justified in that on top of having incredible money sense, he also has a power that can convert tons of toxic waste into gold.
  • The Black Coats' hidden treasure, whose location is known only to the Colonel, contains among other things, IOUs in amounts high enough to bankrupt Europa and America, several columns of gold coins, with 3,000 coins in each pile, etc. Naturally, the Colonel can't resist bragging about this when he shows the treasure to Vincent Carpentier:
    The Colonel: I am gold, I am wealth, I'm the power of money which none can resist. You must not compare me to Kings or Emperors or anyone who lives upon the Earth. I have only two rivals: One in Heaven, the other in Hell. For only God, if God exists, and Satan, if Satan exists, can say as I do: Everything in the World is mine, for I own it all!
  • The House of Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire are famous for being astonishingly rich thanks largely to controlling a large chunk of the realm's gold mines, tithing the lords of even more, and being ridiculously good at finance. They are the main creditors of the Iron Throne, and their unofficial motto is "a Lannister always pays his debts." Possibly a partial subversion, according to this Slate article. It argues that House Tyrell may become richer than them when winter comes, and may already BE wealthier in the first place.
  • From The Belgariad, Silk a.k.a. Prince Kheldar. In the Malloreon, people who are introduced to him will identify him as "the richest man in the world," though he admits that there might still be some governments that are richer than him. Interestingly, while he readily considers the art of making money "The Great Game," he has absolutely no interest in the money itself, calling it "nothing more than a way to keep count of the score." On at least one occasion he willingly left all the cash and valuables he had gathered to that point behind. Oh, yeah, he took a moment to sigh over the loss, then just sorta tossed it over his shoulder and never looked back.
  • The Night's Dawn Trilogy has the members of the B7 security council, the shady cabal running special security operations for the government of planet Earth, Govcentral. Officially. Unofficially, the members are about 400-year-old super-capitalist tycoons who Body Surf every few decades, and secretly control Earth and many other planets. Their financial institutions are said to support a "healthy percentage of the human race" (which is spread across 800+ planets throughout the Milky Way).
  • In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka owns the world's largest chocolate factory (so big it has an entire subterranean river system made from liquid chocolate) and develops things like teleportation just to boost his advertising revenues. At one time he had a huge human workforce that he spontaneously sacked in its entirety due to industrial espionage issues (severance pay, anyone?); he then imported an entire unknown nation of people IN SECRET just to staff his factory, and had enough cash stockpiled to allow him to do this while the factory was closed and he was receiving no income. Better yet, he pays the Oompa-Loompas wages not in money but in leftover cacao beans, so every penny spent on a Wonka bar goes straight to him! While Wonka tends to laugh a lot, he laughs really hard in the sequel when Charlie's family is concerned about money, telling them he "has plenty of that!"
    • In the 2013 stage musical adaptation, Sir Robert Salt — Spoiled Brat Veruca's dad and a billionaire himself — questions Wonka as to the "point" of the elaborate Chocolate Room, as only its waterfall (which mixes the chocolate river's contents) seems to have a practical, money-making application. As it turns out, the rest of the room was created solely as a personal, private work of art; Wonka is a firm believer in the concept of Doing It for the Art and prefers to use his fortune in the service of creating new things (if only for himself) rather than conventional Conspicuous Consumption.
  • In Alfred Bester's The Computer Connection, the character nicknamed 'the Greek Syndicate' owns 15% of the whole world. Well, "fourteen point nine one seven percent, but who counts?"
  • In The Count of Monte Cristo, a scene in the novel shows Edmond Dantes listing his assets, totaling an estimated value of 120 million francs, an impossibly huge figure by 1838 standards (as a comparison, Napoleon Bonaparte's personal wealth in 1814 was estimated at somewhere in the region of 80 million francs), and this is the near the end of the story, when he has already spent a large portion of his fortune. He is able to effectively "resurrect" a ship confirmed as lost at sea in a matter of weeks, is implied to control one of the most powerful banks in Europe, owns a fleet of ships, and singlehandedly toys with the French financial market specifically to screw a single person.
  • From Count Zero by William Gibson, Josef Virek: "You will be given access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to purchase, let us say, substantial amounts of real estate—" "Real estate?" "Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost certainly be given."
  • E William Brown's Daniel Black Cycle main protagonist sometimes looks like this, starting from book 2. If problem CAN be solved by gold, why not just not do this?. If somebody decide they want Daniel's mithril airship and tried to get it force, why not make it possible for them to buy as much mithril as possible, at very good prices?. Conjuring gold and aluminum takes a lot of mana but if you can create direct matter to mana conversion devices, it's not a problem anymore
  • Dune:
    • Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV Corrino is the CEO of CHOAM (Combine Honnete Ober Advanced Mercantiles), which has an exclusive monopoly on Spice, a drug found on the planet Arrakis. The main selling point of spice is that it prolongs the life of its user, cures all diseases, makes you clairvoyant, and gets you addicted with one dose. This is in addition to being The Emperor of a whole galaxy (which is a requirement to become CEO of CHOAM).
    • Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who held the contract to run the spice-harvesting operation for approximately a century until immediately prior to the first book, similarly became obscenely wealthy from his share of the spice sales, enough that Emperor Shaddam viewed him as a threat to his power. By stripping the Harkonnens of the CHOAM contracts and giving them to Duke Leto Atreides, and then helping Baron Harkonnen destroy House Atreides in an Allowed Internal War, the Emperor killed two birds with one stone: he rid himself of the threat of the Atreides' soft power (their respect in the Landsraad), and simultaneously impoverished the Harkonnens to remove them as a threat by forcing Baron Harkonnen to move his entire household and army from Arrakis to Geidi Prime and then back to Arrakis.
    • CHOAM also has the rare distinction of being the richest company in FICTION.
  • In the German novel Eine Billion Dollar by Andreas Eschbach, John Salvatore Fontanelli unexpectedly inherits the titular fortune (a trillion dollars in American terms) from a distant ancestor by way of compound interest. Though he tries various things (the East Asian financial crisis of 1997 is ascribed to his failed bid to join the International Monetary Fund), his most impressive feat is to organize worldwide elections.
  • Laurence E. Dahners likes this. In later books of Ell Donsai cycle, titular character was characterized to President of USA as USA taxpayer number 1 and she paid all taxes without any attempts to hide them. ((in this case it doesn't really matter if it's her or her company. Origial source of money was from her patent of PGR chips (FTL 2-way communication over any distance yes, ANY distance. It was tested over insterstellar distances later in series, ignoring any obstacles). Her main investment was to her new company and new technologies, both by her and (later) by her research team, research team later also gets their share.
  • In the novel Elliot Allagash, the titular character comes from a family who own controlling shares in the manufacture of paper, meaning that everything from banknotes to toilet paper gives them an income. Among other huge investments, at one point Elliot sets up an entire youth basketball league just so his friend can join a team.
  • Ender's Game:
    • Andrew Wiggin has three thousand years of interest to draw on, due to time-dilated relativistic interstellar travel, and a sentient AI (one who operates in real time) monitoring his finances. The size of his initial investment is pretty much irrelevant... and it would've been nothing to sniff at, since he was being heralded as the savior of the human race when they assigned him his pension. Forbes even tried putting him in their list of wealthiest characters, but bailed out on complications (for starters, given the currency of the Enderverse descends from the Yen, it involves more than just dollars).
    • His sister Valentine, who accompanied him on basically all of those journeys, is also a big shot. She didn't have a pension or AI help, and her fortune isn't made as big a deal of, but three millennia of interest is still bound to be sizable.
      Olhado: Tell you what, you give me the interest on this holding for a week and I can buy this planet.
  • In Ever World, Nidhoggr fills a large volcano with treasure, the least valuable of which is pure gold. The King of Fairy Land is similarly rich, with diamond-tiled roofs. The heroes sell technology to the fairies for a large bag of diamonds, which they lose after using the diamonds as a weapon against Hetwan fliers.
  • John Varley’s Golden Globe: Sparky spents most of the book as a Hobo IN SPACE!. In the end he gets acquitted of murdering his father, and gets some 70 years of profits from the equivalent of Disney. He spends a few billions on a starship and offers a huge bounty for a Colony Drop on Charon (a planet of black hats).
  • In The Grimnoir Chronicles, Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant is explicitly referred to as the "richest man in the world," and is the owner of United Blimp & Freight.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
    • In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the rock band Disaster Area not only qualifies as the loudest noise in the Galaxy of any kind, but makes such obscene amounts of money that you need sufficiently advanced mathematics just to do their accounting. Lead musician Hotblack Desiato once spent a year dead for tax reasons.
    • The Guide itself in Mostly Harmless can afford to move the entire building to whatever planet looks more fun, and Ford's company credit card can cover a tip that, in Earth terms, "would buy you roughly ... Switzerland."
  • In the In Death series, any time Eve begins to investigate a company or a property, there is approximately a fifty-fifty chance that Roarke owns it. And if he doesn't, he can buy it. Several of the books contain references to his development of an entire planet as a luxury resort, which eventually provides the setting for one of the series's short stories.
  • In Roger Zelazny's Isle Of The Dead, Francis Sandow owns at least one planet, and doesn't know how rich he is. He lost count a long time ago and was never that interested. There's just nothing buyable beyond his means.
  • In Neuromancer, John and Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool retired from the public eye to legal death in a cryo-storage system at the Villa Straylight — the private half of their orbital citystation "Freeside".
  • In Phule's Company, Willard Phule is not only the sole heir to the owner of one of the largest corporations in the galaxy, Phule-Proof Munitions, but he has also amassed a sizeable fortune of his own. He solves nearly every conflict he and his unit encounter throughout the entire series by fast-talking his way out, practically burying the problem in money, or (most commonly) both.
