I know this post is from 2017 but I only saw it this week and I thought it was so fun that I just had to add my piece too! :D
So to prove OP right on “last amount listed” for thneeds sold, here’s the farthest screenshot I could get of the counter:
And then I measured it a bit more, scrolling to three timestamps all 1 second apart, and it turns out that he actually sells approx 14 thneeds per second:
However, I think it’s inaccurate to say that he stopped selling thneeds right when the last tree fell. I’m sure there were still many thneeds in the middle of being processed in the factory, and still many thneeds in stores that hadn’t been bought yet.
But if we’re trying to determine how much his Net Worth was (since O'hare’s “zillionaire” status is presumably referring to his net worth), we need to take a lot more things into account. Like, yes as the 2nd poster mentioned above, there’s inflation, and money in the early 1970s has inflated 5-6x in modern times. But we also need to consider:
1) Other products that his business sold. The counter in the hallway only counted thneeds. Did he sell other products, like how the 1972 Once-ler sold Onceler burgers, Onceler cones and Oncelermobiles?
Did he open up a park on a piece of land he promised the Lorax he would leave alone and then make money off of visitors, like in the Lorax stageplay?
Or maybe he increased the price of thneeds as demand grew? Did he customize them? Did it become a luxury item? The 2012 movie skipped over his entire biggering phase, so anything could’ve happened.
2) Investors. Every big business has investors buying shares of the company because they have faith that the business will become an even bigger success in the future and thus they’ll get their invested money’s worth through dividends and whenever they decide to sell their shares. With millions of dollars of investor money in his hand, the Once-ler can now use that money to bigger his factory, speed up production, improve his image with a snazzy suit and shiny limo, and start new projects like oncelermobiles and building an entire city called Thneedville (I’ll get to that later). So that’s huge amounts of money added on top of just sales. However…
3) His EXPENSES. Net Worth = Total Assets - Total Liabilities. We can’t stop at just revenue. How much did it cost to build his factory? His super axe hackers? What are the costs of utilities? Did he pay his family to work for him? What were the wages of the PR people? How much were the lawyer fees? How many people did he hire to work the factory assembly lines? How much was advertising? Insurance fees? Did he ever throw fancy parties for the purpose of making important business connections or simply to keep up employee morale? What did he pay for that suit, that limo, and that double neck flying V? Don’t forget the dividends owed to investors. And did he have any bank loans to pay off, too? All these expenses stack up! So how much money did he really have left after all that?
4) Well, in the end he was apparently still rich enough to start construction on an entirely new, futuristic city of plastic (or at least, he believed he would be)! How much money would it have cost to build Thneedville, though? Costs depend on things like location, labour, materials, size, population (and therefore how many homes you plan to build) and whether Thneedville would’ve been built from the ground up with brand new water and hydro systems or if it was built on top of Greenville (my belief is the latter).
In 2020, @floooopafloooopa made [a really awesome post] likening Thneedville to Disney’s EPCOT, which was ALSO supposed to be a circular, utopian autocratic company town. It never ended up getting built, but in its place, they built EPCOT park between 1979-1982, which already cost $800million-$1.4billion to build…BEFORE inflation!? [x] EPCOT the city would’ve been an even more expensive endeavor since it was going to be a fully functioning city housing 20000 residents. Could the Once-ler have afforded this? Costs would also have increased over time due to inflation depending on how long it took to get Thneedville built, and the Once-ler seems to be unwisely sitting on his stacks of cash instead of investing it…
5) …But what if he WAS investing some of it? Who knows, maybe day trading was one of his side gigs. xP If the economy at the time was growing rapidly though, which it sounded like it was during his biggering days, then for sure he would’ve expected his own investments to soar to a level high enough to fund Thneedville. On the other hand…
6) Knowing the Once-ler and his gross lack of foresight, my own headcanon is that he probably didn’t do that many calculations lol. Neither him, nor his investors, nor anyone anticipating the construction of Thneedville, cared to think about the fact that truffula trees were a finite raw material. The Once-ler probably ploughed full steam ahead while riding solely on his charisma and delusions, and only a nerdy kid named Aloysius could take over the economy next and actually be smart enough to keep it afloat.
All in all, it’s much more complicated than we might first guess when we try to think about how much money he’s made off his thneed business! Was O'hare still wealthier than him? Yeah, I would say so. O'hare owned not only the city, but also every business in the city as far as we could tell. On the other hand, the Once-ler owns our hearts, so who’s the real winner here, huh…u.u
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