How Much Does an Inception Cost?

UPDATE: Greetings, visitors from IMDb and beyond! As several commenters have noted already, the math in here’s a little sketchy. I stick by my salary estimates, but several salient points have already been raised about the judiciousness of investing in an airline. Also: I don’t know what ROAA means. Fortunately, the beauty of blogs vs. print is that folks can wander in and point out where I strayed. Sound off in the comments and check out our less spurious Inception posts.

Inception takes place in the glossy but seedy world of corporate espionage. Most heist movies (like the recently released Takers, the Michael Mann classic Heat or grittier movies like Dog Day Afternoon) feature a team of criminals who are in it for themselves. They take down big scores to line their pockets. Their gain is someone else’s loss. And while the fictional criminals of Leverage and Burn Notice may target crooked corporations instead of banks, they’re still calling their own shots.

Inception is one of a few heist movies where the thieves aren’t freelancers – they’re contractors. They’re hired on by one corporation to rob from another. Saito hires Cobb to break up Fischer’s company. So that raises the question: is this a profitable investment for Saito? Just how much does an inception cost?

The Extractor

Cobb is the operative in charge of extracting the actual information from the target’s brain: the secret formula from Saito’s subconscious, or (later in the movie) reaching the point of inception. He has to survey the grounds of the subject’s dream, interrogate them without giving away his motives and acquire the goods. The closest legitimate profession to his is that of a private investigator.

Extractor salary: $40,541 (source)

The Point Man

Arthur’s job is to stay on the scene, keeping an eye out for trouble and intervening. He has to keep everyone on schedule and cover things that the others miss. While the extractor focuses, looking for a target, the point man has to look out for the big picture. The closest professional equivalent is a senior project manager.

Point man salary: $97,799 (source)

The Architect

Ariadne is responsible for designing the layout of a dream. Her job is to give it verisimilitude without connecting it too strongly to a real place. Invest a dream with too much reality and its your subconscious that drives it, not the mark’s. Ariadne might have been an entry-level architect had she taken a legitimate career. As it is, now she gets to play in virtual space.

Architect salary: $56,637 (source)

The Forger

Eames, the forger, guides the mark in by posing as a familiar face. This requires the ability to study someone intently, adopt their mannerisms and fool someone who knows them. Given the fact that Eames not only has to study his target, but communicate what he learns to his team as well, he’s closer to a drama coach than anything else.

Forger salary: $41,467 (source)

The Chemist

Yusuf, the chemist, makes the extraction possible. He concocts the sedatives that keep the mark under and heighten their sensory experience. The ability to accurately judge the chemical dosages required to sedate someone without killing them takes a lot of study. Yusuf would probably draw the salary of a pharmacist if he had a real world job.

Chemist salary: $108,039 (source)

Total Salaries for an Extraction Team: $344,483. Call it an even $350K.

“Hold on,” you’re asking. “Cobb’s in charge and he’s making the least money?” That may offend our Western sensibilities, but there’s nothing that says the layout of Cobb’s team is the default. Maybe on rival teams, the architect calls all the shots. The movie certainly implies that. It’s established that Cobb used to be an architect, but his continued obsession with Mal put the rest of his team at risk. So now he’s a grunt, padding it out on the front lines. The rest of the team still defers to him because he was in charge for so long.

So an extraction – and, in turn, an inception – costs $350,000. But, to quote another Christopher Nolan movie, is it worth the cost?

Here’s what we know: Saito wants to engineer the breakup of Fischer’s company. He is willing to hire a team of dream thieves, buy an airline, risk going insane in Limbo and bribe government officials to do this. That’s a massive expenditure of money right there. But it’s hard for us, the working class, to gauge just how massive. Are we talking tens of millions or hundreds of millions? And even knowing the dollar value wouldn’t help us comprehend it. The difference between $400 million and $500 million is more money than the author of this post will make in fifty lifetimes; on the keyboard, it’s one key over.

Now to start making some educated guesses.

