T’Challa’s Treasure: Why Wakanda Beats Batman And Iron Man Wealth

Comic books have come up with some pretty cool superpowers over the years—from flying to invulnerability to being really strong and sticky (good one, Peter). But there’s one superpower from the real world that allows otherwise super powerless people to live that superhero life: money. Lots and lots of money.

Being rich is a superpower all on its own. Sure, it takes a little extra genius and drive to go from rich to superhero—otherwise, being rich might just mean making YouTube videos about your supercars. But when it comes to rich superheroes, there’s one who outshines all the others: T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, also known as Black Panther. He’s anywhere between 2,160 to 240,200 times richer than Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne combined. Oh yeah, it’s good to be king.

Money Makes the Superhero

Wealth is a pretty good fix when it comes to being a superhero. Even if we were given superpowers, superheroing would have to take a back seat to super paying rent and super eating. As cosplayers have shown us, even putting together a costume is a time-consuming and money-spending proposition—plus, yours can’t be fragile. Rich solves a lot of problems.

Want to avenge your parents’ murder? It helps to have a billion-dollar estate to fund your world travels and ninja lessons. Want to right the wrongs of your war-profiteering ways? Those war profits might just pay for your sweet, sweet power suit.

Just How Rich Are These Superheroes?

Forbes and Money magazines have taken a stab at estimating the wealth of some of our favorite fictional heroes:

• Bruce Wayne is estimated to be worth an astounding $9.2 billion, mostly from his inheritance and foundations. Wayne Enterprises, a broad technology company with defense contracts, brings in another $31.3 billion in revenue. That’s enough to keep Bruce in Batmobiles and batarangs.
• Tony Stark is estimated to be worth $12.4 billion, with Stark Industries bringing in $20.3 billion a year. Tony spends a little more on R&D products that don’t go anywhere than Bruce probably would.
• T’Challa is worth a mind-boggling $90.7 trillion, based almost entirely on the value of vibranium. Yeah, trillion with a T. If you wanted to gather enough money to buy all the vibranium in the world, you’d need the entire gross domestic product of the entire world—a $4 trillion loan, which, of course, prices out Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. Their combined net worth is now a seemingly paltry sum of $42 billion. Even if they combined their yearly profits, they’d have to save up for the next 1,800 years before they could even make an offer.

That number comes from information we got during Doomwar. There are 10,000 tons of vibranium tucked away in Wakanda, and the going rate for the precious metal that can do anything is $10,000 a gram. Of course, in Doomwar, Doctor Doom forced T’Challa to make the vibranium inert to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands—but nothing is permanent in the comics, of course. Plus, there’s the rest of Wakanda and its vibranium-infused technology and people, so they’re going to be fine.

The Wealth of Fictional Heroes

When we’re talking about the relative wealth of fictional heroes who spend the bulk of their time suited up and punching super-powered bad guys—or at least, when it comes to Batman, super weirdos—wealth is measured in different ways. That’s how magazines like Money and Forbes can give estimates on their net worth.

One of the biggest elements in measuring wealth is adding up assets that are considered an investment—things that will increase in value as you own them. That means having the thing is better than having the money. So, that big swanky estate with the full cave of bats and bat-themed gadgets? That’s an asset that goes toward Bruce Wayne’s wealth. The equally swanky Malibu mansion on a sea cliff? Part of Tony Stark’s worth. Even the car collection he has in his garage contributes to his wealth—which took a $1.5 million hit when he landed on a Shelby 427 Cobra. Ouch.

That’s an important distinction that matters when it comes time to buy extra armor pieces or batarangs. Do you think Bruce Wayne collects them? That difference in kinds of wealth is called liquid and illiquid. Illiquid isn’t something you drink at a Beastie Boys show—no, it’s assets that aren’t that easy to turn into money quickly. Like a sweet mansion built on top of a Batcave full of bats, gadgets, and a butler buying batarangs on eBay.

