The other day, Forbes did an article about how they do something pretty cool called the “Fictional Fifteen” in which they determine who are the richest fictional characters out there. And while Ender unfortunately did not make the list (he’d have ranked #1, beating out the likes of Scrooge McDuck and Carlisle Cullen) because of too many unknown factors, they did lay out how they came to the conclusion that he’s worth about as much as Bill Gates at a cool $66 billion dollars.
After the Formic War in Ender’s Game, there was a lot of geopolitical strife, conquest and wars. But at the end of it all, Ender’s brother Peter Wiggin created a one-world government. It’s stated in the books that Starways Congress was basically the next step in evolution from that government, so we’ll say that the Yen became the world’s official currency when Peter Wiggin ended up running everything.
Card’s universe post-Ender’s Game is remarkably geopolitically (and technologically) stable. Three thousand years in the future, the only technology that’s really advanced significantly is genetic engineering –in part because humans took advanced technology from the alien Formics, but never figured out the physics of why that technology worked. So we’ll operate under the assumption that the economics of Ender’s universe is similarly stable.
So now we can make a guess at the value of the Yen before it was used as the base for the new Starways Congress dollar, and figure out how Ender’s year 5189 net worth of $400 trillion SCD translates to 2013 U.S. Dollars.
[…]
Ender’s $400 trillion Starways Congress dollars are worth about 16,920,473,773,265 modern-day Yen. If we convert that to U.S. dollars at the 1985 exchange rate, the figure we arrive at is a little more than $66.6 billion. That means Ender Wiggin’s is worth about as much as Bill Gates.
Don’t we all wish even more now that we had a friend like Jane?
Read the full article at Forbes.com. Thanks to Anthony for the tip!
