Greed Makes You Dumb

Greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which are used to describe the seven (sometimes eight) ways that a person ruins their own life, so if a character follows the sins, their greed will likely catch up to them eventually. Greed is usually considered bad because it makes people do all sorts of terrible things to other people in the name of profit. Another reason why Greed can be bad is because it can, ironically, result in people doing stupid things in the name of profit. Naturally, a combination of greed and stupidity usually results in an overall loss of wealth and/or potential profit.

There are a number of ways that greed can harm rather than improve profits; a villain's scheme to enrich themselves might end up failing because the villain focuses on short-term profit without regard for long-term costs or risks. A cheapskate who tries to save money by Cutting Corners might end up losing money due to lack of quality on their products causing fewer people to buy them or suffer lawsuits from lack of safety testing. A criminal who could become wealthy legitimately might get themselves arrested or sued because their greed caused them to commit crimes rather than stick to the law. A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme that could be a profitable business venture ends up being a failure due to the schemer's impatience when it comes to making money. Occasionally, they actually get the profit they desire, but at such a steep cost that they are completely unable to enjoy their newfound wealth.

Just as Greed can involve things other than money, a person who desires things other than money can end up losing said things out of a desire to get more. A powerful person might end up losing the power they already have trying to get more power. Someone who wants to be popular might end up losing the people who like them because they can't appreciate the people already in their life. A ruler who wants to expand his territory via conquest might end up losing their own territory because they made too many enemies.

Supertrope to Gold Fever, where people behave irrationally and often outright insanely in pursuit of great troves of wealth. Sub-Trope of Greed. Overlaps with Gambling Ruins Lives if the character tries to gain money via gambling, Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat, Villain Ball, and/or Stupid Evil if a villain's money-making scheme fails because of their greed, The Rich Want to Be Richer if a character who is already rich is trying to get even richer, or Cut Lex Luthor a Check if a character commits crimes out of greed even if they could make plenty of money legally. Could lead to an All for Nothing or a rightfully stupid money loss situation. The Clutching Hand Trap relies on this trope. Compare Death by Materialism, which involves a character dying because of their greed (which also can overlap) and Honest Axe, where a character experiences karma for being greedy. Compare/Contrast Money Dumb which is about people stupidly spending money. Contrast, Overly Generous Fool, where a person suffers financially for being too generous.

While this can certainly be Truth in Television, to avoid controversy, No Real Life Examples, Please!.

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Examples

Advertising

• Dumb Ways to Die: Dunce sells off not one, but both of his kidneys for a quick buck.