  • In Daniel Keys Moran's Tales Of The Continuing Time series, Francis Xavier Chandler, who is the wealthiest person in the Solar System, owns an orbital house which is larger than some of the Belt City-States. It is a huge slowly rotating cylinder with three levels of increasing gravity, roughly 800 rooms and a free fall swimming pool and zero G racquetball court in the center. The gym is usually attached directly to the house, but when someone wants to exercise, the gym and a counterweight are extended 800 meters away from the house, and a motor then spins both of them until earth normal gravity is achieved. The process takes roughly an hour.
  • In H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes, Graham (no first name given), through an unintentional Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit, awakens in 2200 to a world groaning under the tyrannical misrule of his own trustees.
  • Great Space Battles: The Terran Trade Authority 'verse, from Stewart Cowley's short story collection:
    • All the members of the Nimrodian Club, an organization devoted to bringing back the practice of dueling to ease the boredom of being told how rich you are.
    • Robin Maxwell, of Maxwell Textiles. It appears from the illustration that to accomodate rush hour traffic from the parking garage at one of his factories, he had an eight — lane highway built.
    • Harcourt Apseley, Chairman of Consolidated Aerospace. "Three out of every four major craft in production came off his slips."
  • Stephen Fry's modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Stars' Tennis Balls, give us the more reasonable £324.000.000, rather than 120 million francs.
  • Tolkien's Legendarium:
    • The Hobbit:
      • Smaug sleeps atop a pile of coins and jewelry, which Forbes had some fun evaluating, (be sure to read the comments, one of which raises the value of the pile substantially, and even adds Smaug's armor collection — the resulting sum is so absurd the article's author replies with "I don't find that credible") and even was enough to put him atop their list in 2012. On the qualitative side, keep in mind that when Smaug died, all of the surrounding countries went to war, just over the argument of who got to loot his hoard.
      • It's also worth mentioning the previous owners of most of Smaug's treasure, the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain. Smaug never spends any of his hoard, but the dwarves were consumers and producers in a market society, and they lived under a mountain jam-packed with precious minerals. The kings of the Lonely Mountain would unquestionably stand as part of the Fiction 500 as well.
    • Thingol, King of Doriath in The Silmarillion. Put it this way: Elros and Elrond split up his money. Elros used his half to build a fleet and then a ginormous palace. Elrond used his half to build Rivendell. And that was after the dwarves had raided Thingol's treasury because he refused to pay them for their work making the Nauglamir. Which was also gone by the time Elrond and Elros got there. Basically, the guy was loaded. But, as per usual in Tolkien's stories: this ended up badly for him. In the same book: apparently the Noldor took quite a bit of cash with them when they went to Middle Earth (presumably in the form of jewelry and weaponry). Gondolin, the city founded by King Turgon, was said to be the largest and most beautiful city in Middle Earth, although "a pale reflection of Elven Tirion in the Undying Lands"(where, of course, you don't need money to have cool stuff). Given the size of Minas Tirith, Gondolin must have been eye-poppingly huge. Ost-in-Edhil, aka Moria, was apparently also a very wealthy city and some of it's wealth can be seen in Lothlorien.
  • In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Captain Nemo brags to The Professor Aronnax that he is so rich, he could pay France's entire national debt. Later Aronnax discover this is the truth in Vigo Bay: The superior tech of the Nautilus lets Nemo reclaim all the treasures lost to man in shipwrecking, before any other treasure hunter.
  • The central characters of "The Totally Rich" by John Brunner would put anybody on the Fortune 500 in the shade. They wouldn't appear on any such list themselves; part of what it means to be totally rich is that, in a world of paparazzi and celebrity profiles, they can afford true privacy — how rich are they? They're so rich that you've never heard of them.
  • In Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, several vampires are mentioned to be unimaginably wealthy with no indication where that wealth came from.
    • Both Lestat and Armand started poor (even though Lestat was a nobleman). Lestat gained a small fortune from his maker, who committed suicide shortly after turning Lestat. By modern days, Lestat has no idea how much money he has. He has accountants for that. All he does is tell them when he needs money, and they wire it. It's implied they invest the rest. Given that he's a vampire, he doesn't actually need that much, especially after gaining the ability to fly. In Tale of the Body Thief, a man asks for $20 million for one day of swapping bodies with him. While for Lestat this is pocket change, he's still reluctant to just give the money to a potential charlatan. Armand owns an island. And not a small one.
    • Lestat's latest protege, Quinn Blackwood, comes from an insanely wealthy Louisiana patrician family. His great-great-grandfather Manfred owned a large plantation and won the services of an exclusive law/investment firm in a poker game, letting him invest the family wealth for the kind of returns Wall Street executives have wet dreams over. Most of the Blackwood family is fairly low-key; for instance, Quinn's grandfather "Pops" attends cock fights and enjoys doing landscaping, while the plantation house itself serves as a bed-and-breakfast. Aunt Queen, on the other hand, has spent most of her life jet-setting across the globe, visiting wondrous sites and staying in five-star hotels. When Quinn comes into his inheritance, his first thoughts are of Pops and how money doesn't necessarily buy happiness, but then he concludes that money can lease happiness for as long as he'd like. He indulges in gifts for his family and friends and other extravagant purchases, but even so, these are done with the accrued interest. Despite everything he buys, he literally cannot spend his money faster than he makes it back.
  • Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Myra Rutledge is the owner of a Fortune 500 candy company (almost like a reference to this trope!), and is at least a billionaire. Her friend Countess Anne "Annie" de Silva owns more money than Bill Gates, as Myra likes to point out.
  • The Cullens of The Twilight Saga, thanks to hundreds of years of art collecting and a century of playing the stock market (with a clairvoyant guiding them), have a cash stockpile that the 2011 Forbes Fortune 15 estimates as larger than those of Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark combined.
  • In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, Sam Vimes, formerly a penniless policeman, is consternated to learn that on marrying Lady Sybil Ramkin, he now has an income of seven million dollars a year plus full access to the Ramkin estates and family fortune. This in an economy where ten dollars a week would be a higher than average wage — most Ankh-Morporkians would be happy to receive a dollar a day. It has been calculated that if seven million a year has been piling up ever since Sybil's grandfather stopped paying for regiments, the Ramkin wealth would be around three hundred million dollars. Sam has so far endowed a hospital, and heavily subsidises relief for Watch widows and orphans. And unlike other city nobles, he makes a point of paying his taxes.
  • Tyler Vernon, the protagonist of Troy Rising, who discovered that one species of aliens goes crazy for maple syrup. He swaps a truckload of it for billions of dollars of alien tech, then uses that money to buy up the majority of maple syrup production in the world. He quickly becomes the richest man in the world, and then uses his money to help build weapons to get hostile aliens out of Sol, and ultimately finance Earth's space defenses and industry — both of which explain how he's still the richest man in the world when hostile aliens put an end to the maple syrup trade. He's stated that he doesn't want to rule the world, and actually would like to break up his company once the war ends, but if he wanted to, he could do it in a heartbeat, especially because he owns a solar-powered superlaser that can either melt asteroids or cut alien battleships in two.
  • Trent from the S.D. Perry Resident Evil novels, the character invented to spackle all the gaping plot holes from the games, is so loaded he can afford to dress and act like something out of a cheesy old spy movie (he even wears a trench coat and fedora) and be taken completely serious.
    Jill: [thinking] It was laughable, yet he just handed you several thousands of dollars worth of equipment with a straight face and told you to watch your back. You think he's kidding?
  • According to After Dead, the epilogue of The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, Bill Compton was already wealthy from a number of investments he's accumulated over the years, but after creating a company that produces a line of vampire-oriented video games, he's wealthy enough to buy and control Louisiana. He also demands that the talent in his companies work exclusively for him for 20 years and regularly has to build more additions to his already huge estate because of that. And when he learns that the family home of one of his descendants is in complete disrepair, he discreetly gives them enough money to restore the mansion to its original glory and then some.
  • Tuesday at the Office gives us the Vogelsang Trade Network, which went from being the inheritance of a Duke's second son to being a major player in international trade and finance. They do so much volume in business that a 3 million gold a year payout to prop up the mismanaged ducal holdings of the other branch of the Vogelsang family is considered 'cutting back'; it used to be over three times that.
  • Bigend Books: Hubertus Bigend had a substantial chunk of cash from inheritance and managing Blue Ant, a massive advertising company. Then, in Pattern Recognition, he stumbles upon a subliminal advertising technique that considerably boosts his company's success rate. But this is chump change compared to the sheer amount of cash he's prepared to make when he receives a program designed to predict market movements with flawless accuracy up to seventeen minutes in the future in Zero History. As he says seven seconds would have been more than enough, one can only wonder just how deep the man's pockets are about to become.
  • Most of the families in Crazy Rich Asians, particularly the Leongs, who buy a British luxury hotel simply because the manager is being racist to them when they get there.
  • In the RCN novels, Daniel Leary was cut off without a farthing by his rich and powerful father after the argument that prompted him to become a spacer, but he quickly becomes independently wealthy from the prize money for capturing starships, and the bajillions of florins in prize money he invariably brings in becomes one of several reasons he has an easier time recruiting crews than other RCN captains (even his enlisted crew and noncoms get rich off their shares). He himself could really care less about the money so long as it's there when he needs it: when he's not on duty he lives as something of a self-made trust fund baby, with his sister, a banker, handling his accounts for him.
