On last night's Breaking Bad, Walter White's now-enormous fortune took yet another turn, when he had the whole shebang dumped into barrels and buried in the New Mexico desert. But did all the money from that infamous cube make the journey? Or did the show's production designer (or someone else...) pull a fast one on us? Luckily, we have the video evidence—and the fifth-grade arithmetic—to see if it all checks out:
The dollar value of Walt's fortune has been estimated before, but for our purposes it doesn't matter; we only need to know the volume of all that cash (nice problem to have, that), and whether it would fill all seven barrels in the van. The estimate from this Quora thread of the size of the cube sounds about right: 5 by 6 by 2.5 feet, or 75 cubic feet.
Now, assuming those are standard 55-gallon drums, seven of them filled to the brim would hold 385 gallons, or (thanks, Google) only 51.467 cubic feet. And that's not accounting for the fact that bills stuffed into barrels is less space-efficient than bills stacked into a cube—just ask your favorite rapper. So where did those three or four extra barrels disappear to, the magic of television? Or...
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