Walter White and Jesse Pinkman cooked meth for the sole purpose of earning quick money when Breaking Bad started. The pair, played by Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, respectively, served as the primary characters throughout all five seasons of the AMC series. While money was a priority, Walt's power through the growing drug empire started to emerge as the motivator. So how much did the pair make during the series, and what happened to it?
Walt initially teamed up with his former student in the Breaking Bad pilot episode. With the help of Jesse, Walt used his chemistry knowledge to cook meth in the desert out of a rolling RV. The purity of Walt's meth, known as "Blue Sky," resulted in very high demand. As Walt and Jesse grew their drug empire, the former took on the darker alter ego, Heisenberg. By Breaking Bad season 3, both men decided to join Gus Fring's operation in the man's secret superlab. Once Gus was eliminated, Walt and Jesse teamed up with Mike Ehrmantraut for a brief time to use a fumigation company as a front for a new meth cook campaign. In time, Walt branched off on his own where he became aligned with Todd Alquist, Jack Welker, and the neo-Nazis, which ended up backfiring.
Calculating Walt and Jesse's earnings from cooking meth during the events of the series is difficult based on a number of factors. While a hefty amount of money kept rolling in from their operations, the exact numbers weren't directly mentioned in the early stages of the series. At the start, the two men split the earnings, but Jesse had a habit of spending his money the second it reached his pocket. Walt, on the other hand, used his earnings for his cancer treatment, Hank Schrader's medical bills, Saul Goodman's fees, and a car wash for money laundering. Even his wife Skyler White used the income to clean up messes like the $621,000 needed to pay off Ted Beneke's IRS problem. That said, season 5 revealed that Walt earned over $80 million in cash, which he kept in a storage unit. Jesse, however, was left with $5 million that Walt gave him out of guilt.
Walt buried the approximate $80 million within eight large barrels in the New Mexico desert. Jack's white supremacist gang ended up taking seven barrels before leaving one for Walt. In total, the barrel was said to hold $11 million, but Walt used some of it to escape town in order to avoid being captured. He also spent some on various supplies in the months that followed before returning to Albuquerque. Walt made sure to leave $9 million for his son, which was basically all he had left. The character then embarked on a suicide mission to kill Jack's gang as an act of revenge.
Jesse refused to accept Walt's $5 million, calling it blood money. Before joining Hank and the DEA's effort in taking down Walt, Jesse got rid of the cash by throwing bundles of bills out of his car window. He later was held hostage by Jack's neo-Nazi gang where he became their meth slave-cook. In the series finale, Walt slaughtered the men in the compound, which allowed Jesse to flee. El Camino followed the next chapter of Jesse's journey, but before he could move on, he needed to find the money stashed in Todd's apartment. At first, he was forced to split the money with Todd's former acquaintances, falling $1,800 short of the $250,000 total needed for Ed Galbraith to give him a new identity. After recovering more of Todd's money from killing the men he split the stash with, Jesse was able to secure a new identity and build a new life in Alaska. Though it wasn't stated, he probably had a couple hundred thousand dollars when his Breaking Bad arc ended.
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September 04, 2020 at 05:11AM