  • In Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia the people of the planet Old North Australia have a production monopoly on the drug stroon, which grants immortality. The resulting wealth threatens to destroy their hard-working rural way of life, so they impose an import duty of 200 million percent on all imports and spend the revenue on defence. The result is that everything costs two million times as much on their planet as off planet, and an ordinary agricultural labourer's income is billions per week. In this setting, Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the 151st is the owner of one of the oldest and largest sheep stations, a major stroon producer, and is fabulously rich even on Old North Australia. To escape some political difficulties he buys Earth, "lock, stock, and underpeople". A lot of people are embarrassed and annoyed that that was possible.
  • It is a function of her job, but Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road has Star, Empress of the Twenty Universes. All of her subjects contribute a tiny fraction of their money in taxes, but it all adds up to simply ridiculous amounts of money for her (and Oscar, her consort's) personal expenses. At one point Oscar has decided he wants to make an outfit for her, and is holding a large bowl of extremely precious gems (diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and other gems he has no name for) as part of the decorations for it. At another point Star suggests tearing out a wall of their house and re-routing a river so he can go fishing while staying at home.
  • The City and the Dungeon: All the upper-spectrum delvers. One violet delver randomly decides to drop a blue crystal (less than pocket change to her) to buy all the clothes and clothes shops in the City, and absolutely no one can stop her. When Alex returns home after going violet, he idly notes that he could buy his entire birth city without any difficulty at all.
  • In the Robert A. Heinlein / Spider Robinson Posthumous Collaboration Variable Star, Conrad of Conrad owns roughly half the Solar System. Heinlein himself seems to have gone on to re-use various bits of the story outline that Robinson turned into Variable Star; Rudbek of Rudbek in Citizen of the Galaxy isn't quite as overwhelmingly rich and powerful as Conrad of Conrad, but is still fabulously wealthy. (Even Conrad of Conrad is stated to have rivals, so he doesn't own everything.)
  • In The Stormlight Archive, the Alethi Highprinces accidentally became this as they waged the Vengeance War against the Parshendi of the Shattered Plains. Because of the unusual geography of the region, the Alethi armies focused on a prolonged seige against the Parshendi. But while besieging the enemy, they learned that the region is home to gigantic chasmfiends, massive crustacean-like predators that break the inverse-square rule via having massive Gem Hearts that store the titular Stormlight which reduces gravity's effects on them. Because gemstones are the basis for the world's economy (due to their applications in transmuting materials through magic) and larger gemstones are more powerful, the gigantic Gem Heart of each chasmfiend is worth a titanic amount, to the point that a single one can pay an entire princedom's operating costs for months. The Alethi armies begin to focus entirely on hunting the chasmfiends and fighting the Parshendi for control of the gemhearts, and as a result they end up becoming astoundingly wealthy over the years they wage the otherwise-costly siege.
  • The Sorrows of Satan: Prince Lucio Rimânez, the earthly incarnation of Satan, is so incredibly wealthy that he considers Geoffrey's five million pounds (over 500 million in today's money) to be a mere trifle. All ill-gotten gains belong to him, and when the original owner dies, Lucio is able to use the money to tempt more people to sin. He tells Geoffrey that he could buy up whole kingdoms, or use financial speculation to destroy whole countries.
  • Alex Rider: Unsurprising for a James Bond-inspired series, many of the Big Bads have a ludicrous amount of wealth behind them to carry out their evil plans. However, this is subverted with Nikolei Drevin, the main villain of Ark Angel. He's a multi-billionaire who states anything can be his, and he's funding the titular Ark Angel, the first hotel in space. However, we later learn that Ark Angel is a failure that's bankrupting even him, so he's planning on knocking it out of space onto the Pentagon where evidence of his illegal activities are held and collect the insurance.
  • In The Purple Cloud, Adam realises After the End that this trope applies to him now that all other property owners are dead. He spends sixteen years constructing a massive palace of gold and jet with a self-replenishing lake of wine, and decorates the house with paintings he took from the Louvre.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In The Addams Family, the titular clan of loveable weirdos. In particular, the patriarch, Gomez, puts more value on losing money than making it, often paying for things with wads of cash he apparently left lying around the house earlier for that purpose.
  • Babylon 5: In season 4 we are introduced to William Edgars, owner of one of the largest pharmaceutical and research companies in Earth space. When mentioned to Mr. Garibaldi, the first thing that comes to his mind is "Has more money than God, that William Edgars." Mr. Edgars uses his wealth to fund a variety of philanthropic endeavors and a number of special side projects, such as a project looking into immortality, eventually leading to a confrontation with the Soul Hunters, and most significantly an engineered virus that will infect all telepaths, making them dependent on regular treatment of a specific drug to survive, essentially enslaving them forever. Of course, since Mr. Garibaldi eventually married Edgars' widow, with whom he'd had a long previous relationship with, after his death, Garibaldi then becomes the one with more money than God.
  • The Big Bang Theory — In-Universe. Sheldon describes Raj's parents as "Richie Rich rich...Somewhere between Bruce Wayne and Scrooge McDuck."
  • Jack Hodgins on Bones for part of the series. He was believed to be the sole heir to the Cantilever Group, the third largest private corporation in the country. His net worth was measured in billions and he had large stakes in many companies and also in the Jeffersonian itself. Once while they were dating, he bought Angela perfume costing thousands of dollars an ounce. Unlike many examples, he never flaunted his wealth and hated being rich. In season 8, he lost it all, though, to hacker Christopher Pelant. Oddly, the repercussions appeared minimal.
  • Castle:
    • Title character Richard Castle made millions as a bestselling mystery novelist, and his wealth and connections come in handy many times, such as in season two's "Sucker Punch" when he funds a sting to smoke out the hitman suspected of killing both the Body of the Week and Beckett's mother to the tune of a hundred grand. He also at one point buys a historic bar to keep a big chain from getting it.
    • In "Kill the Messenger", Castle describes the membership of the high-society Pierson Club with the following line: "My money goes in banks. Their money buys banks."
  • Doctor Who:
    • "Dalek": Henry van Statten, who owns the internet. Has enough money from slowly releasing elements of his hoarded alien technology that he can decide the next US presidential election on a whim.
    • "Spyfall": Daniel Barton is the CEO of MegaCorp VOR, a tech giant said to be more powerful than most countries. VOR also seems to be inspired by Google: it started out as a search engine which quickly became the most popular in the world and has since expanded into a ton of different areas of research, but has recently been accused of some shady business practices.
  • In the Elementary premiere, Sherlock Holmes's father is stated to be very wealthy and is the one who hires Joan Watson to be Sherlock's sober companion. However, it is not till much later that we find out just how extremely rich he is. Sherlock and Mycroft need to find data that has been stolen from a bank's computer system so they make an appointment to visit the bank. The bankers think that they are there on behalf of their father and on very short notice organize a banquet for them that would easily feed a dozen people. When the bankers discover the real reason for the visit, they are disappointed since they were hoping that they might be able to get a small percentage of Holmes Sr.'s banking business. To put things in perspective, the data theft will cost the bank millions and ruin their reputation but having the Holmes family as clients is seen as more profitable than recovering the data.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The Lannisters are by far the richest family in the Seven Kingdoms, and Tywin Lannister is often called the richest man in the Seven Kingdoms — it's mentioned in one episode that King Robert owes them 3 million in gold, and they still have enough left to fork over 80,000 for a tournament with no problem. "As rich as a Lannister" seems to be a well-known phrase, enough so that Tyrion Lannister is able to use it to bribe his way out of a dungeon. Another common saying is that Tywin Lannister is so rich that he "shits gold." According to Forbes magazine, he is worth 2.1 billion American dollars in the books. That makes him exceedingly wealthy even by the standards of a modern economy, Vanity Fair even estimates him to be worth 2.4 trillion American dollars. The second season briefly mentions that House Lannister trades with the Free Cities and as far as Qarth. However, we discover in Season 4 that the Lannisters' wealth may not be as secure as thought. In one episode Tywin reveals that they have not mined any gold in three years, and they are also heavily indebted due to the war as most of the Lannisters' wealth was spent financing Joffrey's time on the throne during the War of the Five Kings; it's the reason why Tywin ends up allying with House Tyrell. Even worse in season 7, when the Iron Bank confronts Cersei for not paying the debts, as her family's vault is empty and not to mention, losing alliance with the Tyrells, because she orchestrated the bomb that killed Lord Mace, Margaery and Loras Tyrell.
    • Cersei calls the Tyrells the second richest in "Second Sons".
    • The merchant prince Xaro Xhoan Daxos, according to Word of God (or at least word of his actor), is even wealthier than Tywin, and he could very well be the wealthiest person in the universe of the series. Xaro started with nothing, but is now wealthy enough that he could personally fund a successful invasion of the Seven Kingdoms and it wouldn't even be a huge investment, or so it appeared, anyway. A later episode reveals that Daxos' vault is actually empty. He's still wealthy, of course ... his house, furnishings, and jewelry are worth quite a bit, and he presumably has investments elsewhere in the city as well ... but he doesn't have the liquid reserves that he claims.
  • Horrible Histories' Marcus Lucinius Crassus fits; while his real life counterpart would need plenty of elaboration, this version gets to brag about how he just bought an army when he needed one, and casually purchased any house on fire in cash, on the spot, so he could have his personal firemen put it out.
  • The 1950s TV show The Millionaire dealt with a faceless philanthropist sending out $1 million checks to ordinary people to see how the money would change their lives, for better or worse. Showing how powerful TV was at the time, viewers wrote into CBS (the network of the show) asking for a handout.
  • An evil example appears in Monk: Dale "The Whale" Biederbeck, a Fat Bastard extraordinaire. He's so enormously obese that he's trapped in his bed, but he doesn't need to move — the world moves for him. In Dale's debut episode, Captain Stottlemeyer mentions that he avoids publicity by buying up entire newspapers (not runs of newspapers, the companies themselves). Dale himself is shown casually calling a congressman (while Congress is in session, no less) and deciding his votes, and later telling a professional baseball coach to change the current pitcher; everyone immediately bows to his whims. Even when he's sent to prison, his cell is outfitted as a hotel room, and he has a network of informants and electronics that let him know everything that happens in the complex. In his own words: "I wouldn't bend over to pick up twelve hundred dollars... even if I could."
