Curiosity #9 How absurdly Rich was Pablo Escobar?

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.

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