Study Finds That Animal Crossing’s Opportunistic Slumlord Tom Nook Is Worth Over $5 TRILLION

If you had the fortune of being quarantined with a Nintendo Switch, chances are you’ve probably been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). If you haven’t been playing it, you probably know a thing or two about it, since it seems like everyone’s been tweeting about the game. ACNH is a social simulation video game that has players moving into islands and making friends with cute animals. Sounds like a dream right?

Wrong.

Under the cutesy graphics and dialogue is a sinister money-making scheme, one masterminded by a certain unscrupulous raccoon, Tom Nook. After Nook lures you to a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, you essentially end up in indentured servitude, finding yourself deeper and deeper in debt to your new slumlord. And on top of that, you’re doing all the work on the island, gathering materials to build infrastructure and even shelling out your hard-earned cash to sell real estate.

This monstrosity of a business model makes no sense, but it works. At least, it does for Nook, who is making an obscene amount of money from duping gullible folks just looking for a way to escape from their quarantine blues.

A study conducted by Onlinecasinos.co.uk found that Tom Nook has a net worth of over a whopping 5 TRILLION DOLLARS. $5,770,052,748,058.73, to be exact. This was after taking into account the conversion rate of Bells (the game’s currency) to real-world money, the value of total home upgrades, island prices, and the number of players around the world.

Prior to this revelation, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was the world’s wealthiest person — beating out even his fictional billionaire counterparts. But Tom Nook is 40 times richer than Bezos, who is worth a measly $140.5 billion.

For comparison, here are today’s 8 richest fictional characters (net worth data from Veranda):