SEASON 5 SPOILERS AHEAD
The mid-season finale of Breaking bad aired last Sunday, and has left us with an agonising 10 month wait, until we finally witness the inevitable downfall of Heisenberg.
Something Breaking Bad does incredibly well is the little details, the chemistry, the facts, the figures, and I found myself desperately needing to know how much money Skyler had actually stacked into the storage lot, as for once Breaking Bad couldn't tell us. Skyler couldn't give us an 'earthly idea' but I'm going to try my best to calculate an approximation, and discuss the implications.
So let's start by taking a look at that incredible montage of Heisenberg's booming empire, running, suprisingly, like clockwork. We only explicitly see two bundle sizes in this montage, they are $2000 and $5000 both being labelled with purple and brown bands respectively.
But we can see from these images two images that there is definitely another bundle size, labelled with a light greenish coloured label. This is further supported by the fact that Skyler states that there are are a 'variety of denominations' when confronting Walt in the storage lot. The label is clearly seen in the second image directly below Walt's hand next to the $2000 purple label. Now in an operation this large I don't believe the last bundle could be $1000 instead I think its the larger of the three denominations at $10,000, but just in case for the final calculation I will work out an estimation based on the third bundle value being both $1000 and $10,000.
Here's a nice clear shot of the top of the stack of money, from this image it looks as though there is a greater abundance of $2000 and $5000 bundles than $10000 (or $1000) ones, however if we look from the side we can see that there is a significant number of $10000 bundles, if not just as much as the other two denominations.
It doesn't look like Skyler piled them in any particular order, lets just assume she stacked them as she received them (this is most likely the case as she even stopped attempting to count the money). From this assumption and from the evidence in the pictures we can assume that the bundles were distributed evenly. So one third of the stack is $2000 bundles, one third is $5000 bundles and the final third is made up from $10000 bundles (or $1000). So finding the mean of the bundles gives us the average bundle value,
2000 + 5000 + 10000 = 17000
17000/3 = $5666.7(1dp)
Now we can simply calculate the amount of bundles, The height of the stack is 47 (give or take it's impossible to know for sure), the width of the stack is 15 and the length is 12. So,
5666.7 x 47 x 15 x 12 =
$47,940,000
However if we were to assume the last stack is valued at only $1000 the estimation becomes,
$22,560,000
Click to find out which value is closer to the truth
Comments and corrections are very much welcomed
