If there’s one thing that the movies have taught us it’s that evil never succeeds. Yet most of the time evil fails for silly reasons. In 1994 Peter Anspach published the 100 things he would do if he ever became an evil overlord. They included such gems as:

If my advisors ask “Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?”, I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”

I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line “No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!” (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

But while following such prescripts are likely to lead to evil-overlord levels of success, is it financially viable to do so?

We went through each of the items on the list and looked at how much money it would either cost (or save) to follow through with it. We assumed an army of 1,000 Evil Legionnaires of Terror, and a rebel army to consist of 100 traitors. Our conclusion? It would cost just $14,268,632, or a little over 14 million dollars to ensure that your reign as an Evil Overlord is truly unstoppable. Scroll through the sheet to see the cost-savings breakdown, and click on the “Notes” cells to find the sources for our estimates. You can sort the columns by clicking in the sheet.

Watch out world. Here we come.

To complete our plans to become an Evil Overlord, we’d need a super-weapon and you can find our estimate of the cost of the Death Star over here. We would also need a lair, and you can find out the cost of that over here. You can find those and other interesting things in our Editorials although if you want a selection of our most popular check out the Greatest Hits. And you can track our progress as we take over the world by following us here: