How rich do you have to be to swim in gold like Scrooge McDuck?

It is a question that people have asked through the ages: How much gold does it take to swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck? Luckily, someone has done the math and figured it out for us.

How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck ‘Gold Coin Swim’

In most money circles (insider tip: “money circles” is a term used by only the most elite investors), wealth is measured exclusively by how closely one can recreate this famed animation. It has come to represent success in America and anything less than doing the backstroke amongst a sea of Earth’s rarest metal should be considered an abject failure. A main problem of this measure, however, is that there is no agreed-upon Scrooge McDuck quantity of gold. In order to give the young investor a goal to shoot for, and to clear up this age-old question once and for all, the following is a precise judgment of exactly how money you need to be successful.

When the area under the curve is calculated (from x=-3 to x=5), it yields roughly 46 square inches. The assumption will be made here that one cubic inch is roughly one ounce of gold. To convert that into a dome shape the value is simply cubed, which becomes 97,366 ounces. Given that 1 ounce of gold is roughly $5.00, it can extrapolated that each large pile of gold in the vault is worth $486,830.

However, Scrooge McDuck was first drawn in 1947, therefore inflation must be adjusted for which totals a whopping 5.2 billion dollars per pile. In the picture, there are two smaller piles which roughly equal the larger doubling the total to 10.4 billion. However, the shadows in the corner suggest that the room is a least three times as large as it is. Therefore, Scrooge was privy to a cool 31.2 billion dollars.

This means that only the six richest people in the world could afford to pull off the Scrooge swim.

The Billfold


Of course, we should probably take this info with a grain of salt.

Matt Powers is in his early twenties-ish. He is also good at making up fake math.

Still, if you've ever dreamed of swimming like Scrooge McDuck, you now know how much you'll have to save up to do it. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't go quite as planned when you jump into it.

You would have to be crazy to do it. Gold is solid, like lead. Jumping into it would hurt. You would likely break some bones if you tried. If you "submerged" yourself into a huge pile of gold coins, it could be worse than quicksand. I do not recommend doing it in cash either. Money is the dirtiest, most contaminated stuff around.

It really doesn't matter. If you really want to know, Peter Griffin can tell you the story himself.

I think what it would cost to do the "swim", would be dependent on how much the "rich" person would charge you to swim in theirs.

Originally posted by Starchild23
It really doesn't matter. If you really want to know, Peter Griffin can tell you the story himself.

This is the central point. Gold is not a liquid in its' cold state; and heating it to form a swimmable liquid would produce other, far more adverse consequences for a human swimmer, than what we saw Peter experience here.

There are a couple of other points to mention, here.

a] The gold swim was never intended to be anything remotely rational or realistic. As mentioned, it involved Scrooge swimming through what was essentially a solid substance. The idea was to suggest that for Scrooge, money was literally as plentiful as water was considered to be.

b] The second point is that as an individual, Scrooge actually had a sufficiently high degree of personal integrity, that he most likely would not have been realistically able to amass such a degree of wealth. He was depicted as being diligent and somewhat hard, yes; but he wasn't anywhere near as immoral as real-life billionaires. In other words, him becoming a billionaire would not realistically happen.

Money has its' own dynamics and laws that it follows, like anything else; and it is not primarily attracted to good people.