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus: Mr Banker in the "Pantomime Horses" sketch has a graph with the masthead "How rich I am." The bar goes off the graph upwards.
  • From Person of Interest, Harold Finch is rich enough to be able to buy up 51% of a major corporation on demand at one point. On another occasion he buys a luxury hotel and makes the person they helped that episode the general manager. In yet another case, he gave a dry cleaning clerk a full-ride scholarship to Harvard Law so he could bug a businessman's clothes. He also casually purchases a security company to set up a cover story for Reese. When the background check is too thorough for that he simply buys a credit bureau as well. It's strongly indicated he stole most of his money in a prior career as The Cracker. Averted in season 4 after the Machine has to create new identities for the cast to protect them from its Evil Counterpart Samaritan, cutting off Finch's access to his money. They get a new operational slush fund by robbing the mob, but it's nowhere near the scope of their previous resources.
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive actually includes one of these. Andrew Hartford has a mansion with 27 bathrooms complete with a secret cave underneath with special genetic scramblers (which gives superpowers on the molecular level), ranger technology and zords (which gives power suits and a Humongous Mecha), all which he basically designed for his own private use rather than needing to have it go public in any way. He owns a film studio, had Will break into his own bank, has pioneered holographic recording technology and even built his own absurdly lifelike robot just for his own use, and even has time to spend "twice the net worth of New Mexico" to go treasure hunting in his spare time. It's pretty crazy.
    • There's also the Shiba family, who must have some pretty solid investments. Antonio seemed to work to pay his way, but in the two years they were active, Shiba family money was supporting five Rangers and their mentor at home and Lauren and her mentor in hiding and we know at least the previous generation did the same thing, plus the house was rebuilt in between. The Shibas and the other families have been doing this for about four hundred years. It's also implied that they own their own monastry, the Tengen Gate.
  • On Punky Brewster (the 1984 series), Margaux Kramer's family is notably wealthy. This may account for her contemptuously calling the other kids "peasants." (Season four's "Poor Margaux" had her dad going bankrupt, only to retain his fortune. During the lean moments, Punky still offered Margaux a shoulder to cry on.
  • In Star Trek, insane amounts of wealth don't mean as much in a society that can replicate most of their daily goods, but a few beings manage to stand out.
    • The Ferengi have had thousands of years to hone and refine their capitalistic arts to perfection, so it stands to reason that at least a few very successful Ferengi can fit onto this list. In fact, Grand Nagus Zek goes so far as to publish a series of Revised Rules of Acquisition in order to change his entire species' hat from Honest John's Dealership to something more respectable. He realizes that many prospective customers are leery of doing business with Ferengi because of their cutthroat business practices, and by regaining their trust they can expand their customer base. All for increased profits.
    • The Next Gen episode "The Most Toys" brings us collector Kivas Fajo. While his wealth is not specifically mentioned in the show, he has enough to synthesize large amounts of two exceptionally rare, dangerous, and difficult compounds to set in motion his plan to steal Data. He also has perhaps the largest collection of rare and unique artifacts in existence.
    • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Quark's cousin owns his own moon.
  • In The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, London Tipton. Heiress to a hotel fortune. Subverts the ditzy "I can see my house from here!" by actually being able to see her house. From space. When she goes a day or two without buying anything, she comments that it's severely hurting the global economy. Her father once bought her Iceland, simply because she wanted to be an ice-skater.
  • Thunderbirds: Jeff Tracy definitely counts. The man singlehandedly funded the entire International Rescue organisation, which includes (among other things) a huge island base, aircrafts, spacecrafts, submarines and various rescuing machines that are well ahead of their time, and an international network of agents. His sons also all attended some of the best universities and colleges in the world. He apparently got his money from both his days as an astronaut, and his own company he started afterwards.
  • The West Wing: In the penultimate episode C.J. Cregg is approached by a technology mogul named Franklin Hollis who's said to have bought a private island and "most of" Montana, but apparently still has enough money left over to offer C.J. $10 billion to start a relief foundation.
  • On Will & Grace, Karen's husband Stanley owned Walker Inc., a company that we never really learned much about. Aside from owning at least a few apartment buildings in New York (under the name Walker Property Management, implying Walker Inc. was an umbrella company,) we don't really know what it does or how much it's worth except for the fact that it has made Stan and Karen obscenely wealthy. Just a few examples:
    • In one episode, Karen is upset that Stanley put her on a budget. When Grace asks how much, Karen writes the number down, and Grace responds that she should be able to live on this since Spain does.
    • When Stan's possessions are divvied up in his will in season five, Karen is left $978 million.
    • In another episode, Karen's personal wardrobe is shown to take up several rooms—at one point, she remarks that she "heard an echo in the Fur Vault."
    • It's revealed in one Christmas episode that Karen, whose official job title is assistant in Grace's interior design studio, provides Grace with an annual holiday bonus.
    • When Karen divorces Stanley, she stays in the penthouse suite of New York's Plaza Hotel, which is consistently ranked as one of the fanciest (and most expensive) hotels in the entire world.

    Music 
  • Die Ärzte "Ich bin reich". Lessee... his swimming pool is implied to be the Mediterranean Sea... check.
  • "Whales" by Hail Mary Mallon, a collaborative project between Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic, is a parody of Glam Rap where the rappers brag about the various bizarre, absurdly expensive (and in some cases just plain logically impossible) luxuries they possess.
    Money in the motherfuckin' jar
    Shark-fin pastries, summers on Mars
    Twenty motherfuckers in a levitating car,
    747 full of women and cigars

    Mythology and Religion 
  • Hades/Pluto, ruler of the Greek or Roman Underworld in Classical Mythology. Pluto (and another name, Dis) mean "Rich One". It was said that all of the riches of the mines and the earth's own fertile capabilities belonged to him.
  • Santa Claus can afford to make toys for all the children in the world, which he is capable of maintaining without any apparent means of income. Not to mention a system capable of delivering said presents in one night, the elven city that houses his staff, etc. Santa used to top the Forbes 15 every year with a wealth simply described as infinite. He was removed from the list for this reason and because of children insisting that he was real.
  • God, according to The Bible, is as rich as it's possible to be (all quotes from net.bible.org unless noted otherwise):
    "... for the earth and its abundance are the Lord’s" (1 Corinthians 10:26)
    "The Lord owns the earth and all it contains, the world and all who live in it." (Psalm 24:1)
Psalm 115:6 does say "The heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind," but the preceding examples suggest this should be interpreted as "given as a tenancy" and not "given outright ownership of". See also the parable of the tenants reported in the gospels of Matthew (21:33-41), Mark (12:1-9) and Luke (20:9-16).

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Ted DiBiase, Professional Wrestling's original "Million Dollar Man". So rich, he would flaunt his wealth by cramming $100 bills down the throats of his fallen opponents until they choked on them — at which point, his manservant, Virgil, would take the money back. He lived by the motto, "Everybody's got a price!" and he proved it by, at various points, essentially buying André the Giant, Nikolai Volkoff, and Tatanka. The only man he couldn't buy? Hulk Hogan, who turned down his overtures to buy the WWF Championship for obscene amounts of money. Eventually, he just made his own championship belt, the Million Dollar Belt, a creation of solid gold and diamonds that cost over one million dollars, and which served purely as a monument to his incredible wealth.
  • Ashley Cartier and Tina Ferrari in GLOW tried to use their wealth and status to help people, but those traits still brought them into conflict with the Soviet Colonel Ninotchka and Major Tanya.
  • John "Bradshaw" Layfield started off as a beer-drinking redneck before moving into his more well-known big-talking, big-spending, angry businessman character who pulled up to wrestling matches in a luxurious white limousine. Interestingly, for the trope, this is no lie: Layfield is in fact a wealthy entrepreneur in Real Life with legitimate wealth-building (that he shared in his best-selling book Have More Money Now) and corporate executive talents.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • One of Asmodeus' outfits costs about as much as a large country spends on food in a year. It just goes up from there. Additionally, he wields an extremely powerful Magic Staff made of pure ruby. It is said to be worth 1,000,000 gold pieces — considering its gem value only!
    • Pretty much all high-level characters fall under this trope.
    • In the 5th ed. adventure book Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, the insane wizard Halaster Blackcloak is so wealthy from looting other planes and having his dungeon Undermountain built into a fallen dwarven kingdom that he seldom cares about adventurers going to his home and looting the place. He sometimes even encourages theft at his place.
    • Dragons are known for their massive treasure hoards, a trait inspired by The Hobbit. They're also known for their ability to slaughter the many, many adventurers who try to kill them and take their stuff.
    • Abbathor, the dwarven god of greed and wealth, is the Token Evil Teammate of the dwarven pantheon. He's so rich that he manifests as a dwarf made of precious metals and stones, and his temples often contain vast hoards of wealth.
  • From Shadowrun:
    • After years of audits and asset assessments after his death, the nearest estimate is that the dragon Dunkelzahn was worth well over 100 trillion nuyen, not including his collections of cultural artifacts, magical items, and so forth whose true value cannot be easily quantified. Just read his will. As an example, he left behind 20 million for the redevelopment of Jiffy Pop. And in the single largest endowment, he left Art Dankwalther $34,586,224,739.58 as repayment, accounting for inflation and interest, for a meal Art's ancestor once bought for him.