Assumption 1: Paying Sticker Price

Saito has a sense for how much an inception could cost. Powerful people in Inception already know about dream extraction – both the technology and how it’s done. Saito and Fischer have both had training in recognizing and resisting an extraction. So Cobb, Art and their team aren’t genies offering them a pearl beyond price. They’re professionals in a rarefied field. Buying an inception is like buying a yacht big enough to land a helicopter on: by the time you’re rich enough to afford one, you’ll know where to start looking.

So Saito knows he’s laying out at least $350,000.

(Tangent: this is one of my favorite things about Inception. It cuts down on the amount of exposition needed by presuming everyone already knows what dream extraction is. Even the team’s one neophyte, Ariadne, accepts what’s happening to her as soon as it happens. There’s no awkward moments of, “No! This can’t be real! How are you inside my head?” This is a refreshing change of pace, presuming that the protagonists are at least as smart as the audience. It’s also fortunate, as Inception is a rather talky movie already)

Assumption 2: Return on Investment

While Saito does play a little loose – he’s bold enough to jump into Fischer’s dream with the rest of the crew – he didn’t get to be the head of a business empire by making foolish choices. Saito has at least a bit of common sense. He knows how much money an extraction and its associated costs could make him if invested conventionally. So the only reason he’s paying for an inception is because he thinks the potential payout is greater.

So what else could Saito spend this money on?

Saito and Fischer’s companies are both energy companies. They’re among the biggest players in their fields. Let’s look at the return on average assets for the top 10 oil and gas companies in the world. Return on average assets is a company’s income divided by the average value of its plants, vehicles, employee salaries and everything else tangible. Since an extraction team can be considered an “asset” – albeit a short-term asset, buried very carefully from the auditors – I’m lumping them in here.

The top 10 oil and gas companies in the world have an average ROAA of 5.45. This means for every $100 the average energy megacorporation invests in assets, like oil rigs and geological surveys, it can expect to make $545 in return something else entirely (see comments). That’s impressive, but that’s the world of petroleum conglomerates for you. If you can’t guarantee massive returns, investors will go to a company that will.

So planting this inception in Fischer’s brain must have an expected return of at least 5.45, if not greater. Otherwise, why bother doing something illegal?

Assumption 3: The Price of a Bribe

To secure Cobb’s cooperation, Saito promises to enable Cobb’s return to the United States. Since Cobb fled overseas to escape a murder rap, this will take some serious pull by Saito. But it’s probably not as expensive as we think.

To get Cobb safely home, Saito will need to bribe the attorney general for whichever state Cobb lives in (New York? California?). The attorney general can then lean on the district attorney for whichever city Cobb and Mal lived in (New York City? Los Angeles?) to bury this case. This actually won’t be that hard. As anyone who’s watched The Wire can tell you, big cities deal with tons of murders every year. Cobb’s case is at least a year old, if not older. DAs want clearance on current cases. They don’t want to waste their limited time chasing down old crimes, especially if they have pressure from the top to ignore them.

There’s no set price tag on how much it costs to bribe an attorney general. But we can ask ourselves: what does an attorney general want? Probably the next step up in the ladder: to be governor.

The cost of a campaign for governor varies, depending on the state in question and the size of the competition. But taking California as an example, Governor Jerry Brown has spent $23 million (as of early August) on his re-election campaign. While incumbents don’t need to spend as much as challengers – they get free press just by doing their jobs – Brown has been feeling more pressure due to Meg Whitman’s high-budget blitzkrieg ($100 million so far and climbing).

So let’s assume that gives us a fair estimate of the cost of running a campaign for governor. And if running for governor is what every attorney general secretly wants, Saito will need to pay the attorney general about $20 million.

Cobb’s problems don’t end at the state level. By fleeing the country, he’s become an international fugitive. This makes him a target of the State Department. It doesn’t matter if Cobb’s home state abandons the search. The FBI will be after him as well. Saito probably doesn’t have much that an FBI director would want. Large infusions of cash would be hard to explain, and nobody wants an oil rig.