Anime & Manga

• Pokémon: The Series: One episode has Team Rocket plotting to steal four different Eeveelutions, each of which is extremely valuable. They manage to escape with three out of the four, but Jessie insists on going back to steal the fourth one. As a result, the good guys are able to take back the Eeveelutions, leaving Team Rocket with nothing.
• Early in the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, there are plenty of villains that Yugi comes across who are so greedy that Dark Yugi exploits their nature to punish them in Shadow Games.
  • In the very first chapter, Hall Monitor Ushio self-appoints himself as Yugi's bodyguard and then goes on to beat up both Honda and Jonouchi (Tristan and Joey in the English dub of the anime), and then charges Yugi with 200,000 yen as a fee. When Yugi defends the defenseless Honda and Jounouchi, Ushio beats up Yugi as well, then threatens him with a knife to bring the money or else. When Yugi manages to complete the Millennium Puzzle and unlock its power, he challenges Ushio to an Absurdly High-Stakes Game: use Ushio's knife to stab at a stack of bills on top of their hands, with whatever the knife gets is what they keep (Yugi even bringing 400,000 yen instead of 200,000 like Ushio asked). Ushio's true nature comes out at the end of the game, where he finds himself unable to stab at the money without also getting his hand. In the end, he tries cheating by stabbing Yugi, which ends with him getting inflicted with a Penalty Game (fittingly called "Greed, the Illusion of Avarice"). He suddenly sees everything around him as money, when in reality he's grabbing onto dead leaves and trash, while Yugi walks away with all the money he initially brought as "payment" for his bodyguard services.
  • In Chapter 8, Yugi discovers that the shoe store owner hired some street punks to steal back a pair of popular high-tech sneakers he had just sold to Jonouchi. In retaliation, he challenges the owner to a Shadow Game that involved getting the most coins out of the sneaker without getting stung by the owner's pet scorpion inside it. For each coin that the store owner got, the larger the sum of the money Yugi would have to pay him if he won the game. The store owner, in his greed, hastily tries stabbing at the scorpion inside the shoe and then grab all the coins inside the sneaker. When he realizes that his hand is stuck, he then hears his pet scorpion still shuffling inside the shoe, as he missed. The store owner ends up getting stung by said scorpion, is taken to a hospital to be treated, and Yugi takes the shoes back to Jonouchi.
  • In Chapter 42, Jonouchi is looking to win a million yen by entering a Game Show, being selected as one of its participants. He however was selected by the TV producers since his background of a poor family and an abusive alcoholic father made them believe that he could get them high ratings. During the show, it becomes obvious that he has no intention of giving Jonouchi money if he wins, making sure to rig the final wheel spin to make him lose. Yugi, overhearing this, takes matters into his own hands by playing a game with the producer, and subsequently deals a penalty game. Said penalty game causes the producer to get in front of the live television cameras and demand money from the audience, ruining the production company and bankrupting them. Yugi's efforts also unfortunately also cause problems for Jonouchi, as the production company's bankruptcy makes the check of one million yen that Jonouchi won legitimately worth nothing as an unintended side effect.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Pegasus invokes this during his 1v2 duel against Crowler and Bonaparte, who have challenged Pegasus to a duel where they will receive a job at his company if they win; Pegasus sets a stipulation saying that if they win, the one who has more Life Points remaining will receive a better position at his company, hoping to turn them against one another. Crowler doesn't take the bait, but Bonaparte does and starts attacking Crowler to lower his Life Points, causing Crowler to respond in kind. As a result, they end up not getting jobs at Pegasus's company because they wasted cards that could have used on Pegasus on each other.
• Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead: A theme throughout the "Millionaire of the Dead" arc. The protagonists, after struggling for the first few chapters, manage to build a bar that gets them plenty of food cans, which are Osaka's form of currency after the Zombie Apocalypse. Akira Tendo, the main protagonist, literally gets blinded by greed (represented by the food cans covering his eyes after their newfound success) that he ends up taking the food cans and buying himself into the Castle Elite, seeing himself as the reason why they got so many cans despite it being a group effort. He then finds himself unsatisfied with the constant talk of money with the other fat cat members of the castle, with an old man spelling out how badly greed will blind people in obtaining the most capital. Greed ends up being the downfall of Castle Elite, and through both Akira's old friend Takemina and the old man's words, they manage to show how dumb Akira had been for abandoning his friends in the pursuit of wealth.
  Old Man: You know the point of gaining capital? It ain't about... having enough to make your life feel better. It's about having the most. [...] You got 10 billion? Next, you'll want 20 billion. It'll pull ya from your friends, your family... till the greed's all you got room for.
  • The first time is when the people of Osaka pool their cans into playing a game of "Canning or Zombie" at the Elite Castle's casino. The goal is for the contestant to run into a door in order to land in a hole with their winnings or in a hole to meet a grisly end with zombies, with no upper limit for betting. Takemina ends up almost losing his life, though thanks to Akira's hint, he ends up winning instead. After winning, however, Takemina then declares a double or nothing bet with their current winnings, which the fat cats believe is a foolish move that will give their casino an easy victory. However, doubling the amount of cans causes them to overflow and make it easy to see where the prize is above the doorframe, making it a guaranteed win at the casino game that was initially designed to drain the poor of their cans. Coupled with the game's "No Upper Limit" policy, this allows Takemina to keep winning until he cleans out the Elites entirely.
    Takemina: Your pit... became your pitfall. Y'all were confident you had all the cans on your side. You never imagined we'd ever hold this many cans... even if we pooled together everything we had. Your greed... cost you.
  • This theme is hammered home a second time with the "Canning Chief" who has the most amount of cans, but had holed himself in his teshu. When Akira and his friends meet the man himself, he's already been turned into a zombie, with Takemina commenting that his greed blinded him so much that he never realized that he can't take his capital with him if he ever died.

