Hoarding the Profits

"Three of us, two of these [emeralds]... I guess we'll split them one way."

— Ragdoll, The Batman

Generally speaking, people are expected to be compensated for their work. While some people have no issues doing this, others are so greedy and selfish that they have no problem screwing other people out of their hard-earned money just to line their own pockets. Said methods of cheating people out of profits might be legal or illegal, but they are almost always immoral.

There are many ways this trope can manifest. In a group of thieves agreeing to split the loot among themselves, one thief might attempt to keep it all for themselves by turning in or killing the others. A corrupt businessperson might try to use loopholes in the law to legally cheat employees, contractors, or business partners out of their pay, or literally sell them out in the back. If a group of people decides to start a business, one or multiple members might decide to fire one or more of the other members as soon as they stop being useful. A villain who agrees to compensate someone for assisting them might have no problem breaking their word, either because they never intended on paying their helper or out of impulsive greed.

Sub-Trope of Greed. Could lead to a Greed Makes You Dumb situation if the character's attempt to steal from their partners/employees causes them to lose their profit. In some cases, trying this against the wrong person or group may be Too Dumb to Live.

Compare Stealing the Credit, which this trope could overlap with a character does it to hog all the money and credit for themselves, and Ninja Looting, which this trope overlaps with if the "ninja" in question is part of the group who did the work. If a criminal does this to another criminal, it's also a case of No Honor Among Thieves. Also compare Ballistic Discount. For subtle approaches to taking more than one's share, compare Stealing from the Till. Can overlap with Financial Abuse, especially when those cheated out of their fair share are exploited. In a Tontine, the profits all go to the last survivor by design.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: At one point, Josuke, Okuyasu, and Shigechi find a winning lottery ticket and agree to give half of the money to Shigechi while Okuyasu and Josuke get the other half. However, after getting the money, Shigechi gets greedy and tries to keep most of the cash for himself, arguing that since he did most of the work, he should get a bigger cut. After beating some sense into him, Shigechi gives up and agrees to split it fairly.
• One Piece: In the gap between Skypiea and Long Ring Longland, Nami proposes to divide the crew's hard-fought gold...by immediately claiming 80% for her personal stash. Even Sanji, who usually worships the ground she walks on, protests.

Comic Books

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In stories where Scrooge McDuck is hit with Adaptational Jerkass and Adaptational Villainy treatment, he often steals riches that his nephews hardly earned.

Fan Works

• Inverted in The Rigel Black Chronicles when Remus Lupin believes he's getting an equal share of the profits from the Marauder's line of joke products, but he's actually getting all of them. James and Sirius arranged for him to be deceived because they knew that he wouldn't just accept a handout to cover the cost of his regular Wolfsbane Potion, and both are independently wealthy, so they don't need it.
• The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest: Downplayed in the WarioWare arc; Wario decides to work with Bowser and Dedede as business partners, even splitting the profits with them, something extremely out of character for Wario. However, an inner monologue reveals that the money Wario is sharing with the other two is only ten percent of what they're actually making and that the other ninety percent is kept in a secret bank account.

Films — Animated

• Aladdin: The Return of Jafar: When Abis Mal and his gang of thieves return to their hideout with stolen treasure, Abis Mal tries to keep a majority of the treasure, claiming that it's his bonus for being a "good leader". When his men demand a portion of the treasure, Abis Mal only gives them a small bag of coins, much to their anger.
• Pinocchio (1940): After discovering that Pinocchio is a living wooden puppet, Honest John convinces him to star in Stromboli's travelling puppet show. Stromboli makes a lot of money from Pinocchio's performance and keeps it all for himself. When he discovers a slug, he gives it to Pinocchio as his pay. Since Pinocchio Really Was Born Yesterday and doesn't know any better, he gladly accepts it. When Pinocchio tells Stromboli that he's going home to tell his father, Stromboli traps him in a birdcage and explains his motive.
  Stromboli: You will make lots of money... for me!
• Tangled: Flynn Rider works with the Stabbington Brothers to steal the royal crown of the lost princess, but while making their escape, he gives them the slip and runs off with the crown himself. After falling for Rapunzel and having a change of heart, he meets them and hands the crown over — but they're keen on revenge and have learned about Rapunzel's magic, so they're no longer satisfied with just taking the crown.

Films — Live-Action

• The Dark Knight: The opening scene has the Joker putting together the crew for a bank heist, but secretly giving each member of the crew instructions to kill another member once their role in the heist is complete, with the promise of a bigger share of the loot afterwards. One of the last surviving robbers figures this out and tries to shoot the Joker, only to be run over by the Getaway Driver — and when Joker kills the driver, he's the last surviving member of the crew and takes all the loot for himself with no-one alive to complain about it.
• Fargo: Jerry Lundegaard is prone to making lopsided deals that end up going badly for him. When making a business proposition to his wealthy father-in-law Wade, Jerry asks for a $750,000 loan that he can turn into a lucrative investment. Wade, however, says it's ridiculous to loan him that much money and only get his principal and interest back while Jerry profits when Wade could just make the deal himself and pay Jerry a mere 10 percent finder's fee. Then when Jerry attempts to cut a ransom deal with the help of two crooks, he tells them they'll get a $40,000 payment while telling Wade the crooks want a million dollars, intending to pocket the difference. This too goes wrong when Wade insists on making the ransom payment in person, resulting in the criminals getting all the money.
• It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World:
  • Downplayed in the opening. When five random tourists learn from the dying "Smiler" Grogan where he buried his $35,000 haul from a bank robbery, they initially want to find the money together and share it fairly. However, they can't agree on how to share it fairly: Does this mean four shares, one for each car? Eight shares, one for every person? Or five shares, one each specifically for those who were actually present to hear "Smiler" Grogan's message? Naturally, each party argues for whichever distribution benefits themselves the most. In the name of fairness they try to make a complicated hybrid of all three schemes, but just wind up confusing themselves until the negotiations completely break down. So they give up on cooperation and just race each other to the location, intending for the winner to take all.
  • At the end, after all manner of shenanigans, everyone reaches the burial location at the same time and digs up the money together. Their numbers have swollen to 13 people by now, but after the ordeals they've been through, they're willing to split the money equally amongst everyone and be done with it. But Otto Meyer tries to cheat and give himself a double portion, by including himself first and last on the list of people who get a share. Lennie Pike catches this and calls Otto out, leading to another fight that lasts until the police arrive to confiscate the cash.
• They Drive by Night: The Fabrini brothers start off as truck drivers for Charles C. Wilburn, who's constantly late with their payments and always has an excuse about not having enough money on hand to pay them. Eventually, the Fabrinis burst into the office when Wilburn isn't expecting them—finding him counting fat stacks of cash on his desk, they call him out on his lies and grab the money owed to them right then and there. Not long after, they quit working for Wilburn and start trucking independently.
• Goodfellas: Jimmy has almost everyone who was involved in the Lufthansa heist killed because it netted more money than they expected and he wants to keep all of the extra cash for himself.
• To Have And Have Not: Harry Morgan is a fishing boat captain in Martinique who makes money taking tourists on boat tours and fishing trips. However, his latest customer, Johnson, tries to skip town without paying Harry. Harry confronts Johnson before he can leave, and Johnson does agree to pay Harry—but then he gets too close to a gunfight and dies of a stray bullet before he can sign one of his traveler's checks over to Harry. (This sets up Harry being cash-strapped enough that he takes a job for La Résistance, setting off the plot.)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: In the first act, Dodds and Curtin are down on their luck until they get a construction job. After the job is over, the foreman McCormick tells all the workers to wait at the dock and he'll be back with their pay shortly. A few hours pass, at which point Dodds and Curtin decide to see what's taking McCormick so long. They find him drinking at a bar. Naturally, they beat him unconscious and grab the money he owes them from his pockets.

Literature

• Aesop's Fables: The fable of "The Lion and His Fellow Hunters", which is the origin of the Leonine Contract, involves a group of animals bringing down prey together, and then the lion claiming all the spoils for himself.
  "This quarter," said the lion, "is for me, as I am the King of Beasts. And this quarter is mine as the arbiter of the spoils. The third quarter is mine because of my part in chasing down the stag. And as for the fourth — well, I'd like to see any of you dare to put so much as a paw on it."
• All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG: Scourgeling kills in Texas have to be tagged by the adventurer responsible in order to claim the card shards from their hearts. However, Bradley's card power lets him flood an area with opaque poison gas that doesn't affect himself, so when he arrives, everyone else backs off as the scourgelings die — and then Bradley walks into the cloud, and when it clears, all the scourgelings have his tags on them, and everyone else's tags have been removed and piled up in a corner. Bradley just sneers and claims that since no-one saw what he did in the cloud, no-one can prove anything. Arthur doesn't intend to take that lying down, though.
• I Left the A-Rank Party: One of the reasons Yoke left Thunder Pike is because he was sick of his fellow party members hoarding the earnings from their activities for themselves without even compensating him for his expenses in helping the party get where they are, leaving him in the red. His new party, Clover, rewards his contributions much more fairly and achieves quick success and fame under Yoke's leadership while Thunder Pike keeps losing prestige, and their hired replacements for Yoke leave because they were asking them to do all the work Yoke did without fair compensation.
• Mattimeo: The villain Slagar the Cruel elevates this to a business model — recruit a crew of slavers, trap some children, sell them to the Kingdom of Malkariss, manipulate the crew into killing each other so he can keep all the profits, rinse and repeat.
• The Sign Of Four: Jonathan Small helps to murder a man and steal a treasure with three native soldiers, is found out, and sent to prison in the Andaman Islands. There he gets two ruined officers (named Sholto and Morstan) to agree to find the treasure and use it to free him and the other three. Sholto goes, but instead keeps the treasure for himself. When Morstan comes to demand his share, he suffers a heart attack during the argument and falls over, hitting his head on the chest and making it look as though Sholto had killed him. The dying Sholto tells his sons Thaddeus and Bartholomew to give part of the treasure to Morstan's daughter, which Thaddeus agrees to do, but Bartholomew is clearly more reticent (Thaddeus even says his brother suffers from the same avarice as their father). While the treasure remains lost, Thaddeus settles for regularly sending her a pearl from a jeweled vase but informs her once it's found.

