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What's "it"? His products? I couldn't find the number in the wiki.
Edit: thank you guys! It didn't occur to be that it's actually the cash, that's crazy!
In reality it was actual cash money. He couldn't use banks due to his money being gained through illegal means. He had stacks of money just laying around so much he couldn't really secure it. Columbia is generally warm and humid so a lot of pests like rats and insects. I heard he was spending around 10k a week just on rubber bands to wrap the money into stacks of a thousands.
If you don't know he made most of his money by selling cocaine though.
Chap never heard of tupperware apparently.
Rats can chew through cement.
No way. Really? That can't be much softer than their teeth.
Their teeth continually grow, and cement (not concrete) is not that hard to abrade away.
Yeah, sand definitely is much harder than teeth (which in a normal vertebrate are based on apatite, at a Mohs hardness of 5). If it's abrasion, that explains a bit, although it's going to be much slower than an actual cutting action. A quick search indicates cement is at Mohs 5-7, so you theoretically could chew through an unusually soft sample.
It absolutely abrades the teeth faster than the cement, but rats are very social creatures. The point is that the Tupperware doesn't stand a chance against even a single rat.
You could also go with metal or stone, like an actual vault, but we both thought of tupperware. Go figure.
The District of Columbia isn't that warm.
Maybe they meant the city from Bioshock Infinite. But I would think being at that elevation would make things colder, if anything.
Cash. His business was illegal (naturally), and it was the 1980s, so most of his profits were in literal cash that could not really be safely put in banks in the amounts he was bringing it in. So much of it was physically stored and hidden in various safehouses... and sometimes, vermin and the elements would get at it, destroying or rotting the paper money beyond usability.
was cash ever actual paper? I'm pretty sure the US dollar has been cotton since it was first created, only actual paper money i can think of would be proto-cash in the form of bonds and whatnot.
Cotton paper is still paper.
It being the literal cash.
No, his literal bank notes. Due to the nature of his business he hid his money wherever he could and a percentage of it was lost to environmental factors.
It looks like "it" is money, USD specifically judging by the $ in the meme.
To be fair, that’s 10%. That’s nuts.
$2.1B a year
$420M a week
I don't think that's 10%.
420M*52 weeks =21,840M =21.84B
Is it not?
How much is that after taxes?
You sure he paid taxes on his illegal coke business?
You're technically correct. The best kind of correct.
I think this is technically more correct:
365.25 / 7 = 52.178571429
52.178571429 * 420,000,000 = 21,915,000,000
(2,100,000,000 / 21,915,000,000) * 100 = 9.582477755
Which means it's 9.58% rounded down to 2 decimals.
(This is using the common definition of a year and not a "tropical year")
He cumulated the money for more than 52 weeks
But he lost 2.1B every year, so for every 52 week period
Yes, but losing 10% of an asset typically refers to total asset value, not revenue.
We’re not even including losses on the cocaine itself, this is all just about the revenue. He didn’t lose 10% of his business every year.
I read it that he lost a significant part if his cash assets. Revenue is a different concept. In your calculation you made the comparison with revenue.
I compared the size of the two numbers I was given. I didn’t call them equivalent, I didn’t say they described the same thing. I only even used the word revenue after you did, because I was using zero context to compare the numbers (I just like numbers and it popped out to me that it was 10%)- it wasn’t until you said revenue that it occurred to me that he probably would have reinvested much of that money and it wasn’t just profit.
That said, now that I am thinking about it, he didn’t exactly have access to non cash investment or value storage options. I wonder if there was much of a difference between the total money coming in and the total cash coming in.
Yes I know, you divided number one with number two and did the math right. I’m just saying that in the general world of business metrics comparing those numbers is not really a common practice.
Edit. For comparison, you might have a car that loses 5k of its value in a year and you work and get paid 50k a year. Surely that 5k depreciation is 10% of your yearly income, but typically you count that per cent from the value of the car instead.
This is, to be fair, most billionaires.
Assholes the lot of them.
Imagine making that sort of money and just buying hippos with it
He bought a country with it first
What got eaten by rats? Were those rats living on pure cocaine somehow?
Cash, delicious, delicious paper
Ah. I'm surprised there's any calories in that for a non-ruminant.
Bro, get some Tupperware or something. Sure you're still unimaginably rich, but there's a principle to it!
They nest with it
That would make more sense. I imagine it would also be good just to wear down their teeth if there's nothing else available.
That's about 21 billion a year (assuming 2 weeks for holidays because 50 is easier to multiply than 52, and 21 is a nicer number than 21.84).
Nah, that shit was stolen.
Honestly, when your whole organisation is hardened criminals <10% grift is pretty impressive.
That's less than retail store losses due to theft. Lol.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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