The Absurd True Scale of Pablo Escobar’s Wealth Visualized
Jason 0 Comments Retire Wealthy
If somebody were to
ask you who the richest criminal of all time
was you would probably say that it was Pablo Escobar. And you would definitely
be right in saying that. But you may not know exactly
just how absurdly rich the man actually was. At the height of Escobar's
power and adjusted for inflation in 2012 dollars, he had
an estimated net worth of $30 billion US dollars. Now, $30 billion is a
very difficult number to get one's head
around, so let's look at this from a different angle. In 1989, Pablo Escobar
was estimated by Forbes to be the seventh richest
person in the world.
If he were alive
today and making the same amount
of money, he would be placed 18th on that list. The engine that provided
him with his immense wealth has his Medellin cartel, a
ruthless drug organization so large that it could be
placed on the Fortune 500. For a time, the cartel
basically owned an entire island in the Bahamas that they
used as a refueling point for their planes smuggling
cocaine from Colombia. The island had a 1
kilometer long airstrip where they would land
their large planes, transfer the cocaine
on to smaller planes, and from there land
on remote dirt roads in the south of Florida,
where the cocaine would then hit the streets of
the United States. The cartel was
making five to seven of these flights every
day in their heyday and even had a fleet
of two submarines.
Altogether about
15 tons of cocaine was being smuggled by the cartel
into the United States per day. This amounted to them
controlling 84 to 90% of the cocaine supply in the
United States and about 80% of the total global
cocaine supply. One single kilo of cocaine cost
the cartel an average of $1,000 to refine and another $4,000 to
smuggle into the United States. Pilots who were
employed by the cartel can make up to $500,000 per
flight into the United States. Once on the streets
of the United States, that kilo that cost
$5,000 to arrive there could sell for anywhere
between $50,000 to $70,000.
What this meant was that
Escobar's cartel was making $60 million in revenue per day. That equals $420
million every week and that meant an operating
yearly income of $22 billion. They were making so
much money that they had to spend around $1,000
each week just on rubber bands to keep their mountains of
cash all neat and organized. They ran out of places
to store their money and had to resort to
stashing it in old worn down warehouses and even
buried it in remote fields. Escobar decided to write off
10% of their monthly revenues simply because that's about how
much was being eaten by rats or damaged by water. That's about $2.2
billion every year that was simply being destroyed,
and it didn't affect Escobar much at all. This is a man who once burned
$2 million in cold cash just to keep his daughter warm
one time when she was cold.
Now, let's get some
perspective on these numbers. As stated earlier, these numbers
are so astronomically high that they're very
difficult to visualize. Let's think about how
the average yearly income for somebody in Colombia
today is $5,194. That means that today it
would take 4,235,657 average Colombians to combine their
yearly incomes just to match Pablo Escobar's. Moving over to the United
States for a comparison, the average yearly household
income here is $51,939. That means that the average
household in the United States would have to work for 1,155
years saving all of the money that they made in
the process just to equal the same
amount of money that Pablo Escobar's Medellin
cartel was making in just one single day. Staggeringly, to match
the amount of money the cartel was
making in one year it would take 423,574
average US households to pool all of their
yearly earnings together. That's roughly the
same population as the city of Miami.
And what about
Escobar's reported net worth of $30 billion? That value is so
high, it's roughly equivalent to the
entire 2016 GDP of Paraguay, a country with a
population of 6,783,000 people. If the Medellin
cartel at its peak was actually listed as an
American company on the Fortune 500 today, it would be placed
at the 129th largest company by yearly revenue, just making
more money than the Union Pacific Railroad Company,
while also making more money than Starbucks, Staples, Kohl's,
Southwest Airlines, and even Facebook. But all of this wealth
couldn't possibly last forever. Escobar's cartel was responsible
for an estimated 3,500 murders, 500 of whom
were police officers in the city of Medellin.
Escobar himself was gunned
down in a hail of bullets on the 2nd of December in
1993, and his cartel and wealth largely died with him. So thank you for
watching this video. While Pablo Escobar's fortune
made him an influential man in life, his legacy has
left a lasting influence on our pop culture and TV shows. Click here to go
to our good friends over at the Court Of Source
for the next part explaining how huge of an impact on our
popular culture men like Pablo Escobar have had. The Court Of Source
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think about changing that. Until next time, this
was Real Life Lore..