    • Art Dankwalther, who turned out to be an obsessive lunatic and financial genius, then went on to use that money in a stock scheme that destroyed one of the world's ten largest megacorporations and forced another one to have an IPO and go publicly financed in order to survive his takeover attempt, the fallout of which helped shape the economic history of the planet for the next fifteen years, so Dunkelzahn appeared to have a much more significant plan in play here than simply paying off an old debt in a massively frivolous way.
    • To put the idea of mega-corps into perspective in the Shadowrun universe, imagine a company that's able to employ military and security that would rival most nations'. Imagine also that their headquarters spans tens of city blocks, and the ground it's built on is claimed as sovereign land with its own laws from the parent country. Now consider that there are at least ten megacorps that meet this requirement. All things considered, the megacorps are probably the only thing on this page that could give Scrooge McDuck a run for his money, no pun intended. This being a setting where your corporation IS a country, if they're not an entire continent, government, military and all, and a few trillion dollars is chump change.
  • In Warhammer, Greasus Goldtooth, Overtyrant of the Ogres. One of his special rules is 'Too Rich To Walk', and he is allowed to bribe anyone. No exceptions.
  • This is what the Rogue Traders are in Warhammer 40,000; people gifted with Warrants of Trade that allow them to go wherever and do whatever — so long as it doesn't hurt the Imperium — making absurd amounts of profit in the process. At the low end, a Trader is a merchant with a personal mile-long space battle-cathedral. At the high end, they operate entire fleets of starships and run a trade dynasty spanning dozens if not hundreds of worlds.
  • Exalted features several characters of particularly obscene wealth. Chejop Kejak's personal salary is the equivalent of a Guild factor's entire investment network. The investments and personal treasury of a Guild hierarch are equivalent to the wealth of one of Creation's mightiest trade-nations and the operating budget of the most powerful army in the world. The personal wealth of the Scarlet Empress is able to back the currency used by the vast majority of people in the Realm (which, note, is Creation's single largest economy), as well as being the credit for its most powerful bank. Even those are minimal compared to the finances of some of the wealthiest Exalted of the First Age. Further, the nature of reality in creation (a consensual one supported by the Order-Conferring Trade Pattern that exists as a bulwark against primordial chaos) means that large transactions by fiction 500 characters can damage the trade pattern, and therefore, REALITY ITSELF. Stock market crashes are deadly in Exalted.
  • Adventure!: Any character with the Wealth Beyond Avarice background enhancement qualifies. You can buy pretty much anything without it affecting your bank balance (albeit not necessarily immediately), except if it'd qualify as a background in its own right.

    Video Games 
  • Video games in general tend to have a Money for Nothing problem if the player character can earn fabulous amounts of wealth with no means of spending it in any significant manner. In general, this results in a wealth horde of astronomical value.
  • Andrew Ryan from BioShock fits perfectly for this trope. He earned an immeasurable amount of wealth, allowing him to build a whole city underwater to create an independent society of free individuals in a record time without anybody noticing. It doesn't work out well, but it's still impressive.
  • Persona:
    • The Kirijo Group in Persona 3 are a globally known MegaCorp that, in addition to creating electronics and being involved with research on Shadows (the enemies fought throughout this game and the next), created a man made island (the setting of the game, no less). Party member Mitsuru Kirijo shows off their wealth quite well: a video recording notes that her room in the party's dorm is more luxurious and has a private bathroom, her family has a fashion consultant, they own a vacation home at a nearby beach area, and that certainly doesn't cover all of the technology they've made in regards to hunting Shadows, including Anti-Shadow weapons Aigis and Persona 4: Arena's Labrys. Her wealth also crosses with Arbitrarily Large Bank Account, as it's implied that she covers a lot of expenses for SEES, and it's implied that the only reason Akihiko, an orphan, could go around the world on a journey and possibly re-enroll into college after Persona 4: Arena (in Real Life, college applications in Japan revolve around exams and there's very little flexibility for those who choose it or opt to go straight to work instead) is because he has Mitsuru and Aigis backing him up both financially and reputation-wise.
    • The original Persona had the Nanjo Group, which is this trope to a lesser degree. The only hint of their wealth, aside from party member Kei Nanjo and his butler Yamaoka, is a scene in Persona 2: Eternal Punishment where they are revealed to have enough money to completely erase any hints of involvement with the supernatural with a simple phonecall. From the butler. As a matter of fact, the Kirijo Group is mentioned to have originally split off from the Nanjo Group, and the two companies still work closely together.
    • And before both of them is SEBEC; an in-universe Fortuna 500 company that drabbles in subjects such as genetic research and supernatural experimentation, and still has enough money to spare to hire cybernatically-enhanced secret police and the Yakuza. They have also drabled in reality-bending machines and the creation of Artificial Persona users; something mentioned in Persona 3.
    • Persona 5 has Okumura Foods, which owns the Big Bang Burger chain and party member Haru Okumura is the sole daughter of the owner. It's mentioned they have the funds and ability to casually privately rent "Destinyland" for a party that the Phantom Thieves commandeer as per Haru's request following their latest mission's completion.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, Robert House. Before the Great War, he was the Owner and CEO of one of the largest corporations on the entire planet, bought out dozens if not hundreds of other large corporations, and personally funded research into a life support system that would give the Golden Throne a run for its money.
    • After discovering that the world would end fifteen years prior with the Power of Math, he set about to personally fund the transformation of the greater Las Vegas Area (which by this point in time he owned, save for a single business owned by his half-brother, the reason for this being that he bought all of the Las Vegas area and screwed with the local economy solely to screw over said brother) into an impenetrable missile-proof fortress, complete with anti-missile lasers fitted into the rooftops of casinos, orbiting satellites designed to fry incoming ICBMs, and an entire army of extremely well-armed robots armed with absurd amounts of weaponry and self-repair systems.
    • After the war, he spent, on average, around a million caps a year on mercenaries and salvage teams for more than two hundred years in an effort to recover a platinum poker chip that contained the updated software that would turn his army of killer robots into an army of military grade killer robots. Robert House is on this list by virtue of being the only one with enough money to be able to survive a nuclear holocaust and thrive afterwards in a world where Everything Is Trying to Kill You.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, President Shinra, being the owner of Shinra Electric Power Company effectively controlled the whole world by economic means. Except for one quasi-autonomous state, which was conquered by Shinra's own private army. Constructed a whole cyperpunkian city and had the only space program. His heir Rufus funded the next world-spanning organization and maintained infrastructure to fly Black Helicopters after the company downfall. Yes, even without any new revenue stream, he was still that rich.
    • Implied in Final Fantasy VI with the unnamed bidder in the Auction House, who can repeatedly purchase items for 1 million gil and call it a treat for the day.
  • In Guilty Party, Dorian Dickens, head of the world's most effective and famous detective family. Exact wealth unknown, but it's enough to purchase a couple hundred zeppelins—or their approximate worth in pudding.
  • One of the side quests in Honkai: Star Rail reveals that Asta, the lead researcher of the Herta Space Station, effectively funds the facility on her own credit card because she hails from an obscenely wealthy and renowned family who are among the leaders of the IPC. She's also not above trying to buy an entire fleet of ships for extra security or giving a scammer 200 million credits to suss him out. One of the readable items the player can discover that despite all the money she spends on the station to keep it running and make life better for the staff, her mother is concerned that she doesn't spend enough.
  • From the Mass Effect series, the Illusive Man. Cerberus' resources, while not unlimited, are still substantial enough to fund a two-year project to rebuild someone who is for all intents and purposes dead, and can replicate — with improvements, including an incredibly complex brand-new AI — the most advanced starship in the galaxy, with unique, groundbreaking stealth technology. Now, if even that doesn't sound like much, consider how valuable element zero is, then consider how much eezo was sunk into the drive cores of both the Normandy SR-1 and the Normandy SR-2. Note that late-game, we actually do find out where Cerberus gets its money from: Cerberus operates several dozen legitimate Fiction 500 corporations, and receives substantial funding from "private investors" — ultra-wealthy pro-humanity individuals, especially within the Alliance's military-industrial complex. They were also able to build the Normandy SR-2 because the very companies that Cerberus established to fund themselves were among those who built the original Normandy SR-1, so Cerberus had access to the blueprints and equipment to build the replacement. Similarly, they were able to create the ship's AI, EDI, using leftover Reaper technology and the rogue VI on Luna, both from the first game, so some of the initial cost was less than if they had to research and develop EDI without any of those advantages. By the third game, Cerberus has the resources to wage war against the entire galaxy, due to using Reaper tech to indoctrinate people into becoming mooks.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has the Andromeda Initiative, which is able to fund the construction of six very large spaceships designed to carry around twenty thousand beings each to another galaxy, along with a variety of smaller support ships, and the material needed to set up colonies there. It actually turns out to be a subversion, the Initiative's founder had run out of money pretty early on, and the project only got off the ground thanks of an anonymous backer who knew about the impending Reaper invasion.
  • From Metal Gear Solid 3, Colonel Volgin is in possession of the Philosophers' Legacy, the accumulation of the Ancient Conspiracy's vast fortunes, and he can personally bankroll his own assembly line of doomsday machines. The US government is willing to sacrifice the greatest soldier the world has ever known to get their hands on his money. As it's worth $100 Billion in 1964 money (which would be almost $1 trillion dollars today when adjusted for inflation), it's easy to see why.
  • In Remnant: From the Ashes, this is why the Iskal Queen can make an offer for the Guardian Heart item you get from killing a powerful boss. Unlike the Undying King who faces an uprising and has only partial control of a nearly dead world, the Iskal Queen is the sole ruler of Corsus and it's a rich, verdant world. The offer she gives you for the Guardian Heart is to use her immense wealth to help your quest. And it shows, where the Undying King only gives you a Magitek scythe, the Queen gives you a new set of good armour and a Gear Punk crossbow (plus you'll be forced to kill the Undying King so that nets you a Magitek assault rifle and a strong new ability). And in the adventure mode, if you see her again, she's still grateful and will give you an artifact that unlocks The Monolith that will eventually net you some new abilities and one of the best sets of armour in the game.