Live-Action TV

• Breaking Bad: In the episode 'Down', Jesse demands that Walt split the profits they've made from their drug business so far. Walt agrees, but when he goes into another room to divide up the money, he finds he has an odd number of stacks of bills. Rather than dividing the last stack in half he just keeps it and shorts Jesse.
• Worzel Gummidge: In one episode, Worzel and Aunt Sally enter a dance contest, where the prize is sixteen pounds. Sally takes advantage of Worzel's inability to count by giving him three pounds and keeping the rest for herself, knowing he doesn't know that three is less than half of sixteen.

Video Games

• Borderlands 2: "BFFs/A Truxican Standoff", a side mission in Sanctuary that takes place after "Where Angels Fear to Tread Part II" has been completed, has the Vault Hunters trying to find who's the culprit of the missing profits in a group that's split over who's the hoarder of the money that they looted up. When they find the group, they're in a Truxican Standoff. The responsible is Jim, the one which carries the big $ backpack.
• The Elder Scrolls series has an in-universe short story, "Three Thieves", in which an assassin named Lledos, a scout named Galsiah, and a lockbreaker named Imalyn partner together to heist a guildhouse. After the heist is over, Lledos insists on keeping hold of the stolen coin, claiming his garments have specially designed pockets that can hide the loot without it jingling or bulging, but tells his accomplices to meet him at a tavern later where they'll split the gold. Instead, he betrays them and rides back to his home in another city. Unfortunately, he underestimates his accomplices and they manage to track him down — Imalyn breaks into his private vault, while Galsiah uses one of Lledos's own throat-slicing techniques to murder him in his bed.
• Fable: The Hero can inflict this on a bandit he rescues from Hobbe Cave. The bandit offers to help explore the cave in exchange for a cut of the treasure, but the Hero can refuse to pay afterwards, causing the bandit to turn hostile.
• Far Cry 3: One of the reasons Hoyt Volker is such a Bad Boss is that he insists on keeping all the profits made from his empire of drug running and human trafficking for himself, instead of sharing any of it with his privateers. The other half is that, if any of his men disobey him and keep some of the money for themselves, he'll burn them alive just to Make an Example of Them.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Dimitri Raskalov is one who makes deals with others yet practically never holds up his end of the bargain. The biggest case comes at the end where if Niko accepts to handle the deal that Jimmy Pegorino made with Dimitri over some goods, Dimitri opts to betray Niko once again with intent to claim the goods and the money he was to pay for himself. Not only that but after forming a partnership with Pegorino, Dimitri is quick to betray and kill him too claiming he did not get where he is by sharing the spoils.
• Mortal Kombat 11: While in other intros the Kollector and Shao Kahn value each other, there's an intro where the former almost gets himself ousted:
  Kollector: About those missing profits...
  Shao Kahn: What profits?
  Kollector: Nothing, your excellence.
• Saints Row 2: When the Boss first meets Maero, leader of the Brotherhood, Maero proposes an alliance between their two gangs for power of the city. However, Maero insists on having 80 percent while leaving the Saints with 20 percent. Given who Maero is dealing with, offering only 20 percent to the Saints proved to be a bad idea.
• Sid Meier's Pirates!: A cruel yet practical tactic for the Privateer player character. You need to divide the plunder sometime after a successful mission, and your crew get unhappier the longer you wait — but the more of them you get killed in the interim, the bigger the remaining shares become. It's quite possible to return to port alone, very wealthy, and on the lookout for a fresh crew.
• WarioWare:
  • During the outro of WarioWare: Mega Microgames!!, Wario tries to hoard all of the money from the games that his company made, which Mona finds to her dismay.
  • In Warioware Gold, Wario holds a tournament with the promise of prize money, once again hiring his usual group to help him with the tournament. Not only did he have no intention of rewarding the winner of the tournament, but he also had no intent of paying his employees. After they subdue him, they find that he has already spent most of the money and divide what is left evenly amongst themselves while the player just gets what they paid for the entry fee as their prize for winning the tournament.

