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.
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Until next time, this was Real Life Lore.