But it’s much easier to bribe a member of Congress. The worst fallout that the FBI would have to worry about, as a result of letting Cobb’s murder indictment slide, would be answering questions before a Congressional committee. “Can you explain why it is,” etc. Therefore, Saito needs to reach the chairpersons of the Senate Judiciary Committee and of the House Judiciary Committee. They could exert the necessary influence on the Director of the FBI, telling him to “forget” about Cobb’s extradition status.

This is tricky, because it’s not as if members of Congress publish lists of what it costs to bribe them. Except when they do.

When Randy “Duke” Cunningham, former TOPGUN instructor and seven-term Congressman from California, was indicted for conspiracy to commit bribery, one of the items of evidence brought against him was a menu of bribe prices. It listed a number of potential defense contracts for Mitchell Wade (of MZM) on the left and the volume of needed bribes on the right. The minimum was a yacht, valued at $140,000 – that would secure Wade a $16 million contract. Another $50,000 in bribes on top of that would get Wade a $17 million contract; another $50K, an $18 million contract. Cunningham might never have been caught if he hadn’t needed to itemize his greed.

So it costs at least $140,000 to bribe a member of Congress. This doesn’t make much sense at first: why should a member of Congress go for cheaper than a state attorney general? Consider what’s at stake, though. The fate of one murder investigation is a relatively small item in a senior Congressman’s career. It might take up an hour of testimony on one day of hearings. It’s a much bigger deal to an attorney general, however, who has nothing to do all day but prosecute murderers. It’s much more important to an attorney general, so Saito will have to pay more. It’s much less important to a member of Congress, so he won’t have to pay as much.

Saito will pay $140,000 to each of the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. Let’s assume some smaller bribes get passed around to other committee members as well, bringing the total up to an even million. That, plus the $20 million it cost to buy off the attorney general, gives us a grand total of $21 million for the necessary bribes.

(Tangent: Saito might not be paying all these bribes in cash. Perhaps he has a secret of his own that he can use as leverage against the U.S. Attorney General or the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This makes sense, considering that Saito can apparently clear up Cobb’s legal status with one groggy phone call. However, the economics at work still stand. If Saito’s using one secret as leverage, or cashing in one favor, that favor must be worth at least $24 million)

Assumption 4: Buying an Airline

Cobb: For this to work, we’d have to buy off the pilots…
Arthur: And we’d have to buy off the flight attendants…
Saito: I bought the airline. It seemed neater.

This is one of the easiest bits of math to do. Several major airlines have changed hands in the last decade. So we have a good sense of what it might cost Saito to pull off this little stunt.

U.S. Airways was acquired for about $565 million in 2005. KLM and Air France merged in 2003, in a deal that valued KLM at $913 million. And the world’s largest airline was formed by the Northwest / Delta merger in 2008, in which Northwest paid $2700 million.

Averaging those three out, we get $1392 million, or about $1.4 billion.

There’s nothing that says that Saito had to buy out one of the largest airlines in the world. But this is an airline that does regular non-stop flights from Sydney to Los Angeles. A quick check of travel websites tells me that the airlines fitting that description have names like United, Delta, American and US Airways. So Saito’s buying off the top shelf.

Putting The Math Together

(converting all the numbers to millions)

Saito’s spending $21 million to bribe an attorney general and several members of Congress, $1392 million to acquire an airline and $0.35 million to pay the extraction team’s wages. Total costs: $1413.35 million (or $1.4 billion).

If Saito invested $1416 million in his company’s assets, he should expect a return of 5.45 times as much, or $7702 million ($7.7 billion). The only reason Saito would be spending it on an inception is because he thinks the inception will bring more.

What could be worth more than $7.7 billion? How about a controlling interest in the Fischer conglomerate?

Saito and Fischer are business rivals in the energy industry. Saito could probably acquire bits of Fischer’s company if he wanted. “We’ll take over your Southeast Asia holdings; the joint venture will retain both the Saito and Fischer brand.” But the only reason Saito could want to break Fischer up would be to snatch up the pieces. Saito doesn’t want to modestly increase his holdings – he wants to buy up Fischer outright. To do that, he needs Fischer’s company in smaller chunks.

