Forget bill gates.. the richest man in history
lived in mali
700 years ago!
By David Usborne, Wednesday, 17 October 2012
The richest person ever to walk the planet was not, as it turns out, an Astor, a Carnegie or even a Windsor. Rather it was a fellow named Mansa Musa I, who, if you haven't heard of him, ruled what used to the vast Malian Empire from 1280 to 1337, a terrain now encompassing Mali and Ghana that was blessed with oodles of salt and gold. He was worth 400 billion dollars!
That you have to travel to Timbuktu and back seven centuries to find the man with the most wealth – ever – is only one of the surprises of a list of the top 25 richest people in the history of mankind compiled and just released by the website celebritynetworth.com.
The authors drew it up by establishing the peak worth of each entrant during their lifetime (some guesswork here perhaps) and adjusting for inflation to find the equivalent in 2012 US dollars.
Today's super rich are mere tiddlers. Carlos Slim Helu, currently pegged by Forbes as the world's richest person, comes in only at No 22 on this list with $68bn to his name. He is beaten by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who comes in at No 12 because at his richest his fortune allegedly touched the equivalent of $136bn in today's dollars.
There are no contemporary celebrities in the usual sense of the word on the list and no women. Not surprising, perhaps, is the dominance of Americans, 14 in all. They include the old barons of steel, railways, cars and fur. In third and fourth place respectively are Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller, whose names still adorn upstanding civic institutions across the US. Cornelius Vanderbilt is at No 10 and John Jacob Astor at 14.
Mansa Musa is not the only despot (Dictator) to earn a place in this rarefied club. Look with envy at the gallery of portraits of this moneyed bunch and one face is suddenly more familiar than almost any, partly because he is only so recently dispatched and by violent means too. That would be Muammar Gaddafi of Libya who liked to sleep in tents even though he could afford to buy a whole hotel chain with $200bn stashed in his personal piggy bank.....
The No 2 slot below the mysterious Mansa Musa is a whole family, some branches of which extend deep into British society. This, of course, would be the Rothschild clan.
"The Rothschild family are the richest people on earth today with assets that total at least $350bn," the site claims. "Their net worth is difficult to peg because their holdings are so vast but without question they are the most powerful family in the world. Many people believe they control over $1 trillion in real estate and banking assets." If they say so.
The richest person ever to walk the planet was not, as it turns out, an Astor, a Carnegie or even a Windsor. Rather it was a fellow named Mansa Musa I, who, if you haven't heard of him, ruled what used to the vast Malian Empire from 1280 to 1337, a terrain now encompassing Mali and Ghana that was blessed with oodles of salt and gold. He was worth 400 billion dollars!
That you have to travel to Timbuktu and back seven centuries to find the man with the most wealth – ever – is only one of the surprises of a list of the top 25 richest people in the history of mankind compiled and just released by the website celebritynetworth.com.
The authors drew it up by establishing the peak worth of each entrant during their lifetime (some guesswork here perhaps) and adjusting for inflation to find the equivalent in 2012 US dollars.
Today's super rich are mere tiddlers. Carlos Slim Helu, currently pegged by Forbes as the world's richest person, comes in only at No 22 on this list with $68bn to his name. He is beaten by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who comes in at No 12 because at his richest his fortune allegedly touched the equivalent of $136bn in today's dollars.
There are no contemporary celebrities in the usual sense of the word on the list and no women. Not surprising, perhaps, is the dominance of Americans, 14 in all. They include the old barons of steel, railways, cars and fur. In third and fourth place respectively are Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller, whose names still adorn upstanding civic institutions across the US. Cornelius Vanderbilt is at No 10 and John Jacob Astor at 14.
Mansa Musa is not the only despot (Dictator) to earn a place in this rarefied club. Look with envy at the gallery of portraits of this moneyed bunch and one face is suddenly more familiar than almost any, partly because he is only so recently dispatched and by violent means too. That would be Muammar Gaddafi of Libya who liked to sleep in tents even though he could afford to buy a whole hotel chain with $200bn stashed in his personal piggy bank.....
The No 2 slot below the mysterious Mansa Musa is a whole family, some branches of which extend deep into British society. This, of course, would be the Rothschild clan.
"The Rothschild family are the richest people on earth today with assets that total at least $350bn," the site claims. "Their net worth is difficult to peg because their holdings are so vast but without question they are the most powerful family in the world. Many people believe they control over $1 trillion in real estate and banking assets." If they say so.