Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.

I visited the Biltmore Estate years ago, the home of the Vanderbilt family. It occurred to me during the tour that all the end result of all this wealth was approximately equivalent to having a 5 bedroom McMansion. A huge percentage of the sprawling property was dedicated to housing servants who performed tasks like laundry, changing the water in the (pre-chlorine) pool, taking care of the horses and carriages of visitors, or preparing meals that today are mostly completely automated or unnecessary. The end result was housing the owners and a few guests in conditions substantially worse than the average modern suburban home.

That's definitely a reasonable way to think about it. Another though is in terms of social status and ability to direct human labor, in which case most people are not more wealthy.

On that scale Xi Jinping is likely the richest person to ever live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping

You rarely see modern dictators on these lists but populations and economic prosperity have exploded to the point where historic kings can’t really compete.

I actually do think of him as a candidate for wealthiest person to have ever lived.

yeah but he is "only" leader, he don't own entire china economy

“social status and ability to direct human labor” doesn’t require ownership just control.

In the US congress controls in the funding, but in a dictatorship the guy at the top can unilaterally allocate billions and then manage how it’s spent. It’s not total control of all government assets but it is control of a significant fraction of a modern economy.

Just as a thought experiment, suppose he wanted to fund Doctors Without Borders or some other international charity. Do you really think he’d have trouble sending the equivalent of 1 billion USD in Chinese government funds to that org? How about 2 billion? Obviously at some point it wouldn’t work but where exactly that line is says a lot about the power he has.

That one way to measure wealth. Another would be to measure it in terms of how much labor you can get from your fellow humans. Mana Musa was far more wealthy by that measure.

Yeah, but this completely ignores the relative access to resources as others at the same time. That’s kind of the point at specifying a date for these discussions. If a cure for cancer existed during the time Musa was alive, you can rest assured he would have had access to that information and those services.

Sure Musa didn't have those things, but not because of a lack of wealth. There is no point that you could increase his wealth to such that he would be able to afford those things. It takes some amount of resources and labor to produce an air conditioner, and Musa definitely could afford those resources and labor. Likewise, you are not richer than Carnegie or Rockefeller because you happen to own a microwave, you have orders of magnitude less capability to procure resources and labor, even if you have access to a slightly different set of resources and labor. Whatever you can currently afford, they would be able to afford if they were to spend their wealth in today's markets.

But by that argument we are all dirt poor, provided humanity isn't wiped out, because future generations will have more technology than us. Which to me is kind of a worthless way to measure how wealthy anybody is.

It is if you compare yourself to other people living around you or at the same time. After all they are the ones your competing for a limited amount of resources with.

Comparing the wealth of people who lived hundreds of years ago in entirely different societies/economic systems is quite pointless, yes.

Indeed, it depends. I think the way this list works it's relative to the available resources at the time, i.e. what percentage of the available wealth did they control?

Mansa Musa’s headline story is that his spending caused inflation in Egypt. I understand that estimate of Augustus Caesar’s wealth is based in part on him considering Egypt, in its entirety, to be his personal possession. It feels like “owning the whole country” should probably outrank “causing inflation in that country”, it’s probably meaningless to try to compare across such vast gulfs of time and place.

Musa had an empire too, one that possessed so much gold that his holiday tips devalued the principal store of wealth in foreign countries. Agree the comparisons aren't particularly meaningful; a lot depends on whether your consider having lots of gold to show off with to be more valuable than building an industrial empire, or even owning a bunch of now-common consumer goods and having access to healthcare more impressive than anything Augustus or Musa bought

Problem is that gold is only worth as much as you can buy with it. If there aren’t enough goods it’s actual price will drop by many times

> wealth indescribable

That’s kind of the problem.. even if we knew the amount of gold he actually had and multiplied it by its current market price the resulting figure would be entirely pointless. The question is how much stuff he could buy for it back in the 1300s. If there wasn’t enough stuff/people to buy having a massive hoard of illiquid gold doesn’t necessarily make you extremely wealthy.

Including absolute monarchs and dictators in the list is also semi meaningless.

Also the the way you chose to measure this wealth results in massive variance. E.g. Jacob Fugger was allegedly worth $400 billion if adjusted by inflation but he’s not even here.

Is there a reason this list wouldn't include any of their successors, who inherited the vast majority, if not all, of their holdings? Did Tiberius not inherit enough of Augustus's wealth to make this top 10 as well?

Iirc he gave some to his wife(?)

Anyone who had multiple people in their will diluted it. Though I feel Augustus got all of Julius' will which goes against this, I imagine powerful people might have a few people they want to leave something for when they die.

Aren't Bezos, Musk, Gates & co richer the first half of the people on the list?

Not until one of them buys the entire US armed forces, installs himself on the throne in Washington and declares all of California his own personal property - just to draw a parallel to the number 2 spot ;)

The fact that none of them could come close to doing that aptly illustrates why they’re not nearly as wealthy as those in the past.

Soon.

fwiw Mughal≠Mongol