How Much Is Squid Game’s 45 Billion Won Prize In Dollars?

Squid Game

So, of all the mysteries in Squid Game, without question, the one thing I think that every American watching the show Googled was how much the game’s prize pool, 45.6 billion won, 100 million won for every participant, was in US dollars.

Well, I figured I’d do that conversion for you, as I know I looked it up too.

• So, 1 Korean won is worth 0.00084 USD.
• That means 45,600,000,000 won is $38,460,271.20 USD.
• And each contestant worth 100,000,000 won was worth $84,341.99 USD.

So, it’s still a lot of money to win in the end if you’re the last one standing, and it would have been a good bit of money distributed to the families of those who died if it was turned down. But many of the contestants had billions of won in debt, so it wouldn’t have covered all of that, it seems.

$45 billion USD? That would have been a prize so large it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense in context. Elon Musk just made headlines as having his fortune eclipse $200 billion, only the second person ever to do that besides Jeff Bezos, so you’d be a quarter of the way there with 45 billion USD. $38 million is probably enough to buy one of Jeff Bezos’s yachts.

ITALY – JULY 2, 2021: The yacht Flying Fox allegedly belonging to US business magnate and Amazon CEO … [+] Jeff Bezos is seen in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily, Italy. Vera Shcherbakova/TASS (Photo by Vera ShcherbakovaTASS via Getty Images)

It’s implied this has always been the pool for past games, so the game is giving away $38 million a year to its winners (or losers), while somehow financing the costs of the game itself. We learned from Squid Game that a bunch of rich men (many westerners included) sit around betting millions on the game, but we still don’t really know how the game started, or who ultimately is behind it. We know who through this year’s game in Korea with all the children’s games, but the implication was that it’s not necessarily normally like that, and now that character is dead (no spoilers as to who it was).

Squid Game is rising up the ranks to become one of Netflix’s most popular shows ever, if not the most popular ever, so a season 2 seems likely, even if the writer/director does not have any ideas yet, which he says he doesn’t. But we’ll assume the prize pool may remain the same, unless they increase the number of contestants. Though at that point, things may get a little…overcrowded. We’ll see how it works out in a year, two years? Who knows.

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