This means that Bruce Wayne’s wealth and Tony Stark’s wealth are slightly different due to the way they decide to get down when the bad guys come to town. Bruce Wayne wants to keep his nocturnal habits to himself, so he creates the public persona of the playboy Bruce Wayne—the ineffectual man-child heir to his parents’ fortune and company, with just enough involvement to make sure the company does the right thing and no one carefully audits Lucius Fox’s research. Wayne Foundation also funds a lot of charities and social programs in Gotham. With the inheritance and foundation responsibilities, Bruce Wayne probably spends most of his energy hiding his superheroing from auditors and accountants as much as he does the Gotham police department.

Over at Marvel, Tony Stark’s situation is a little different. Tony Stark isn’t trying to hide his genius under the act of being a playboy—he is a playboy and also a genius. The song might say Tony Stark will make you feel like he’s a cool exec with a heart of steel, but he’s really a cool exec with a heart being threatened with shrapnel made of steel. As the CEO and chief guy who comes up with things, Tony is more involved in the company, and because of this kind of relationship, he’s also probably more liquid than Bruce Wayne.

By now, in the comics and in the MCU, Tony has outed himself as Iron Man, so he’s not restricted by trying to pretend he spent a few million dollars partying in Gotham and not making a sweet custom jet car. Of course, in the MCU, Tony has given up control of Stark Industries to Pepper, who he also married, so Tony still gets profit from ownership of the company—but like Bruce Wayne’s inheritance, he gets to spend it willy-nilly.

Wakanda: A Different Kind of Wealth

Things get a lot trickier when we get to Wakanda. T’Challa might be a monarch, but Wakanda isn’t really your typical monarchy. There are some antiquated methods of determining political power—you can only challenge for leadership of the country if you’re from an approved bloodline, and instead of campaigning on your platform of “more cool waterfowl event spaces,” you have to fight the current king.

Just because you won the fight doesn’t mean you get to start spending the country’s money willy-nilly. While Bruce Wayne can pretend to be a playboy and Tony Stark can actually be a playboy, T’Challa has to be a king. For Wakanda, that also means suiting up and punching bad guys who might threaten the kingdom. This means that while he’s free to buy some sweet sandals that his sister won’t like, if he wants a sweet upgrade to his Black Panther suit, the spending has to be justified as part of the operating budget of the kingdom of Wakanda—which also has to pay for the cool shield and hologram that protect the land and the cool ships they fly around in.

Before T’Challa opened Wakanda to the world, they’d fly out of Wakanda in the cool ships, sneak into old Land Rovers to go to an airport in Zimbabwe, and pretend like their agrarian nation didn’t have super jets for some reason. This raises another problem with T’Challa’s net worth, aside from the fact that he can lose it by getting beaten up at a waterfall: He has to run a country, not a company. The number is based entirely on a stockpile of vibranium, Dr. Doom plots aside, that’s a combination of liquid and illiquid assets that probably requires an economics degree to sort out.

Should Wakanda start selling vibranium, they’d find no shortage of buyers, except they have a central principle of protecting this technology from getting into the wrong hands—like, say, Dr. Doom. I mean, it’s in his name. However, once vibranium is on the market, its value would start changing. Right now, it’s worth $10,000 a gram, partially because Wakanda won’t sell it. If they started flooding the market with their several tons of vibranium, the value would change. But since the amount of vibranium is finite, this helps keep the value high.

Then all the tricky issues of international monetary policy start to take place—unsexy things like controlling supply to maintain value, setting the market, and currency policy, and a bunch of other things that aren’t as cool as power suits, Batmobiles, and energy-absorbing armor.

The biggest hitch, of course, is that there isn’t enough wealth in the world to buy all the vibranium in the world. And ultimately, something is only worth what other people are willing or able to pay for it. So, is that $90.7 trillion worth of vibranium worthless? No, because remember, wealth is a superpower. On top of that, T’Challa is able to call upon the projected wealth of his nation, which can buy more than money can.

That doesn’t even get intothe intrinsic value of all the other vibranium-dependent technology in the fictional kingdom. You could argue that Wakanda’s central wealth and technological position in the Marvel Universe gives T’Challa a position of strength against any outside forces looking to invade. Not even Bruce Wayne’s Bat-empire or Tony Stark’s Age of Ultron could buy that.