The short version
When someone says "You're a company president, so you must be rich, right?", you can reply, "I couldn't even afford every piece of merch from one independent VTuber." It sounds like plain modesty, but the thing you're comparing yourself to is seriously expensive. At Shigure Ui's 2026 exhibition and live-show shop, six A4 art reproductions come to 210,000 yen, and six limited-run B2-size pieces come to 3,100,000 yen. The art alone adds up to 3.31 million yen. [2][4] Regular merch mostly runs from a few hundred to a few thousand yen, so the average price gets dragged way up by the big-ticket pieces while the median stays in the low thousands. The product lineup breaks your wallet and the statistics at the same time.
1. How it started: answering "You're rich, right?" without giving a number
In September 2026, a company owner posted on X that when people ask "You're a president, so you're rich, right?", he answers that he couldn't even buy every piece of merch released by a single independent VTuber. People then think "Huh, he doesn't have as much money as I figured," and he gets out of having to pick up the bill. [1]
What makes this line funny is that it never reveals his income, his assets, or his bank balance. Not one yen.
The other person's yardstick is "president = someone who can spend pretty freely." Then out of nowhere you slip in a different yardstick: "all the merch from one independent VTuber."
And the conversation shifts like this:
- Before the question: president → rich → probably treats us
- After the reply: can't even afford all the VTuber merch → wait, maybe he's pretty normal?
- Reality: nobody has seen the president's wallet at all
This isn't disclosing your wealth. It's swapping out what you're being compared to.
And the swapped-in comparison really isn't cheap. That's what gives the joke its punch.
2. Why does "one independent VTuber's merch" come to 3.31 million yen?
Look at the official shops for Shigure Ui's 2026 exhibition "Uitopia" and her Birthday Live "Wishing Umbrella." Next to the usual fan goods like T-shirts, can badges, plush toys, cards, and light sticks, you suddenly find reproduction artworks made "to the same specs as the pieces on display." [2][3][4]
Pull out just the expensive art and it looks like this.
| Category | Unit price | Qty | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|
| A4 aurora art reproduction | 35,000 yen | 6 | 210,000 yen |
| B2-size limited-run piece | 500,000 yen | 4 | 2,000,000 yen |
| B2-size limited-run piece | 550,000 yen | 2 | 1,100,000 yen |
| Total | 3,310,000 yen |
So before you even reach the acrylic stands or T-shirts, you're at 3.31 million yen.
On top of that, the 550,000-yen "UitopiaKV" aurora acrylic artwork offered an option to add a built-in light, like the one used at the venue display, and that option alone cost 50,000 yen. [6]
Measured in 500-yen blind-box can badges, the 550,000-yen piece is 1,100 badges. The lighting option alone is 100 badges.
You came to a merch stand, and somewhere along the way an art dealer logged in.
If you add the regular products, the list-price total for one of everything lands roughly in the 3.4 million yen range. But that figure is not an "everything set" total published by the official side. The sum shifts depending on whether you count each design of a blind-box item as its own product, how you handle overlap between sets and single items, and whether you include venue-only goods and options. The only floor we can state with confidence is that the 12 art pieces above alone come to 3.31 million yen.
3. Normal merch has normal prices, which is why the average and the median clash
What's interesting is that not everything costs 500,000 yen. Representative items confirmed on the official sales pages: blind-box can badges at 500 yen, rubber bands at 800 yen, sticky notes at 850 yen, pin badges at 1,000 yen, card sleeves at 1,400 yen, keycap keychains at 1,500 yen, silver-tape keychains at 1,800 yen, acrylic card holders at 2,000 yen, a "Bunchō" (Java sparrow) poncho at 2,530 yen, tote bags at 3,300 yen, catalogs at 3,500 yen, plush toys at 4,400 yen, T-shirts at 5,000 yen, light sticks at 5,300 yen, and so on. [4]
In other words, most of the price tags are the same old fan-goods territory. Then 35,000, 500,000, and 550,000 get stabbed right into the middle of it.
So if you count the products in a consistent way and run a quick tally, the average climbs to roughly 50,000 yen, while the median stays in the low thousands. The rough figures we got in the course of our discussion, "average about 49,000 yen, median about 3,000 yen," come from exactly this extreme right skew. Exact values depend on how you split SKUs (individual product variants), so treat these as an approximation that shows the structure, not as official statistics.
In short:
Average: an art museum. Median: ordinary merch.