  • Candy from the Richman series is a rich schoolgirl who can purchase an island just with her pocket money.
  • In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Nwabudike Morgan, richest man on any planet, who is wealthy enough to help fund a significant part of the cost of a spaceship large enough to take a decent fraction of humanity to another star system, after alliances of major countries (like the EU and Russia) have been forced to cut down their share after finding it too costly. Better yet, one victory condition requires you to be rich enough to buy the planet outright, so any player can easily join the Fiction 500.
    • The Spiritual Successor Civilization: Beyond Earth has the American Reclamation Corporation, which has been able to fund an interstellar colonization mission on par with some world governments.
    • The other Spiritual Successor Pandora: First Contact has the Noxium Corporation, which has a monopoly on asteroid mining in the Solar System (by using Imperium to sabotage the competitors' efforts to move in on their turf). They have their own extremely competent R&D division, which manages to improve the Alcubierre Drive developed by the Togra University to make interstellar travel possible. When the Imperium betrays them and "commandeers" their first interstellar colony ship, Noxium's stock drops like a stone, but the Director has anticipated this and had his people bet the farm on the stock dropping, which ends up not only covering the company's losses but giving them enough money to build more such ships, which they then sell on the open market.
  • Somewhat similarly to the Alpha Centauri example, in certain iterations of Civilization, you may have the opportunity, if you play your cards right, for your civilization to get insanely rich, and thereby use its money to basically buy victory. This is easiest with the Spaceship victory, since in most iterations the forms of government that allow you to hurry production of the starship (and everything else) with cash are also the forms of government that allow you to get incredible amounts of cash in the first place.
    • The Venetian civ from Civilization V takes the cake, as they are specifically designed this way. Playing as them, you cannot found new cities and are stuck with one. But you get twice the trade routes (which can easily make you filthy rich) and the Great Person "Merchant of Venice", who can outright buy City States.
    • In Civilization VI, Mali gets ridiculously large bonuses towards gold generation from trade routes that start in deserts, as well as a unique district with extra gold adjacency bonuses and discounts on gold and faith purchases. This lets them outright buy most of the things they need, such as units, buildings, Great People and (with the right Governor upgrades) entire districts. A Mali player will generally be the richest player in the game by far. Given that their leader, Mansa Musa, was likely one of, if not the wealthiest single person in human history, this isn't surprising.
  • In Street Fighter Alpha, Karin Kanzuki. Her parents run the Kanzuki Zaibatsu, and they have a Kill Sat.
  • Robert Garcia is also the scion of the Garcia Concern.
  • Tekken: Depending on which installment you're playing, Heihachi, Kazuya, or Jin is the CEO of the Mishima Zaibatsu, the eminent corporation of The 'Verse.
    • Lee's no slouch, either. He managed to build one of the most advanced robotics companies on the planet from scratch, and has the resources to repair Alisa, a Ridiculously Human Robot whose technology is light-years beyond any of Earth science. His mansion's so big, it has over 60 rooms, and his swimming pool's big enough to serve as a fighting arena.
    • Also Lili Rochefort's father is a wealthy world famous owner of an oil company.
  • In Super Mario Bros.:
    • Bowser Koopa is insanely wealthy, having owned at least twenty castles, an equally ginormous villa and even a city. However, he isn't satisfied unless he can rule the cosmos.
    • In Wario Land, Wario has a huge castle with apparent walls of gold, treasure and more gold lying around, a huge throne, and in Shake It, ends up with a gold filled, gold walled garage with its own chandelier. He got a planet in the first game for getting all the treasure. Heck, the Mario Spinoffs alone show him with a personal gold mine, multiple stadiums, a colosseum, multiple whole cities and a lot of other stuff. Oh, and the WarioWare games apparently sell thousands, if not millions in copies in the game stories. And he still wants more.
      • However, Wario's fortune varies between games, since in other games, he is shown living in a normal house instead of a castle.
      • In the first WarioWare, he converts his house on the top of a mountain pillar into a videogame company and then he moves into another normal house in later games, the intro of WarioWare Gold confirms that Wario became broke, and plots a scheme to become rich, and in WarioWare: Get It Together! he doesn't even have the original flashy company headquarters on the mountain pillar after it was destroyed, and the new WarioWare Inc. building looks like a cheap garage.
    • Though they live in a humble house and don't seem to work a steady day job (besides that whole Princess-rescuing gig), the Mario Brothers own: at least one private plane and a submarine (Mario uses them to rescue Daisy in Super Mario Land), a castle (that Mario seized from Wario in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins), a mansion full of precious gems (Luigi's Mansion), several carts and racetracks (for racing in the various Mario Kart games), places to throw fabulous parties (Mario Party), top-of-the-line tennis gear (Mario Tennis), and near-infinite extra lives thanks to their income stream. In addition, they amass large amounts of gold coins in their travels, a signficant portion of which is invested in their massive extra life reserve.
    • Princess Peach and Princess Daisy are fabulously wealthy too. Being princesses, this is a given for them. They have extravagant castles of their own, along with several carts and racetracks just like Mario and Luigi. They also have topnotch sports gear and they each have a closet full of beautiful dresses and fabulous clothes. In Super Mario Sunshine Princess Peach actually has an airplane that takes her Mario, Toadworth and The Toads to the Isle Delfino for vacation. Princess Daisy herself has the priviledge of ruling four separate regions in Sarasaland, Birabuto, Muda, Easton, and Chai respectively. She evens owns a luxury cruiser. Despite their incredible wealth, Peach and Daisy are very sweet princesses.
  • Wilhelm of Xenosaga owns Vector, a corporation so large that their headquarters is a space station the size of Lebanon and with smaller branches on numerous planets. It's described as the largest and most wealthy corporation in existence. Later, it's revealed he also owns Hyam's Heavy Industries, the second-wealthiest corporation in existence. Oddly for this trope, he doesn't openly flaunt his wealth, his housing, for lack of a better term, is basically a room or two, he never buys anything obscenely priced, most things he does need or want he has made through Vector, and the one time he defies physics, he literally defies physics, and it has nothing to do with money.
  • The Rosenqueen family of the Shared Universe of many Nippon Ichi games, from the Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure series to Disgaea, where they have shops across several worlds and planes.
  • Handsome Jack in Borderlands 2. Among other things, he owns a diamond horse — not a statue, an actual living horse made of diamonds — and promises to pay a group of assassins enough money that they'll be able to buy mansions made of other, smaller mansions.
  • The entire Fable franchise falls into this, as it's possible for the player to get involved in real estate(of both the buy->sell and the buy->rent out varieties), selling merchandise of all kinds(from clothing to jewelry to pies) not to mention make obscene amounts of money from doing odd jobs. It's possible to end up owning the majority of homes, businesses and street vendor stations in the entire nation. To give an idea of what is possible, in the third game in the series Fable III you can make 127,000 gold every 5 minutes not counting odd job work. For perspective, in order to fill the kingdom's treasury with gold, you only need 6 million total. With minimal effort and a bit of patience the player can be worth more privately than an entire nation.
  • In supplementary materials, it's revealed that the RED and BLU teams in Team Fortress 2 each secretly own half of the world through various front companies. And if that wasn't enough, the Announcer secretly controls both of those companies, meaning she effectively owns the entire world.
    • This was later retconned to exclude one company (later two): Mann Co. and Gray Gravel. Mann Co. is the arms dealer for both teams, which has the largest stockpile of Australium in the world. Gray Gravel, on the other hand, has an army of robot mercenaries that are powered by money.
  • Baro Ki'Teer is easily the richest man in Warframe. He trades in hundreds of "Prime weapons" daily, when most top-level players will deal with maybe a dozen Prime weapons per week. An invitation to his parties, so goes word on the street, would set you back a crate full of the most expensive item in the game. He's so rich he once hired the entire playerbase for several weeks, just because he was bored with less violent workers (he needed us to build him a glorified refrigerator).
  • Ted Faro from Horizon Zero Dawn became the world's first trillionaire thanks to his company, Faro Automated Solutions, being at the forefront of several programs aimed at undoing the environmental damage caused decades prior. Then FAS got into manufacturing "peacekeeping" robotic soldiers...
  • In EVE Online the Capsuleers are known as this in game lore. A single ISK (The ingame currency among players) is stated as equivalent of years' worth of an ordinary salary. Meanwhile, most ships costs millions if not billions of ISK, meaning that even starting characters have a wealth comparable to the GDP of entire planets. Player controlled corporations and alliances are empires in their own right, with some alliances control numerous solar systems, moons and entire fleets of capital ships as reserves, making them literal in-universe examples. Furthermore, because of the ability to calculate a dollar-to-ISK value, battles and scams in EVE can be measured in the dollars destroyed or stolen, sometimes hitting the million dollar range.
  • In Disco Elysium, you can encounter the eccentric multi-billionaire Roustame Diodore who travels around the world via a shipping container. He is so rich that light itself bends around his face, making him look like a colorful singularity or an optical illusion. At least that is what the Player Character sees. When you bring it up, Diodore admits that he has heard of the light-bending effect, and knows the theory behind it, but he cannot see the effect himself, nor can any one else besides you, who just think you're seeing things when you try to point it out. Another minor effect of his massive wealth is that the closer the Detective is to him, the more erratically the money counter in the UI acts, from gaining a few extra digits to constantly rolling around.
