This is a guest post from Monique Jones from Moniqueblog.net. Thank you very much for the post Monique.
All of my posts concerning Draco and Viktor are titled “The Worth Of”, but I’ve never actually talked about their monetary worth, mostly because that’s not the type of worth I was ever concerned with when writing about their importance to the Harry Potter series. But recently, I got to thinking: what is their actual monetary worth? Any Harry Potter fan can tell you that the Malfoys and Viktor are rich, but just how rich are they, and how does that wealth get translated into Muggle terms we can readily identify with?
Forbes already did part of the work for me when it comes to how much Draco’s father Lucius Malfoy is worth. In their 2005 list of “The Forbes Fictional 15″ wealthiest fictional people, Lucis was calculated as being worth $900 million(that is, when galleons are converted into dollars). That’s a lot, but how does he rank with wealthy existing people? Firstly, he’s only $ 1 million short of being a billionaire, meaning that in the scope of the top billionaires in the world, Malfoy’s like middle class. To give you a sense of how middle-of-the-pack Malfoy is, the top billionaire in the world, Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helu is worth $53.5 billion dollars, making $18.5 billion a year. A year. In contrast, Malfoy only makes $2, 465, 753.42 a year. Also, Bill Gates, the most powerful entrepreneur in America, makes $53 billion, coming second to Helu. Malfoy’s level of wealth includes movie stars like Mel Gibson and Jennifer Aniston, and music stars like David Bowie. So, while Malfoy thinks he’s so much better than non-magical people, he’s actually really not much of a monetary force in the world of Muggles.
Meanwhile, how much does Viktor Krum have? Well, there’s no exact amount given to him like what Forbes gave Malfoy, we can estimate how rich Viktor is by how much athletes in similar sports make. Viktor’s sport, Quidditch, is like a cross between soccer (football) and basketball, since you can hold the balls with your hands. The average footballer makes, according to a 2006 story by The Independent, 676,000 pounds a year, meaning 13,000 pounds a week. In American dollars, that’s $970,640. But, at least according to the MLS Players Union, U.S. soccer players make much more than this, their lowest salary paid being around $15,ooo and David Beckham, now playing for the U.S., is one of the highest-paid soccer players, averaging between $5,500,000.08 (base salary as of last year) and $6, 500, 000.o4 (guaranteed compensation as of last year). The highest paid U.S. soccer player is Chris Albright at $176,000. The salary of the average basketball player is between $14-$24 million a year. So, considering the popularity of Quidditch in Magical Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia and the wide range of salaries between the popularity and skill of certain football and basketball players, I would wager that Krum-being one of the top Quidditch players in Magical Europe-would take in a salary between $900,000 and $4 million a year.
If there is a lesson to take from any of this imaginary guessing, it would be that money talks, even in the land of make-believe and magic.
