Bond villains tend to be similar without dragging any sort of monotony with them. The schemes of all the villains normally stem from the desire to destroy the competition and pump up the revenues of already-profitable business ventures, or the need to destroy the world. Thanos isn't alone in his line of thought.
While Bond globe-trots and parties on taxpayers' money, most of the criminal masterminds that he faces tend to have massive fortunes of their own. These men gladly use their wealth to mess up with the world or create even more money for themselves. But who among them can boast of having the deepest pockets?
10 Francisco Scaramanga (The Man With The Golden Gun)
Scaramanga is no businessman. He has a talent that earns him a lot of money. In the movie, it's revealed that Scaramanga, who happens to have three nipples, is the world's best assassin. His rates are impressive as he charges $1 million per kill. Since the year is 1974, that amount adjusted to inflation today would be way over $5 million today.
A minimum of 100 kills a year makes him one of the world's highest-earning individuals. He lives on his own private island off the coast of Eastern China. And to keep it classy, he only uses gold bullets. He has a golden gun too, custom made from a gold cigarette case, gold fountain pen, gold cigarette lighter, and a gold cufflink which serves as the trigger.
9 Elektra King (The World Is Not Enough)
Not only is the world not enough to heiress Elektra King but money isn't either. Elektra sits at the helm of King Industries, a massive oil pipeline, and construction business that was passed on to her after her father died from a terrorist attack.
The company has contracts to install oil pipelines in various parts of the world. The large network and the value of oil mean King Industries rakes in billions of dollars each year. Since the cash is still not enough, Elektra plans to make King Industries the only supplier of crude oil in the world. And she is intelligent enough to fool Bond into falling for her.
8 Mr. Big (Live And Let Die)
Dr. Kananga aka Mr. Big is a dictator who rules his own fictional country of San Monique. All of the small island nation's wealth is under his control. The nation also has vast farms full of opium poppies that he uses to manufacture heroin.
Mr. Big has a Gus Fring side to him. His portfolio includes a chain of restaurants in New Orleans and New York City that go under the brand name "Fillet of Soul." He also oversees the operations of the street gangs in Harlem which he uses to supply drugs. Since he is a head-of-state, he enjoys certain diplomatic immunities in America, enabling him to grow his criminal empire smoothly.
7 Franz Sanchez (License To Kill)
Sanchez runs one of the biggest drug cartels in Central and Southern America. His operations are based in the fictional Republic of Isthmus where he is the most powerful man. Keeping up with his flamboyance, his pet iguana has a diamond-encrusted collar.
The drug lord owns a number of estates and factories that he uses to manufacture drugs. He has access to petroleum too, which he sometimes uses to hide cocaine by dissolving it. Given how casually he cuts a cheque of $5 million in the movie, it can be assumed this is pocket change to him.
6 Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
The bullion dealer hates banks so he keeps his entire fortune in gold. He doesn't pay taxes either, meaning he saves a lot of money that would have gone to the IRS. His gold is buried underneath his Kentucky farm. He also plans to increase its value by destroying all the US gold reserves.
For his protection, Goldfinger has an army of henchmen—including the popular Oddjob—who he uses to deal with nuisances like James Bond. He also owns a plane, a factory, and several Rolls-Royce Phantom III's that are made of gold.
5 Elliot Carver (Tomorrow Never Dies)
The media mogul is the owner of the Carver Media Group which runs a couple of TV stations as well as the controversial Tomorrow newspaper. His company has the broadcast rights to report news in all countries in the world except China. But he is working hard to make sure that the vast Asian nation is covered too.
Carver prefers when the world is in chaos as this means more bad news for his paper to report on. Among his many assets is a stealth ship costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
4 Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me)
Stromberg is basically Aquaman with unlimited reserves of cash. He has an aquatic empire that includes plenty of submarines, a shipping firm and an underwater city that he's confident will sustain him and his buddies in the event of a nuclear disaster. Yes, his underwater city goes by the name Atlantis too.
Part of his assets includes a huge tanker, dubbed the Liparus, that he uses as his second base. Liparus is guarded by an army of red soldiers. Unlike Goldfinger, Stromberg is very liquid (he lives underwater after all). He easily gives away 20 million dollars to professors at the beginning of the movie.
3 Max Zorin (A View To Kill)
Zorin is a highly intelligent and psychopathic man, thanks to a Nazi experiment where pregnant mothers were injected with steroids to create super babies. The experiment failed but the few children that survived went on to rule the world. Zorin's brains enable him to form the biggest microchip company in the world.
Aside from his tech empire, Zorin doubles in oil well operations. His ties to the KGB means he can get deals done quite easily. But too much wealth is never enough so Zorin plans to flood Silicon Valley so that all his competitors may be destroyed, leaving him as the only microchip manufacturer.
2 Hugo Drax (Moonraker)
Hugo Drax's wealth comes from space research. He's kinda like an evil version of Elon Musk. He owns Drax Industries which operates a fleet of rockets and satellites. It's implied that the company is frequently contracted by NASA.
Away from his space empire, Drax has one of the world's coolest pieces of real estate in his portfolio. He is the proud owner of the Eiffel Tower. Sadly the French government has denied him the permit to export the tower out of the country since it's too valuable to the economy. Yes, he wanted to bring it to America.
1 Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Spectre, From Russia With Love, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, Diamonds Are Forever, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)
As the head of the biggest criminal empire in the world known as SPECTRE, Blofeld easily qualifies as the richest. He gets a cut from all of the major global criminal activities conducted by SPECTRE members, as well as members of the subsidiary group known as QUANTUM. His power makes him the highest-earning Bond villain.
Blofeld's assets are countless as seen in the numerous movies he has appeared in. His last known base was in Tangier, Morrocco where he had thousands of employees in a vast ultra-modern estate that Bond managed to destroy.
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