Behind the bounty
Two apprentices spent their days on the deck of the Oro Jackson arguing about which pole was colder, until Silvers Rayleigh came over to separate them. Buggy was one of the two. Decades on, both names sit in the same list of four, and one of them got there without a single fight of his own to earn it.
The multiplier between his previous amount and this one runs past two hundred. No intermediate step, no island taken, no admiral faced: what changed is the position the world credits him with inside Cross Guild, a firm founded by Crocodile and Dracule Mihawk. It was the posters drawn by his own men that put him front and centre, and the two partners decided after the fact to leave him there, because a visible president draws attention away from the two men making the decisions.
It would be unfair to stop there. Cross Guild was built on Buggy's Delivery, handed over to settle a debt he could not pay, staff, printing presses and transport included; the skull at the centre of its flag is his, nose and bicorne and all. And it was Buggy, hanging from a hook in the meeting room and begging to be finished off, who grabbed a Den Den Mushi and told the entire organisation it was going after the One Piece — to Crocodile's considerable annoyance, as he had intended to run Operation Utopia again.
Which leaves his record against the current generation. At Orange Town the man presumably already worth 15 million lost to a boy with nothing on his head. At Loguetown he had that same boy on Roger's own scaffold, sword raised, when lightning destroyed the platform under his feet. The title is real, the amount is real, and he asked for neither of them.
