So as the title implies, I’ve got a trio of questions about the very wealthy. Without further ado:
Who was the first millionaire, and when did he achieve that status?
As number 1), for the first billionaire.
In absolute dollars or some other standardized measurement, who was richer? What about in purchasing power relative to the median wealth at the time?
Are you restricting the question to Americans and to wealth measured in dollars? If not, how do you propose converting fortunes in other countries to dollars–at the exchange rates prevailing at the time (impossible, obviously, before 1776), or at today’s rates? Do you intend to include rulers of foriegn countries, whose wealth is often difficult to separate from that of their state?
(I don’t know the answers in either case, but I want to understand the question!)
I was primarily thinking of American businessmen, but if there’s someone else who’s a reasonable candidate, I’m all for hearing about them. I’d have to imagine that economists have some means of comparing wealth in different currencies.
Well, I’d nominate the Egyptian pharoahs if we’re going to play the field.
As regards Americans, fortunes from the colonial period are difficult to evaluate, both because American dollars didn’t exist and because most fortunes were based in land which was subject to speculative bubbles and very illiquid. Here is a list of the estimated wealth of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, measured in pounds. At today’s exchange rate, there wouldn’t be any millionaires as measured in dollars. However, other colonial families like the Van Rensselaers and Livingstons were wealthier.
If we limit ourselves to American businessmen, candidates for the first Americans to become millionaires through commerce would include John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard. Both probably became millionaires in the first decade of the 1800’s.
The first American billionaire was almost certainly John D. Rockefeller, who accumulated about $1.2 billion in assets before beginning to channel his wealth into his foundation around 1920. He was certainly much richer than the persons named earlier, as the currency didn’t inflate 1,000 times between 1800 and 1920.
My 1989 Guinness Book of World Records mentions J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford
and Andrew W. Mellon, who were contemporaries (Rockefeller and Mellon died in 1937, Ford in 1947), as the three first billionaires. It also mentions railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) as first hundredfold millionare and says that the term “millionaire” was first used around 1740 and “billionaire” in 1861.
According to this consumer price index page, one 1800 dollar corresponds to about 11 2005 dollars (there seems to have been some serious deflation going on afterwards, as the 1850 dollar is worth more, not less, than the currency of 1800, and the 1800 dollar pretty much equals the dollar of as late as 1919).