The Cost Of Being An Unbeatable Evil Overlord
May 27, 2012 in Editorial, Top
If there’s one thing that the movies have taught us it’s that evil never succeeds. Yet most of the time evil fails for silly reasons. In 1994 Peter Anspach published the 100 things he would do if he ever became an evil overlord. They included such gems as:
- If my advisors ask “Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?”, I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.
- When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”
- I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line “No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!” (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)
But while following such prescripts are likely to lead to evil-overlord levels of success, is it financially viable to do so?
We went through each of the items on the list and looked at how much money it would either cost (or save) to follow through with it. We assumed an army of 1,000 Evil Legionnaires of Terror, and a rebel army to consist of 100 traitors. Our conclusion? It would cost just $14,268,632, or a little over 14 million dollars to ensure that your reign as an Evil Overlord is truly unstoppable. Scroll through the sheet to see the cost-savings breakdown, and click on the “Notes” cells to find the sources for our estimates. You can sort the columns by clicking in the sheet.
Watch out world. Here we come.
To complete our plans to become an Evil Overlord, we’d need a super-weapon and you can find our estimate of the cost of the Death Star over here. We would also need a lair, and you can find out the cost of that over here. You can find those and other interesting things in our Editorials although if you want a selection of our most popular check out the Greatest Hits. And you can track our progress as we take over the world by following us here:
Oh come on, number seven has got to be at least a buck, I mean assuming you want to use a bullet strong enough to do the job.
The 5 year old adviser will have to be replaced each year.
With the hero who is the intended replacement – hire them and get them to give you a good retirement package.
I’m just gonna say, a little over 14 million seems like an unbelievable bargain for an evil overlord. Real life evil overlords are billionaires. So we’ve got a nice evil retirement fund. I don’t know how inflation factors in though.
This seems to be an annual cost.
Typo in #36.
Because an evil warlord’s habit of keeping their power through evil means will generally mean there will always be someone who wants to kill them either within their grasp of power or outside of it?
For #8, just to let you know, you said it would cost 31 million dollars, but Peter says he would NOT have a lavish spectacle for a wedding. I don’t know about where you’re from, but I think in general simple and quiet weddings cost a bit less then 31 million dollars 😉
Did you notice the negative sign ” – ” which means 31 million dollar is not used.(less than 31 million dollar)
Re #9: An Escort shotgun (Chinese import) will set you back less than $350 even in a nice nickel finish. Granted it’s not as pretty as the $5900 Browning Grade VII Citori Lightning, but is the (deceased) hero really going to care?
Two thoughts on #13:
“The announcement of their death” – A 1 day obituary costs just over $100.
“as well as any accompanying celebration” – You would need to pay for food & wine for at least yourself and your advisors, so that’s at least another $500.
RE: #59 – They are missing a solid opportunity with distributed computing. Not only can they get super-computer level work completed but with the correct programming and the right cover propaganda (such as a project that is alleged to work against your own “empire” or pursue some contrary goal) one could ferret out potential enemies, leave back-door hack options on enemy computer and *still* get one’s supercomputing done – at very little cost compared to buying or building the hardware and software yourself!
$528,000 would be the cost of buying 1760 Playstation 3 ($300/ from Amazon.com) to simulate the US Air Force’s Condor cluster.
Note: Tax and Shipping/handling not included. Bribe to Sony to allow modding of said Playstation 3s to run Linux or other OS will be much larger.
Pentium computers appear to average approximately $50 each on eBay. I’m not sure how that compares in computing power to a PS3, but if it takes five Pentium computers to equal a single PS3, that’s still a savings of $88,000.
(However, this may make the IT department costs go up.)
Why are all the estimates in British pounds?
Who better to model an Evil Empire after? =)
Britain had pretty good evil empire going for awhile. So why not?