Comic Books

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • The Beagle Boys can come off as this for constantly going after Scrooge's Money Bin; despite the fact they have shown themselves to be Not So Harmless Villains when robbing people other than Scrooge and the fact that a number of them possess college degrees that they could use to earn an earnest living, they insist on trying, and failing, to rob Scrooge despite the countless failures they've suffered all out of a desire for a big score.
  • While Scrooge McDuck tries to not become an example of this trope (and does not always succeed, usually when it would be funnier — witness the many times he assigns Donald Duck to do something because he literally pays him cents and Donald… well, "who gets stuck with all of the bad luck?" and all), his clan has a long history of prioritizing being skinflints over practicality (such as one who declared war, and not only did not paid his troops but only bought three arrows for each archer. When his ghost appears in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, he not only shows no regret about said decision getting him abandoned by his troops mid-battle and killed, he is actually proud that Scrooge will surpass him in greed).

Fairy Tales

• In The Presents of the Little Folk, a tailor and a goldsmith come across a circle of little men and women dancing, presided over by an old man, and join in. The old man shaves off their hair and beards with a razor and directs them to fill their pockets with coal. When they wake up the next morning, their hair has grown back, and the coal has turned into gold coins. The tailor is happy and satisfied but the goldsmith decides to go back, wanting more. He dances with the little folk, gets his hair shaved off, and fills his pockets with coal, but the next day his hair doesn't grow back, the coal is still coal, and his gold from the previous night has also turned into coal. To add insult to injury, he has grown a lump on his chest.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In the AbraxasVerse Timeline, greedy dirty corporation Bio-Major sells fertility treatments made using illegally-marketeered DNA from Ghidorah for commercial use just to net themselves a short-term boon of profit; and they do so after Monarch made the whole world aware that mixing Ghidorah's DNA with humans leads to uncontrollable results, like the accidental creation of a virulent, transhuman and horrific Undead Abomination. Once the dozens of women around the world who take Bio-Major's treatment end up giving birth to horrifically-deformed, not-entirely-human Zmeyevich after several months, and many of the mothers suffer damaging or even lethal dents to their health, Bio-Major endure a major backlash for what's happened.

Films — Animated

• Cinderella: All the mice have to collect their breakfast quickly before the cat Lucifer gets to them. While the others carry just a couple of kernels of corn each, Gus Gus carries a tall stack of them that he struggles to hold under his chin. When he sees a kernel dropped by the other mice, he tries to add it to his pile, but they keep slipping out, the sound of them falling alerting Lucifer. By the time Gus Gus figures out how to carry them all, he finds himself face to face with Lucifer, and has to drop all the corn to run for his life.
• Shark Tale: Oscar combines this trope with Gambling Ruins Lives; he's in deep debt to The Mafia as a result of countless failed Get Rich Quick Schemes. His friend Angie gives him a pearl that can be sold in order to pay back the money he owes, but rather than just pay the money back, he decides to bet it on a (allegedly) rigged seahorse race. Unsurprisingly, he not only loses his money but also almost ends up dying for his idiocy.

