He was supposed to have received tribute that amounted to two trillion dollars, in today’s money, over the course of his reign. Richest?
I always read that it was Marcus Licinius Crassus, also estimated by some to have been worth an inflation-adjusted 2 trillion.
He couldn’t buy video games with it.
So no. No he was not.
That’s jokey, but not a joke. If you think of “wealth” as a pile of shiny metal, then some people in history had quite an enormous amount of shiny metal. Would you want to switch places with them? Give up modern dentistry, toilet paper, and AC for primitive sovereignty? If your answer is yes, then sure, somebody with the biggest storehouse of shiny was the “wealthiest” person. See Mansa Musa (who has come up recently in another GQ thread).
But if you like modern conveniences more than dominion over serfs, then Mansa Musa wasn’t actually that wealthy by your personal evaluation.
Value is ultimately just what we value. Wealth is having a lot of what we value. Comparisons across time are extremely tricky, because we value different things. You might get a more precise answer by narrowing the question: Who in history had the largest hoard of shiny? That might have an objective answer.
Nah…
It is difficult to calculate but there is:
Mansa Musa:
Are we talking about de jure ownership, or de facto? Because Josef Stalin, while officially of modest means, had absolute control over everything and everyone in the Soviet Block, and really, what’s the difference between that and ownership?
Mansa Musa did a grand tour of North Africa, including Egypt, on his way to Mecca, spreading so much gold in his wake that the resulting inflation bankrupted the countries he passed through.
We may never know but I would be willing to put odds on Vladimir Putin being the actual richest man in the world right now.
Have you been richer than Crassus?
Who has “owned” (controlled) the most stuff? Compare Stalin (gross product) and Mao (giga-people) to any recent POTUS, who “owns” the greatest military complex in history.
How could we estimate his wealth without even knowing if he was a historical figure at all?
One thing I recall about this guy is he invented firemen…a bunch of people dedicated to putting out fires.
BUT…he had a twist.
If there was a fire he’d have his firemen (they were slaves) roll up to the fire and then tell the owner he’d buy the place for 100 denarii (I’m making numbers up). The owner, shocked would tell him no way…it’s worth a 1000! The fire keeps burning and he offer 90…80…eventually the owner relents because it is that or lose everything.
Then Crassus would have the fire put out and was a proud owner of a new property.
Crassus became the largest land owner in Rome which was the base of his massive fortune.
The question is hard to answer like it’s hard to say what a dollar today would have been worth 100 years ago. What do you plan to do with that dollar? Buy real estate in Silicon Valley? Pay college tuition? Then it’s worth a lot less. OTOH if you want to buy electronics, it’s worth way more today. [sup]1[/sup]
It’s true that when you consider benefits of what’s available today versus the past, a middle-class American in 2020 could be considered better off than pretty much anyone who lived before 1900. (By which standard, no, Solomon wasn’t the richest).
But that leads to the conclusion that at some point in the future, everyone alive will be richer than anyone who’s ever lived as of 2020.
Which leads to the unsatisfying (but technically accurate) answer that the richest person who ever lived hasn’t been born yet.[sup]2[/sup]
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There was a cartoon I saw on many cubicles during my decades of government employment: two medieval kings are talking. One of them says, “I don’t know–I could make more money in the private sector than the public sector. But in the private sector, I wouldn’t be able to chop off heads”. My point being: you and I might prefer being alive today, but Genghis Khan might have been willing endure a toothache if he could keep chopping off heads.
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I’m reminded of this joke: a young Rodney Dangerfield complains to his dad, “Everyone hates me!” His dad replies, “Don’t feel bad–everyone hasn’t met you yet!”
Just by coincidence, this video just popped up in my YouTube feed:
Musa I of Mali: The Richest Man who Ever Lived
And this was a video recommended to me last week: Jakob Fugger: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived.
You need to stop and ask yourself what all these evaluations of wealth are based on. I think you’ll find they’re usually dependent on speculation, guesses, rumors, fawning contemporaries, and non-standard ways of measuring. And then subject to the most extreme possible conversion factors into modern currency.
Historians have been arguing for two generations just how valuable slavery was in the U.S. and we have a thousand times as much information on the subject as for ancient days. Economic history is extremely fraught.
I wouldn’t deny that many men (are there any candidates who are women?) throughout history amassed huge fortunes. But exact numbers? Doubt them, divide them by ten, and then discount them some more.
Possibly. Mostly Queens, as a result of their royal titles, not personal income.
For example, Queen Elizabeth II of the UK. Besides her personal family wealth, she ‘owns’ all the parkland & roads in the UK, the government buildings, the crown jewels, etc. But it’s entailed, not personal – she can’t will it to somebody other than her heir.
And it’s really hard to put a value on it. includes the 2 largest diamonds in the world – 3what are they worth? They were never on the market, so nothing to compare them to. Also Buckingham Palace. Not counting the palace building, it sits on 17 hectares of prime land in Westminster London – that goes for about £90 million or so per hectare, so about £1.5 billion just in land value.
Yay, let them sell the estate, level the palace and build office space. Profit!
Yeah - I thought about Fugger as well. Read a book on him a while back. Even if he wasn’t richest ever, a fascinating read.
If he wasn’t the richest, he was at least one of the most powerful and influential persons of all time, in their time.
Btw., Dinsdale, do you remember the title of the book? I’m just following the history books thread in CS, and that would be a welcome addition to my wish list.
Some of the accomplishments of Solomon have been slightly exaggerated in the sources we have. So this is not really an answerable question.
Seconded My brother is a senior tax partner in one of the largest UK accountancy firms. At one stage he was in charge of theer personal wealth division ,and obviously knew a great deal about the finances of some very wealthy people.
Various publications in the UK issue an annual rich list, claiming to rank the UK’s wealthiest people. He used to read them for the laughs :- they were so inaccurate as to be risible. They’d list people in the top 20 who had negative net worth (they’d have debts that weren’t publicly known). There were dozens of my brother’s clients who should have been top fifty not listed at all, because nobody has ever heard of them.
If we can’t determine wealth accurately in the 21st century UK, we have no hope for 1st century BC Roman senators or 14th century Malian kings.