Today there are around 300,000 tons of gold extant
Interestingly, his number deviates significantly from the mainstream one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold
"A total of 183,600 tonnes of gold is in existence above ground, as of 2014."
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Favorite pastime of mine: Check the Wikipedia edit/history stats.
Pretty hectic :D
@alexgr the differences may be from calculating the complete total known, vs how much gold is in bullion form. The remainder would be artwork, ancient relics, jewelry, etc... this stuff would be outside the monetary or internationally tradeable gold. That would be the big 'good delivery' bars you see in national vaults.
AND/OR-
Prior to WW2, southeast Asia and southern China was gold rich. Extremely.
The Japanese gutted them, this was the Yamashita's gold hoard you may have heard of.
When I was a child, in the 1970s, it was said that nobody had ever found this gold, so it became considered a myth.
And then there's Karen Hudes. ?
Above ground estimates always include all forms of gold (bullion or otherwise), so there should be no discrepancies there.
As for the gold hoard, the numbers cited are usually unrealistic (tens of thousands of tons). They are unrealistic mainly because gold production was extremely inefficient in the past even in the richest sites. Today we are close to 3000tons per year with very advanced means (compared to old times or ancient times) and still it'd take us 30-40 years to mine 100k tons. From the entire globe nonetheless...
I've also heard the story of Karen Hudes. I don't know what to make of it. The numbers don't add up in terms of production and extrapolating such levels of production in the past...
In any case the billionaire says 300k tons and that's a huge deviation from the 180k. Who knows what's going on... but old gold doesn't explain it well for me. I'd be more satisfied with an explanation like "we are mining 6k tons per year, 3k is acquired by miners to the Elite without being declared anywhere, so over 30-40 years they have +100k tons" - or something to that effect. This would make more sense for me.