Films — Live-Action

• The Mummy (1999):
  • Beni Gabor combines this with Death by Materialism; he manages to escape the city of Hamunaptra with vast quantities of treasure but decides to go back for more. By doing so, he inadvertently activates a trap causing the city to sink into the sand taking all of the treasure with it and trapping him inside the treasure room where moments later he's Eaten Alive by scarab beetles in a truly Karmic Death. To add insult to injury, Rick O'Connell and Evelyn escape from Hamunaptra and later use the treasure Beni took to buy a mansion in London.
  • The Warden meets a similar fate, when he gets distracted by "blue gold" scarabs embedded into the wall of Imhotep's tomb. He is too concerned with removing them to pay attention to anything else, including ones he's dropped. A real scarab beetle pops out of one that hits the sand, and crawls inside the Warden. He avoids being Eaten Alive only because he runs head-first into one of the tomb walls to end his suffering.
• Parasite (2019): The Fatal Flaw of the Kim family. After Kim Ki-woo manages to get the poor family some money by being an English tutor for the Park Family, he enacts a scheme where he has the Parks unknowingly hire the Kim family for various jobs. The family had already achieved their goals after all four of them are hired by the Parks in well-paying jobs, but they just can't help but want even more. Their pursuit of money and laxness end up becoming their undoing however, where they're caught red-handed partying in the Park mansion by Moon-gwang and Geun-sae, leading to the tragic birthday party. This includes the death of Kim Ki-jeong, with Kim Ki-taek fleeing from the authorities after murdering Park Dong-ik in a fit of rage, the latter forced to live in the secret bunker of the basement of the Park mansion, like Geun-se before him. By the end of the film, the Kim family lost Ki-jeong along with their newfound wealth, Ki-taek is stuck living in the bunker below the Parks' home forever to avoid being imprisoned, with the remaining Kim Ki-woo having the Tragic Dream of trying to buy the mansion back in order to save his father.
  • The film contrasts the Kim family's greed with the more passive and pervasive greed of the Parks, who lives of abundance and luxury without ever thinking of people beyond themselves. They end up losing their family patriarch, Park Dong-ik, and possibly son, Park Da-song, after a fatal stabbing and seizure respectively, and are forced to move out of the mansion.
• Trading Places: The Duke brothers, who are already wealthy members of the upper class who can afford anything they want, decide to risk their entire fortune on a scheme to corner the frozen orange juice market and make them obscenely wealthy. This backfires on them horribly when Louis and Billy Ray catch wind of their scheme and enact their own plan that results in the Dukes being completely bankrupted.

Literature

• Aesop's Fables covered this in multiple stories:
  • The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs. A farmer discovers that one of his geese can miraculously lay gold eggs, and he begins selling them. He soon becomes so greedy for more gold that he kills the goose, cutting it open in hopes of finding more gold eggs inside, and doesn't realize until it's too late that there will never be any more.
  • The Dog And His Reflection: A dog carrying a bone sees his reflection in a pond and thinks that he would like to have the "other dog's" bone as well. He opens his mouth to grab it, only to drop the bone he is carrying, leaving him with none.
  • The Flies and the Honey Pot: A swarm of flies comes across a pot of honey that has spilled, and decide not to leave until they have eaten all of the honey. After they have eaten for a while, the honey sticks to their feet and wings, leaving them unable to fly away. They lament how stupid they were, throwing their lives away for a moment's pleasure.
• Mentioned as backstory in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. The brothers Vormercier start an embezzlement operation stealing and selling surplus military equipment slated for destruction. This works, so they promptly steal and sell more. Apparently never having heard of "quit while you're ahead," they eventually get caught when one of their sales is held up by a fleet inspection. The resulting complications end up introducing main characters Ivan and Tej to each other.
• In Jataka, an Indian adaptation of The Golden Goose, a man who has reincarnated as a golden goose with golden feathers sees that his death has left his family in financial trouble, and decides to help them out by giving them feathers to sell. Over time, he brings them more feathers to sell, and they are living comfortably again; until one day, when his wife became greedy and decided to formulate a plan to steal all of his feathers for money. Alas, the next time he comes, his wife plucks all of his feathers. When she does this, the feathers immediately change from golden feathers to white crane feathers. The wife waits for the golden feathers to grow back, but they never do; they grow back white, and he flies away, never to return again.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Discussed in "Starship Down". Quark complains to Hanok that the Karemma way of doing business is no fun because there's no greed involved. Hanok retorts that "Greed leads to misjudgement, and that can result in a loss of profits."
  Quark: Yet there's no risk! There's no thrill! Your way is just barter. If you wanna win big, you've gotta be willing to play the odds. It's like gambling!
  Hanok: Gambling is the last recourse of the desperate. Only a fool would risk losing what he has to chance!

Music

• Evillious Chronicles: In "Judgment of Corruption," Gallerian Marlon, a corrupt judge, dies when his house is burned down by an angry mob in retribution for taking a bribe to declare a war criminal innocent. He comes before the Master of the Hellish Yard, who offers to spare him in exchange for all of his money. He says, "I will never hand over my fortune to the likes of you," and is cast down into hell.

Mythology & Religion

• A Welsh folktale describes a poor boy who meets a Mysterious Stranger who guides him into an ancient burial mound, inside of which sleep King Arthur and his warriors. The boy and the stranger help themselves to the treasure that the mound also contains, taking care not to wake Arthur and his men up, and if they do, the stranger tells Arthur that it's not time for him to come back and defend Britain yet, making him go back to sleep again. After leaving the mound, the stranger leaves the boy, both with bags full of gold, but the boy's hunger for more gold leads him back inside the mound, where, in the midst of stealing more gold, he rings the bell again. Too paralysed by fear to remember how the stranger lulled Arthur back to sleep, the boy gets beaten up by the warriors and thrown out into the sunlight, after which the entrance to the mound vanishes, and the boy is left just as poor as when he started. (In some alternative accounts, the mound entrance just vanishes before the boy can go back there for more gold)
• The famous tale of King Midas, who wished for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold, only to find out too late that that also applies to food and drink as well. Some tales see him turn his own daughter into gold when he tries comforting her shortly after his failed dinner.
• One folktale (sometimes presented as a riddle) discusses this trope. A man visiting a village notices a seemingly simple-minded beggar woman sitting in the town square; various people amuse themselves by offering her the choice between a crisp new dollar and a wrinkled ten-dollar bill, and laugh hysterically when she inevitably picks the nicer-looking money. Afterwards, the visitor approaches the woman and tries to teach her the difference between them...only for her to drop the act and admit that of course she knows that the tenner is worth more money—but if she got greedy and picked it, she'd lose out on a steady stream of $1 bills!

Video Games

• Asgard's Wrath: Stikkan, the Elven smuggler, stole Thor's hammer, and attempted to steal Freyja's necklace, which was in the possession of Hel at the time. Suffice to say, if not for the New Gods presence, he likely wouldn't have survived committing such brazen burglary for long.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, Gorai was rescued out of poverty by the monks of Mt. Rokkon. Desperate to avoid the suffering of being impoverished again, he began hoarding priceless artifacts in avarice until eventually obtaining a storied kiseru said to be a Doom Magnet for those who own it. He keeps the pipe despite its reputation and his knowledge that said kiseru would likely become host to a potentially malevolent tsukumogami. He could have avoided his fate of being transformed into a rat demon to be put down had he simply refused to add such a dangerous artifact to his collection.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: Exploited by Hades, who knows humanity will be greedy enough to wage war under even a false promise of a wish as he spreads a rumor about a wish seed. Not only does this result in humans slaughtering each other for nothing, but it causes the goddess of nature Viridi to view humans as nothing more than destructive creatures who need to be removed from the world. Meanwhile, Hades uses the deaths to strengthen his own army.
• Little Goody Two Shoes: Poor village girl Elise Liedl's desire for a wealthy lifestyle leads her to undergo various trials in order to make a deal with Him to get her wish to come true. Throughout the game, it becomes increasingly clear that this deal is a very bad thing that she is outright warned by past victims will destroy her and whichever love interest she brings to Him, yet she ignores these warnings, blinded by her desire. It's not until just outside The Very Definitely Final Dungeon (and only if she maxed out her affection with her love interest) that she can finally get the hint, but in the ending canon to Pocket Mirror, she goes in anyway. Predictably, she loses her love interest and lives the rest of her life in a Gilded Cage, unable to enjoy the wealth she coveted for so long, and her new husband and children have to deal with the consequences of her refusal to let go of her greed.
• The Glukkons from the Oddworld franchise are notoriously shortsighted in their businesses, their Rupture Farms causes the extinction of several species while trying to meet demand and have to resort to using their Mudokon workers as part of their "New 'N Tasty" product.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends: The raccoon twins' obsession with stealing often ends poorly for them. In "Sea What I Found", Shifty attempts to squeeze through a door on a burning submarine, but because he's overloaded with gold on his person, he can't get through. He never thinks of abandoning his treasure, and the gold melts on him, encasing him within. Later, Lifty finds his golden statue of a brother and instead of swimming up to the surface to safety, he attempts to bring Shifty's statue up with him. Unsurprisingly, he ends up drowning.
• Helluva Boss: Mammon's greed leads him to overwork Fizzarolli out of a desire to squeeze every cent out of his popularity. This causes Fizz to quit in a way that massively humiliates Mammon, while also losing Mammon his star act.

