378 million is what you meant @Geers (OR, maybe it is trillion, idrc) Could have been 417mil (or tril) though... Then again, that is not accounting for the inevitable fact that the value will fall with that much being introduced into the market all at once. Still be fairly valuable nonetheless.
40K dollar per kilogram http://goldprice.org/ 10 000 000 metric tons times 40 000 000 dollar per ton = 400 000 000 000 000 dollar. So yes 400 trillion USD. Or 400 billion USD, depending on where you live. Well 400 million implies it's 40 dollar per ton of gold. so you kind of could've know that's wrong. (I am an engineer, i'm good at order-of-magnitude estimates). EDIT: just to drive a point home: With 2.5 million tons as the higher estimate, and the comic's 10 million tons, you're essentially five-folding (12.5/2.5 = 5 after all) the amount of gold in the world. Assuming gold value is a perfectly linear thing, your 10 Mtons of gold would still be worth one-fifth as much as current gold prices ( so ~80 trillion). Assuming it's a square function, it would be 1/25th it's value ( so 16 trillion). Either way, you're still dirty filthy rich. even if it's the lowest value combined with the worst prediction, making you worth 1 trillion dollars. Unless things go really, really, really bad, but it needs to drop by truly insane figures (divide by a million and you have 400 million) before your 10 million tonnes of gold become worthless.
I thought my arguement that THAT MUCH GOLD being introduced to the marked would drive it's value down, making these measurements impractical, was a winning arguement...
I think it only enhances the comic. If he'd asked for the same amount of steel, he' d be a small time foundry. With gold, he possesses 4x more than the entire human race ever had