The average is the total divided by the number of products, so a handful of 500,000-yen items pull it way up. The median is the middle value when prices are lined up in order, so if ordinary products are the majority, it stays in the few-thousand-yen range. It's a textbook skewed distribution with a long tail on the expensive side.
Also, going for "a full set of every design" in a blind-box item opens up another trap. Take a simple model where there are 5 designs at 500 yen each, and each design comes up with equal probability, independently. The expected number of purchases to collect all 5 is about 11.4, which is about 5,700 yen. The minimum would be 2,500 yen for just 5 pieces, but duplicates keep demanding "one more try" from your wallet. We haven't confirmed that the real pull rates are even, so this is a math example.
4. "If you can't buy something that costs about 3.4 million yen, that's still tough" is also true
Here comes the obvious pushback.
"But if you can't afford something that costs about 3.4 million yen in total, then you really don't have much money, right?"
That's correct.
Not many people would call 3.4 million yen an amount you can casually dump into a hobby in one go. So this reply isn't a sophistry that only works because the comparison is unusual. The thing being compared to is genuinely expensive.
Still, "doesn't spend 3.4 million yen on a hobby, or can't" and "isn't rich" are not the same statement.
- He might have the cash but not want to spend it on that.
- The company's value and the cash he can freely use personally could be two different things.
- Even if he could buy it, he might think collecting every single item isn't a rational thing to do.
- Or "can't" may not mean he's physically unable to pay, but just "I'm not paying that much."
So you can't estimate his net worth from this remark. But the joke that "collecting everything for one favorite is a pretty high bar" still stands.
5. Why this comeback works so well as humor
The key is that he never says "I don't have money."
If you say "I'm a president, but I'm not that rich," it suddenly gets uncomfortably real. The other person can say "Come on, you must have some," and you could end up in a conversation about income, assets, and company size.
But "I couldn't even buy all the merch from one independent VTuber" is concrete without being financial information. And behind the word "merch," which people usually picture as costing a few tens of thousands of yen at most, there's a 550,000-yen exhibition-spec artwork waiting.
The comeback has a three-part structure:
- Concrete: it paints a clearer picture than the abstract "I have no money."
- Unexpected: the pairing of "company president" and "complete VTuber merch collection" is mismatched, which is funny.
- An escape hatch: it gets across "I can't spend without limit" without ever stating an amount.
So it's less about playing poor and more humor that glitches the comparison point so you don't get labeled as rich.
And when you actually look up the comparison, it really does top 3 million yen. The foundation of the joke is oddly solid.
6. Conclusion: it wasn't the president's wallet that was broken, it was the yardstick
The 2026 Shigure Ui exhibition and live-show shop was mostly a few hundred to a few thousand yen if you looked only at the regular goods. Yet the 12 art reproductions alone came to 3.31 million yen. The 550,000-yen piece even had a 50,000-yen lighting option. [2][4][6]
So "I couldn't even buy all the merch from one independent VTuber" is not as modest a benchmark as it sounds.
And as a conversational technique, it's even slicker. Even if the other person thinks "He doesn't have as much money as I thought," he never once mentioned his income or his assets.
He didn't make the president's wallet look small. He made the comparison enormous.
One more thing: as of September 14, 2026, the official event shop had been taken offline, and many items were discontinued or out of stock. [4] So the roughly 3.4 million yen figure in this article is an analysis based on the list prices at the time ("what if you collected one of everything"), and does not mean you could buy everything today by paying 3.4 million yen.
If I had to put it as briefly as possible, it would be this:
"Even a company president can't buy all the VTuber merch" ↓ "Oh, so he's actually pretty down-to-earth" ↓ The art reproductions alone were 3.31 million yen.
So even if he says he can't, you still can't conclude he's not rich.
Sources
- Post on X (2026-09-14): https://x.com/chokudai/status/2099364785263702402
- Shigure Ui Exhibition 2026 "Uitopia" (official): https://7th.uishigure.com/uitopia/
- SHIGURE UI Birthday Live "Wishing Umbrella" (official): https://7th.uishigure.com/wishingumbrella/
- Shigure Ui Exhibition & Live SHOP (BOOTH): https://uishigure-event.booth.pm/items
- Wishing Umbrella key visual, B2 limited-run piece (550,000 yen): https://booth.pm/ja/items/8195348
- Uitopia key visual, B2 limited-run piece (550,000 yen, lighting option +50,000 yen): https://uishigure-event.booth.pm/items/8195507