Again, we don’t know how much Fischer is worth. But movies are always more entertaining if the heroes are going after high stakes. So let’s assume, again, that the Fischer conglomerate is one of the ten biggest oil and gas companies in the world. In the real world, those ten companies (ExxonMobil at the top, Suncor Energy at the bottom) have an average EBITDA of $24 billion. (EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. It’s not everyone’s favorite form of bookkeeping, but I think it’s a handy measure of how much a company makes)

Saito hopes to snatch up enough of Fischer’s assets, once the Fischer conglomerate breaks up, to capture most of that $24 billion in earnings. Are the stakes high enough for you?

Your Dream Job is a Dream … Job …

This raises the question: should the extraction team ask for more money?

We don’t know that Cobb, Art, Ariadne, Eames and Yusuf are only making $350,000. That’s our seat-of-the-pants assertion. But how much more could they conceivably be making? Half a million? Two million? That doesn’t render our math any less valid. When there’s $24 billion in future earnings at stake – money that you’re not only making, but that you’re taking out of a rival’s pocket – wouldn’t you pay two million dollars? Or even $1.4 billion?

Why is Cobb doing this for Saito? Why isn’t he doing this for himself?

Consider: you have the power to break into people’s dreams. You hire the most creative people in the world and train them to work with military efficiency. You set them loose in a contained reality where their imagination gives them superhuman power. Once inside another person’s mind, you can – with the proper plan – steal anything they know. Are you going to start shopping yourselves out as contractors? Or would you go into business for yourself?

The movie begins with Cobb improvising his way through an extraction in Saito’s mind. He’s doing this at the behest of a company called Cobol, for whom he botched a prior assignment. Cobb botches the Saito job as well, meaning Cobol will be sending people to kill him. He’s saved only when Saito offers to take him on for another job. Cobb’s like any other contractor in a recession – bouncing from job to job, chased by creditors. unable to provide for his family.

Why doesn’t Cobb take some initiative? Why doesn’t he extract a chemical formula from the mind of a pharmaceutical research lead? Or a list of non-official cover operatives from a foreign diplomat? He could then auction this information off to the highest bidder. Or, if he’s stolen actionable information, he can use this to guide his investments and make a killing in the equities market.

Cobb has the power to read people’s minds and he’s still logging forty hours a week.

Your Mind is the Scene Where You Punch In

Inception is shot with a deliberately sterile feel. Aside from Cobb and Mal in their dream fantasy, and Professor Miles’s class in Paris, most of the movie takes place in dead spaces. Empty warehouses, rain-slicked city streets, metal bridges, contemporary hotels, stone fortresses on Arctic peaks. The team wears suits with sharp, tailored lines. It’s pretty, but it’s not organic. Every angle is deliberate, as if chosen by committee.

It’s like going to the office.

Again, everyone in Inception knows what an inception is. Saito gets Cobb to come back in for one last job by offering him the chance to perform an inception. Not only is dream extraction widely known – at least in the world of corporate espionage – but so are the bounds of dream theory. Saito mentions inception first, not Cobb.

Why? Because Saito’s already an expert at planting ideas. As the head of a global megacorporation, he has to be.

Saito and Fischer, two titans of the industry that literally makes the world go, live in a society where well-equipped thieves can break into their minds. But they don’t seem that worried about it. They’ve both taken precautions. Both of them recognize when someone might be intruding in their dreams. But even if someone slips past their defenses, what’s the worst that can happen? They learn an engineering formula? They plant the suggestion to sell off some holding companies? Big deal. They’ll still wake up from their dream the richest people on the planet.

For all of their vaunted creativity, Cobb and his dreamjacking associates are still caught in the same rat race as the rest of the wage-earning world. They jump from one job to the next, picking up flak from the people they rob as well as the law. They get paid a pittance and have to leave through the back door. All the while, the entrepreneurs (Saito) or the heirs (Fischer) make millions while they sleep.

Saito has planted the idea that an inception is only worth what he’s willing to pay for it. And he didn’t need to go into Cobb’s dreams to do it.