  • Shun Akiyama of Yakuza 4 fame is a friendly Tokyo-based moneylender who lazes about, tends to drink a lot, plays the fool, keeps one hell of a messy office, and sits on over 100 billion yen (around 937 million US dollars) thanks to how benevolent the loan shark racket he runs is. Akiyama's so rich that he now does not see any value in money at all since he almost nightly spends it on a bunch of drinks with some of his old homeless buddies, and even losing his entire fortune throughout the series barely bothers him. This all came from a bunch of scattered banknotes he managed to scoop up during the explosive conclusion of the first game.
  • In Noblemen: 1896 by Foursaken Media, your nobleman provides much of the funding for the US gov'ts defensive war against an insurgent alliance of Mega Corps. It's notable that your nobleman retains all this wealth despite the US losing 70% of its population due to a zombie-making plague.
  • Quite a few Pokémon qualify:
    • Steven Stone from Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. As the son of Mr. Stone, the CEO of the Devon Corporation, he generally subverts most of the qualities associated with this trope, though he was heavily implied to be the previous owner of the Villa in Platinum.
    • Chairman Rose from Pokémon Sword and Shield. He's easily the richest man in all of Galar, as his company nearly single-handedly provides energy to the entire region on top of running the extremely profitable Galar Pokémon League that gets the same spectacle and viewership as the Olympics in real life.
    • Director Cyrano from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. He remarks that the Blueberry Academy and its famous Terarium cost an immense amount of money to build and maintain, leaving many to wonder how wealthy this man might be.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Daughter for Dessert, Cecilia and her family tout the fact that they are enormously wealthy, and Cecilia even confirms Amanda’s comparison of Lainie to Paris Hilton.
  • In Fate/stay night, Gilgamesh originally was the king of the world and possessor of all of its wealth. He has so much stuff that even he doesn't know what most of it is. His primary weapon, the Noble Phantasm called the Gate of Babylon, is a doorway to a pocket dimension that contains thousands upon thousands of priceless and powerful weapons, all of which belong to him. Consider this in comparison to other servants who might have two or three Noble Phantasms at most. At the same time, he has a particular character attribute called The Golden Rule, which measures a character's ability to attract wealth to himself. His is Rank A, which means that no matter what the situation and no matter when or where he might be, he is always guaranteed to have enough money to buy whatever he needs or wants and that more will simply fall into his lap.
  • In Umineko: When They Cry, Kinzo Ushiromiya. No one knows exactly where his wealth originated from though EP7 reveals that it was Italian gold stored on a submarine, but he used it to buy his own private island off Japan, although the Japanese government supposedly doesn't allow it. Said money was used to singlehandedly revive the family from nothing after an earthquake killed the main family and destroyed everything they had using nothing more than the money and seemingly being able to turn the odds being against him into a SUPERPOWER. Not to mention, the guy has ten tons of gold just sitting around, or so the legend goes.
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, this is why Byakuya Togami is the Ultimate Affluent Prodiigy. He has 40 billion yen in a personal account for "pocket money". He also made billions in stocks and only stopped because it was too easy. And even all of this is a drop in the bucket for the gigantic corporation he is the heir to.
  • In Melody, the protagonist and title character become this in the Perfect Ending. They have an enormous house and a huge sum of money from touring and album sales.
  • In NU: carnival, the vampire Aster apparently has enough funds to cover the next few hundred years of his lifestyle. Said lifestyle including buying or creating very successfull businesses on a whim, routinely bribing the entire Klein nobility extravagant amounts of money to accomodate to his every desire and employing an army of staff for his gigantic mansion. Amongst others. And he keeps amassing more money as the story and events go by.

    Webcomics 
  • From 8-Bit Theater, Thief (no last name given) qualifies. He's:
    • Prince of the richest, most decadent nation on the face of the planet.
    • In charge of the entire economy of a town (well, ex-town; it was flattened by Australia).
    • Stolen the entire treasury of King Steve while walking down a hall.
    • Stolen riches that don't even exist.
    • Filled an infinite bag of holding to capacity with wealth.
  • Schlock Mercenary:
    • Petey, per the page quote. It helps that, for all intents and purposes, Petey is a god. Even if you discount the whole "Hive Mind of gigantic ships" thing, he's still the owner of the biggest warship manufacturing complex in the whole galaxy, as well as its entire output. Very few can claim their MegaCorp unofficially owns the Milky Way galaxy. Though after the intergalactic war against the Pa'anuri, in which most of his ships were destroyed and both the greatest asset of the war and the comparable asset he had were seized as wartime assets and denied to him afterwards, he admits he's entirely bankrupt.
    • After the Toughs become the military arm of the Neofan Freehold (a revived Precursor race with lots of Lost Technology), they gain a budget typically referred to as "all the numbers." When they need to hire a police force quickly due to a scheduling mix-up, the police chief has some difficulty getting them to suggest a price, because they just don't care.note 
      Chief: This negotiation seems odd to me. What would you say if our bid came out to a billion quadrillion kilo-credits?
      Massey: I would caution you about accepting that much money all at once. Having that much money means needing a major military power to watch your back.
      [beat]
      Chief: But... you actually have that much money?
      Massey: I'm sorry, did I blink?
  • Hannelore's parents in Questionable Content are both obscenely wealthy, but for different reasons; her mother is a rich businesswoman who buys an entire restaurant on a whim, and her father is a robotics tycoon who owns and lives in a high-tech space station.
    • The only reference to exactly how wealthy either of them actually could be comes from when Station transfers 0.76% of his shares in EC-Tec to Lt. Potter worth 4.6 million dollars. This means that Station's total holdings in EC-Tec are worth just over $605M. That's Station's wealth, not John Ellicott's.
  • Herman Beckett from Out at Home is stated to have a net worth exceeding the GDP of Uruguay. While other former sports stars may still rake in the millions with endorsement deals, Herman receives a literal boatload of money in the form of a yacht filled with gold coins in exchange for starting a podcast. The power of his wealth is so great that it defies conventional narrative causality; Herman is nearly always better off when he stops trying to go against his nature by trying to be a responsible parent and society member, and just throws money at his problems until they go away.
  • Ray of Achewood is perhaps at the lower end of the Fiction 500 list, but he is incredibly wealthy. He once got $600 million through ownership of the world's first piece of pornography. He made a Deal with the Devil that made him an incredibly successful musician. He regularly blows money on massive parties and bankrolls his friends' ventures. It's suggested that his family was also wealthy, and in general he appears to be Born Lucky.
  • Dark Matt of White Dark Life is a subversion. He IS rich but the sheer wealth he has gets spent like mad making him only regular rich. His Maid on the other hand plays this trope completely straight by charging exorbitant amounts and hoarding it all. Presumably for her breast reduction surgery.
    • Also subverted with Collin. He doesn't have to work another day in his life sure, but he can only afford the bare minimum he needs. Not that he seems to mind.
  • Mammon, owner of the Bank of the Grand Dragon in Kill Six Billion Demons, obsessively hoards the wealth of 111,111 universes. His "bank vault" is an infinitely large pocket dimension featuring a landscape of gold coins that stretches from horizon to horizon. Rivers wind through it and plants somehow grow in it. His supporters are so inured to the wealth surrounding them that they treat it literally like dirt, raising towns and tending fields on top of rolling plains of coins.
  • Ennui GO! opens with protagonist Izzy's H-Game blowing up in popularity, leaving her with more money than she knows how to handle. Later on, she expands into other business ventures (like a brand of beer that's supposed to taste better than regular beer and later turns out to have bust-enhancing properties) that earn her even more money, to the point that she's able to buy out a set of private islands and turn them into her own country without making too big a dent in her finances.

    Web Original 
  • In the Legion of Nothing webnovels, Giles Hardwick, one of Michigan's richest men, bankrolled the original Grand Lake Heroes League.
  • In Whateley Universe, Ayla Goodkind comes from the richest family on the planet. The Goodkinds are estimated to be worth 750 billion dollars, according to Forbes. Ayla has actually seen the inside of a regular grocery store once. He was appalled. And once he formed his own consortium and took over Marvel, he became the richest teenager on the planet who isn't going to inherit family wealth... at fourteen.
  • The Titan Empire webnovels feature Pryvani Tarsuss, who owns an entire moon — and not a boring moon, but a fully terraformed one, complete with a population of several million. And that's really just the start.
  • Conspiracy Theorists online tend to exaggerate the wealth of real figures to absurd levels. This one in particular claims that the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds both are worth 500 trillion dollars. Combined, that's about eight times the GDP of planet Earth.

    Western Animation 
  • As noted under Live Action TV, The Addams Family (1992) continues the tradition of the titular clan being ludicrously wealthy. The episode "The Day Gomez Failed" provides some explanation: it turns out that Gomez Addams was Born Lucky and makes obscene amounts of money without even trying. As the title suggests, he's gotten tired of always coming out on top and thus invests gigantic sums in projects that he hopes won't succeed.
  • Arcane: Mel belongs to the impossibly wealthy Medarda family. For reference, Mel is said to be the richest woman in all of Piltover (an extremely well-to-do city by any standard), yet she complains she's still considered the poorest member of her family! That they're Noxians puts an interesting spin on how the rest of her family acquired their wealth.
  • Uncle Scrooge of DuckTales (1987) has a towering building he calls his "money bin" full of money. He swims, skis, and otherwise plays around in it. This isn't even the sum of all his money, just his liquid assets — he also owns a large number of companies. And he earned it all square! Ironically, despite his opulent mansion, he is also quite the penny-pincher, and doesn't like spending any more than is absolutely necessary. In one episode, his money bin is even described as the tallest building in Duckberg.
