Fiction 500: Difference between revisions

* This sort of character often shows up in [[The DCU]]:

** In ''[[Batman]]'', Bruce Wayne can bury the cost of the [[Justice League of America]] Watchtower in his aerospace budget. To put this in perspective, the smaller and far more primitive International Space Station is projected to cost over $100 billion by the time it's finally completed. ''If'' it's ever completed. He is also funding his secret life of fighting crime using assorted [[Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?|wonderful toys]]. An entire issue of ''Robin'' was devoted to delivering a cost accounting of Batman's arsenal. In ''[[Batman Begins]]'', Bruce and Alfred decide that the best way to disguise their purchase of ears for Batman costumes is to [[Refuge in Audacity|buy 10,000 of them]].

** In 'Teen Titans', Robin (Tim Drake) smuggled a Batmobile from Gotham, by hiding it in the Batarang budget. Impulse promptly crashes it, thus notifying Batman.

'''Robin:''' It's bigger than you'd think. }}

** In ''[[Doom Patrol]]'', Steve Dayton, AKA Mento. Routinely described as the fifth richest man on Earth in [[The DCU]].

* In the German novel ''Eine Billion Dollar'' by Andreas Eschbach, John Salvatore Fontanelli unexpectedly inherits the titular fortune (a trillion dollars in American terms) from a distant ancestor by way of compound interest. Though he tries various things (the East Asian financial crisis of 1997 is ascribed to his failed bid to join the International Monetary Fund), his most impressive feat is to {{spoiler|organize worldwide elections}}.

* From ''[[Ender's Game]]'', Andrew Wiggin has three thousand years of interest to draw in, due to time-dilated relativistic interstellar travel, and a sentient AI (one who operates in real time) monitoring his finances. The size of his initial investment is pretty much irrelevant... and it would've been nothing to sniff at, since he was being heralded as the savior of the human race when they assigned him his pension.<br /><br />His sister Valentine, who accompanied him on basically all of those journeys, is also a big shot. She didn't have a pension or AI help, and her fortune isn't made as big a deal of, but three millenia of interest is still bound to be sizable.

* In ''[[Everworld]]'', Nidhoggr fills a large volcano with treasure, the least valuable of which is pure gold. The King of Fairy Land is similarly rich, with diamond-tiled roofs. The heroes sell technology to the fairies for a large bag of diamonds, which they lose after {{spoiler|using the diamonds as a weapon against Hetwan fliers}}.

* In ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'', the rock band Disaster Area not only qualifies as the loudest noise in the Galaxy of any kind, but makes such obscene amounts of money that you need sufficiently advanced mathematics just to do their accounting. Lead musician Hotblack Desiato once spent a year dead for tax reasons.