Western Animation

• DuckTales (1987): In "Too Much of a Gold Thing," Scrooge and his nephews succumb to "gold fever," which includes an obsession with gold, hiccuping, and purring like a cat. When El Capitán, whose greed has been keeping him alive for centuries, tries to off Scrooge, his nephews, Mrs. Beakley, and Webbigale by dipping them in a lake of molten gold, El Capitán pulls them back up, not wanting them to have one bit of "his" gold. After the valley collapses on itself and buries the golden city under a mountain of earth, El Capitán says he'll dig up the mountain himself so that he can finally get a hold of his treasure.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: Eddy succumbs to this a lot. One of the biggest examples was the episode "Here's Mud in Your Ed", where Rolf tricked him into giving up all of his worldly possessions in exchange for a fake "money tree" seed. After realizing he had been scammed, he falls for the same thing again when Rolf tries to sell him the "real" money tree seed (which is a metal bolt). At this point, even Ed realizes what's going on and mocks him for it.
• Looney Tunes shorts:
  • "One Froggy Evening" is about a man who finds a singing, dancing frog and immediately dreams of making lots of money off his discovery. Unfortunately, all his attempts to do so fail because the frog won't perform for anyone other than him. By the end, he's left penniless and homeless, eventually leaving the frog back where he found it.
  • Daffy Duck is the epitome of this trope in action. In two shorts he challenges two beings much stronger than himself (A giant Elmer Fudd in "Beanstalk Bunny", and a genie in "Ali Baba Bunny") so as to gain or hold onto his riches, suffering the consequences (schmonsequences) as a result.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The Flim Flam Brothers are a duo of Con Stallions whose Fatal Flaw is their greed; all of their money-making schemes end up backfiring on them because they insist on making as much money as they can in the short-term without regard for the long-term risks or consequences.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Buttercup suddenly gains a Money Fetish in "Moral Decay" when she learns about the profits of the Tooth Fairy. She tries to steal more of Bubbles's teeth, and when that doesn't work, she tries to wait for villains to act up to knock their teeth out. She becomes tired of waiting and starts to attack them unprovoked. When Blossom and Bubbles learn of this, they have the villains Buttercup previously beat up pummel her instead. And to add insult to injury, Professor Utonium reveals he discovered Buttercup's secret stash of bills, and states that'll all go towards her dentist's bill, much to her dismay.
• South Park: "Red Man's Greed" combines this trope with Gambling Ruins Lives; the adults of South Park end up losing the entire town to a casino. In order to get it back, they decide to pool their money together and bet it on a game of roulette in order to win enough money to buy the town back. They manage to win more than enough money, but end up blowing it by betting all of their winnings in another round in the hopes of becoming rich.
• Spongebob Squarepants: Quite a number of Mr. Krab's schemes to make and/or save money result in him losing money because his desire for immediate profit ends up blinding him to the long-term costs.
  • In "Patty Caper", he steals the Krabby Patty secret ingredient in order to save $1.99 and frames Spongebob, his only fry cook, to get away with it. Even if Mr. Krabs had gotten away with his scheme, he would have gone out of business because Spongebob is the only one who can actually cook.
  • In "Spongebob You're Fired", Mr. Krabs fires Spongebob, despite the fact that Spongebob is the only one who knows how to make Krabby Patties, in order to save a literal nickel. Unsurprisingly, he ends up almost going out of business.

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