“How much does being Superman pay? Oh, it doesn’t, does it?”
It’s canon that Supes is a billionaire plus. There are literally tons of sunken treasure he’s hauled up and hidden in the Fortress of Solitude*
*The creators of The Man Of Steel stole a lot of their ideas from Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze. Doc had a Fortress long before Superman ever flew.
In Supes defense, there are untold trillions of dollars of rare minerals flying around our solar system right now. He could just fly out to a gold asteroid and knock a chunk off to pay for it himself.
The value of minerals is based on their scarcity (or companies agreeing to price-fix *cough* diamonds *cough* ). If Superman brought a large chunk of gold back to Earth, it would upset the market value of gold, thus devaluing the chunk he found as well as all gold on the planet.
You can’t just “print money.” That’s how you get hyperinflation. Same goes for rare earth minerals; bring home more and the value for all of them globally is reduced, creating a hyperinflation of minerals.
If Superman brought home a large enough chunk of gold, he could essentially crash the gold market and then it would be a practically useless shiny rock. He couldn’t even buy bread with it.
It would still be extremely valuable, though. You would absolutely still buy bread with it especially before you sold it all off
And an abundance of certain minerals means that more applications become possible from them. For example, silver is a better conductor than copper. If Superman hauled back a fuckton of silver then maybe we’d switch over to silver wires, increasing demand for silver still, reducing the price loss, as well as adding efficiencies to wiring
If Superman brought a large chunk of gold back to Earth, it would upset the market value of gold, thus devaluing the chunk he found as well as all gold on the planet.
ok, so just bring back the right quantity of gold so it doesn’t crash the gold economy. I’m pretty sure superman can manage bringing back 1 million dollars worth of gold from wherever instead of 1 squillion
The current gold market is valued at 34.243 trillion dollars.
I don’t know the scope of the damage here but lets assume it costs 50 billion to repair. That would be about 353 tons (US) of gold using current prices. The cost of this represents approximately 0.14% of the current global gold market.
Superman is paid in trillions by the gold and rare earth lobby to never do that exact thing.