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick: The Lovable Rogue Haley Starshine repeatedly hoards more than her share of her Dungeon Crawling team's treasure — once by sneaking ahead to loot a Treasure Room and brazenly denying it; later by tricking the others into accepting worthless rocks as part of their shares. Although she gets away with it, her naked Greed causes The Leader to distrust her for much of the story.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series In "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?", Daniel Mockridge uses a legal loophole to cheat Edward Nygma out of the royalties for the video game the latter created. Unfortunately for Mockridge, this leads to Nygma becoming The Ridder and seeking revenge.
• Darkwing Duck: In "Just Us Justice Ducks, Part 2", after the Fearsome Five take over St. Canard, Negaduck allows the other four to rule the city while keeping all of the loot for himself. When they protest, Negaduck pulls out his chainsaw to get them to shut up.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: This gets Subverted in two episodes:
  • In "Brother Can You Spare an Ed", after Eddy tricks Ed into buying jawbreakers with Sarah’s allowance, Double D promises that they’ll pay her back, but when Eddy gets money from Kevin to give Double D and Ed a wedgie, Eddy tries to keep the money when Sara comes to collect, but she forces him to give it to her.
  • In "Truth or Ed", Eddy is able to successfully make a lot of money through libel in the school newspaper under the pseudonym Bobby Blabby. When Double D sees the money, he goes to give it to the school as the school newspaper is nonprofit, but Eddy once again tries to keep the money, only for him to give it up after he accidentally reveals himself to be Bobby Blabby in front of the other kids when Ed calls him Baby Boo Boo after he spills the money.
• In the Looney Tunes short "Yankee Dood It", the king of the elves discovers that some of his subjects have been missing and discovers that they've been enslaved by a shoemaker who relies on them to keep his outdated business competitive. Part of the problem, it transpires, is that the shoemaker believed that as the owner of the business, he was entitled to all the profits, and thus had not invested in new machinery or made any attempt to attract outside investors.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000", it briefly looks like the Flim Flam Brothers and the Apple family can come to a mutually beneficial business agreement: the Apples have their own orchard but can't make apple cider fast enough to keep up with demand during cider season, while Flim and Flam have a newfangled machine that can make great-tasting cider far faster than the old way, but they don't have any apples of their own. However, negotiations completely break down when Flim and Flam insist they should get 75% of all the money from cider sales. Flim and Flam end up directly competing with the Apples instead—and while they win the initial competition, they alienate the entire town in the process and have to flee before they can make any money from their cider.
• Rugrats (1991): In "Angelica's Last Stand", Angelica starts a lemonade stand and hires the babies to be her helpers. However, she keeps all the money they make for herself by tricking the babies into thinking that her family needs it more because they're poor. When the babies explain the situation to Susie, she suspects that Angelica has been lying to them so she could keep all the money for herself and encourages the babies to go on strike unless she pays them for their services. Angelica tries to run her lemonade stand by herself, but without the babies' help, it goes out of business.
• Spongebob Squarepants: In "Arrgh!", after Spongebob, Patrick and Mr. Krabs discover the Flying Dutchman's treasure, Spongebob and Patrick begin asking each other what they'll do with their shares. Unfortunately for them, Mr. Krabs wants to keep it for himself, which Spongebob protests because they found it together, which leads to Spongebob and Patrick fighting with Mr. Krabs for a share.
• TaleSpin: In "Stormy Weather", Kit Cloudkicker joins Daring Dan Dawson's air circus show to show off his cloud-surfing stunts against Baloo's wishes. Dan makes a lot of money from his air show but gives Kit a single dollar as his pay. When Kit asks Dan if that dollar is all he gets, Dan passes it off by saying that he needs most of the money to pay for Kit's dressing room and new uniform.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Hero Hamton", Montana Max challenges Hamton to a fight after school. When Plucky hears this, he charges the other students admission to see the fight. When Buster and Babs find out about this, they tell Plucky that since Hamton is his best friend, he should split the profits with him equally. Near the end of the episode, when Hamton wins the fight, Plucky keeps most of the money for himself, giving Hamton a single dollar. Karma catches up to Plucky, as Porky takes the money from him to pay to replace the breakaway props that Hamton used to scare Monty away. Desperate to keep at least some of his profits, Plucky takes the dollar he gave Hamton back from him, but Porky takes that dollar from him as well to pay to replace the last chair.
• The Tom and Jerry short "The Truce Hurts" makes this the reason that Tom, Jerry, and Butch's^note Spike, going under a new name for some reason new friendship ultimately falls apart: while they watch each others' backs when there's danger, when they come across a free steak (literally Fell Off the Back of a Truck) each one traces out a hilariously big share for himself and scraps for the other two.

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