Who is the richest person ever? This is an incredibly difficult question because society and economics were vastly different in the past. Still, Mansa Musa is often said to be the richest person who ever lived.
The richest person today is Elon Musk, although his wealth fluctuates wildly. At its peak, he was worth $425 billion. The first person to pass 300 and 400 billion dollars. However, it has also fallen by 200 billion at times. Today (July 30th 2025) he is worth $415 billion dollars. He has enough money to give everyone in the world $51. The top three richest people in the world have more money than the bottom half of all people. Elon Musk has more money than South Africa. If he was a country, he would be number 38 on the list of all countries by GDP. Yet, his wealth is very volatile because it is tied to the companies he owns. Most of it comes from Tesla, where he owns 12.8% of all the shares. If the value of Tesla goes up, he is richer, and if it goes down, he is poorer. And that is interesting because even though Musk is worth $415 billion, he doesn’t actually have $415 billion sitting in the bank. It is potential money because he could potentially have that much money if he sold all of his shares. However, in reality, he couldn’t sell all of his shares because it would crash the share price of Tesla and cause damage to the economy. So, he is rich without having any real money.
There are several things that make this a different question. The first is that these days people can be rich through owning a share of something. In the past, people were rich because they owned things, or they owned a commodity. The second is that the value of things has changed. A commodity that made someone rich in the past may no longer be valuable. The third is that it is difficult to translate amounts of money from the past into modern monetary amounts. The fourth is that many of the people who were rich in the past were rulers who laid claim to the entire wealth of their country. I’m not sure if that is acceptable. And the last is that records were not very well kept or even true. Record keepers may have inflated the wealth of a person to curry favor.
All of that being said, it looks like the richest person who has ever lived was a man called Mansa Musa, who was the 9th ruler of the Mali Empire, which was an empire in West Africa that lasted from 1226 to 1610. The empire had some gold mines, but controlled many other territories that mined. The gold was all the property of Mansa Musa and it was illegal to trade the gold other than with the government. Mail was also important for mining salt, which was probably more valuable than gold. The reports of Mansa Musa’s wealth come from accounts of when he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and took a ridiculous amount of gold with him. He is said to have had all of the gold in the world, but he probably just had more gold than people had seen and he certainly knew how to splash the wealth. However, these stories may have been exaggerated and they don’t necessarily prove that he had tremendous wealth. It also assumes that all of the wealth of his country was his own personal wealth.
To find someone who was ridiculously wealthy but not because they could get their hands on the treasury of an entire country, we have to come to the 19th century with people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Both of them had enormous fortunes, but they were not in the league of the Elon Musks of today. It is often said that both Rockefeller and Carnegie had roughly $600 billion each, but that is not quite true. Adjusted for inflation, they both had about $25 billion each. The high number comes because both of them had a fortune that was worth roughly 2% of America’s GDP at the time. The thinking goes that if someone had 2% of America’s GDP today, they would have potentially $600 billion. That doesn’t quite work because the GDP of the US was a lot smaller back in the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie. Which means, if we don’t look at monarchs or dictators who had access to all the money in their country, Elon Musk might very well be the richest person ever. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.therchktruth.org/general-news/2025/3/30/10-richest-people-in-history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09dcbl0/the-richest-person-who-ever-lived
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Elon_Musk
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052616/top-4-tesla-shareholders-tsla.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/copper-colored-coin-lot-259165/