    • This happens again in the reboot of DuckTales. In this case, they quantify Scrooge McDuck's wealth a bit more, saying that he's a multi-trillionaire and throwing around numbers like 10 million spent on keeping vengeance curses on Scrooge at bay, or 20 thousand on a velvet pillow for his decoy number one dime. One episode narrows his total fortune down to the ten-septillion range. He also manages to have businesses in several cities beyond just Duckburg as well as several departments such as experimental tech, a film studio, and an energy/utility company. Within his mansion, he has apples that have diamonds in them (presumably for decoration rather than for eating), paintings of his family and exploits all around, a pool, a peacock he lets fly around, and several other valuable artifacts lying around that might make his 1987 counterpart scowl in disapproval. And to top it all off, he still has that famous money bin lying around, though he does less swimming in it these days.
  • In Beverly Hills Teens, Bianca Dupree. Okay, most of her friends could fit here, but Bianca mentioned her father owned Texas.
  • Danny Phantom:
    • Vlad Masters. As prominent as Bill Gates, except shown to be much, much richer. The man is a billionaire with a huge castle in Wisconsin along with a huge home by the Rockies. Owns several of his own companies (i.e. Dalv), as well as many others he literally took over (like Mastersoft, formerly Microsoft). Owns state of the art ghost hunting technology and can easily pay to have everything rebuilt time and time again with no financial worry. Can pay for a professional ghost hunting team with superior technology once and easily set a million-dollar bounty on a single ghost. The only things he can't buy are Maddie's love, Danny's respect, and the Green Bay Packers. He does state (and it's taken as Word of Dante), that he used his ghost abilities to commit invisible burglaries and later control people and get them to give him their money.
    • Danny's best friend, Sam, whose family is extremely wealthy because one of her great-grandfathers invented the machine that twirls cellophane around deli toothpicks; when Tucker finds out about this and asks Sam whether her family can buy things such as private jet and private yacht, she says yes. She also has a private movie theatre that's attached to a private bowling alley in the basement.
  • In The Fairly OddParents!, Remy Buxaplenty's wealth can only be described as "Richer than you will ever be." His parents are very good at business. Despite Timmy wishing for them to spend more time together (and thus being on a stranded island), the father found some oil and the mother opened a resort, so they are very good at business.
  • Futurama:
    • Philip J. Fry gains such wealth (for only one episode before losing everything) due to the tiny amount of money he had left in his savings account when he was frozen accumulating 1000 years worth of interest. Buying out entire auctions on a whim didn't seem to make a dent, nor did shooting skeet with the Mona Lisa. That's in addition to the time he and Bender got $1 every time one of their Popplers was sold: 198 billion were sold around the world.
    • Mom, of Mom's Friendly Robot Company, stole the entire wealth of Fry, above, and owned the security camera system that helped her do it. Possibly has a monopoly on robot production. She is more or less Futurama's counterpart to Mr. Burns. Also, the monopoly is hinted further when she ensures people don't find out they can overclock their robots, lest they stop buying newer models. The video game further reveals that she owns exactly 50% of Planet Earth and is constantly scheming to acquire one last bit of property, which would give her a majority ownership and thus control over it.
    • The Wong family owns the entire western hemisphere of Mars—which they originally purchased from the natives using a car-sized diamond (which to them was a single bead). When Amy Wong was introduced, she protested that her parents aren't as rich as people say, then reluctantly admitted that her college sorority was "Kappa Kappa Wong." In fact, according to Amy's dad, Leo, in Where the Buggalo Roam, the Wongs are apparently so wealthy that they actually find it easier to brand the stuff they don't own rather than the stuff they do own.
  • Gargoyles:
    • David Xanatos moved a castle to the top of a skyscraper. Apart from the cost of moving the castle (which involved disassembling it, shipping it from Scotland to New York, and having helicopters lift it to the top of the skyscraper one stone at a time), it's strongly implied that the entire building was created just to provide a platform for the castle to rest on. Granted, such a thing could be done, in principle, in real life, but still...
    • Though per Word of God none of them is quite as rich as Xanatos, fellow Gargoyles cast members Renard, Demona, Macbeth and Thailog are definitely up there too. According to Thailog, his wealth combined with Demona's and Macbeth's would put him on equal footing with Xanatos. He comes up with a plan to make this happen in one episode.
  • In Goldie Gold and Action Jack, Goldie Gold has a flying car, has loads of tech on her person and in her mansion, and thinks a fur coat is proper adventuring wear.
  • Kim Possible:
    • Señor Senior Senior's private island first had such a power load it was blacking out Europe. The bulk of it was going to a sun lamp bulb the size of a hot air balloon. He's one of the five richest people on Earth in the Kim Possible universe. The other four are his card club: one is the 'queen of daytime television' (alluding to Oprah perhaps), one appears to be a possible Russian expy of Bill Gates (the Software Czar), one is Poppop Porter (the snack food king) and the last is the Smarty Mart founder and CEO.
    • Ron Stoppable (briefly). He invented the Naco, the top-selling menu item at Bueno Nacho, and in one episode received a check for 99 million dollars in royalties for his invention. Kim described him as "just south of billionaire." He blew a great deal of the money on Conspicuous Consumption, clothes, bling, and a private jet for himself and Kim, before Drakken and Shego stole the balance, ending his brief tenure on the Fiction 500 list. A number of fan fics suggest that he's still getting Naco royalties, which his parents had enough foresight to invest in a trust fund for him, so he may still belong on this list.
  • In The Powerpuff Girls (1998), this trope is greatly exaggerated to levels that would make the pun in Princess Morbucks' name proud. Seriously, the Morbucks family either has more money than most well-developed countries or their wallet is literally bottomless. When Princess' father gets her anything that she wants, he means EVERYTHING. Their mansion is huger than huge and they even own enough land for there to be a theme park and race car track on the premises. Princess' father was even able to buy the city of Townsville in one episode (although, since it was bought from the Mayor, it only cost a room of Turkish Delight). It still counts because Mr. Morbucks had previously offered five trillion dollars.
  • Totally Spies! takes place in the Beverly Hills, California, one of the most expensive cities in America — all three of the main characters presumably come from rich families, and their rival, Mandy, is proven to come from an even richer family, such as when her mother bought an entire high-end shoe company chain simply to get one pair of shoes.
  • The Metalocalypse band Dethklok as a whole is considered the seventh largest economy on Earth. (They've just passed Belgium!)
  • In The Simpsons, Charles Montgomery Burns, especially with his device to blot out the sun over Springfield and his (albeit temporary) ownership of the world's only trillion dollar bill.
    • Krusty the Clown is a subversion. His comedy show and a merchandising empire that would put Disney to shame have made him a multimillionaire. Unfortuantely, everything from the fact that he's lost huge amounts of money on disastrous promotions (one bungled sponsorship cost him $44 million), his spending on things that are ridiculously extravagant even by this page's standards (buying priceless comic books to light his cigarettes, eating condor egg omelettes and purchasing bling jewelry like ruby-studded clown noses) and his massive gambling debts all mean he's been nearly or completely broke multiple times.
  • Lucius Heinous VII on Jimmy Two-Shoes. One episode shows he spends more on trival things for him than it costs to run his whole MegaCorp. And his son Beezy spends even more.
  • Eustace Strytch from The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius often rivals Jimmy's brain with his wad of cash. He easily manipulates people with his money, is able to buy space ships and fly to Mars and gets anything he points at, constantly dragging along his butler.
  • Eddie, from Class of 3000, is the richest kid not just in school, but likely the world. His father is the CEO of Cola-Cola's "Earth Division," which makes him so ludicrously wealthy that he can afford to buy air time on every single television channel in existence, fund massive displays of love for his crush Tomika on a daily basis, and, in a bit of fourth-wall breaking humor, have five fingers on his hands as opposed to the usual cartoon four. Unlike most examples on this list, though, Eddie is a genuinely kind, generous kid—he never lords his money over his friends, instead happily funding their exploits and participating in all manner of activities with them.
    • Sonny seems to be like this as well—his sprawling mansion in the woods contains entire separate ecosystems contained in individual rooms, and he once casually mentioned that he owned over a million designer outfits.
  • An Al Brodax Popeye cartoon does a spoof of the 1950s TV show The Millionaire with Popeye the philanthropist doling out $1 million personal checks to Olive, Swee' Pea, Wimpy and—yes—Brutus. He then goes out in his sailor outfit to see how his friends spent the money. After seeing what they all did with the money (none too wisely), Popeye gives the rest of his money to the sailors' retirement fund.
  • In The Transformers episode "Megatron's Master Plan", Shawn Berger has his own private army and builds a fake solar power plant for the specific purpose of luring the Decepticons to it so he could show everybody that he could stop them.
  • On PB&J Otter, the Snootie Poodles have enough money to buy so many toys that their children become bored with the toys bought for them in the morning by the afternoon and they get new ones. In the song "That's the Way to See the Great Outdoors," they sing "We're climbing up Mount Hoohaw, though we coulda had shipped" and are apparently quite serious about it. In another episode, they're actually shown having their likenesses carved into mountains like Mt. Rushmore.
  • The Yogi Bear short "The Runaway Bear" features a multimillionaire who has, among other things, double-decker tennis courts, a pool for each foot, and dozens of big, shiny cars (with a little car inside each big car).
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Squilliam Fancyson, Squidward's rival. Among other things, he owns a private yacht, a private lake, a private heliport, a private island, and a balloon/casino.
  • Ch'rell/The Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003). There does not appear to be any limit to his or the Foot Clan's money. The only thing that raised any financial concerns was funding the reconstruction of New York City, which he didn't hold back due to it being a cover for his plan to leave Earth.

 

Alternative Title(s): Impossibly Cool Wealth, Fiction Five Hundred

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