Meet the Richest Man of All Time

In the early 14th century, Mansa Musa I of Mali, the great African king of the Malian Empire, accrued vast riches in his exploits and travels.

He was extraordinarily wealthy in his own time, and had he lived today, he would have been the world's richest man.

Celebrity Net Worth adjusted the fortunes of some of the wealthiest people over the last 1,000 years and came up with a list of the world's 25 wealthiest people.

Their formula used an annual 2199.6 percent rate of inflation. They found that, as today, women were historically never among the wealthiest.

A number of living men came out on the top, though many of them fell lower on the list. Fourteen of the men were Americans, though some—like Mansa Musa—were from worlds and times far, far away.

Mansa Musa may have been one of the first gold bugs. His fascination with the precious metal played a large hand in landing him in the top slot—and he also owned so much that his actions could cause the value to swing.

From Black History Pages:

Mansa Musa is mostly remembered for his extravagant hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca with, according to the Arab historian al-Umari, 100 camel-loads of gold, each weighing 300 lbs.; 500 slaves, each carrying a 4 lb. gold staff[...]With his lavish spending and generosity in Cairo and Mecca, he ran out of money and had to borrow at usurious rates of interest for the return trip. Al-Umari also states that Mansa Musa and his retinue “gave out so much gold that they depressed the value in Egypt and caused its value to fall.”

With Mansa Musa on top, the rest of the list may surprise you. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett ranks at the very bottom, while Bill Gates, hanging in the top 15, is the richest person alive.

Carlos Slim, named the richest person in the world since 2010, actually failed to even make the top 20.

Here is the full list, as posted by Celebrity Net Worth:

The 25 Richest People of All Time

#1 Mansa Musa 1 – Net Worth $400 Billion

#2 The Rothschild Family – $350 Billion

#3 John D. Rockefeller – Net Worth $340 Billion

#4 Andrew Carnegie – Net Worth $310 Billion

#5 Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov – Net Worth $300 Billion

#6 Mir Osman Ali Khan – Net Worth $230 Billion

#7 William The Conqueror – Net Worth $229.5 Billion

#8 Muammar Gaddafi – Net Worth $200 Billion

#9 Henry Ford – Net Worth $119 Billion

#10 Cornelius Vanderbilt – Net Worth $185 Billion

#11 Alan Rufus – $178.65 Billion

#12 Bill Gates – Net Worth $136 Billion

#13 William de Warenne – Net Worth $147.13 Billion

#14 John Jacob Astor – Net Worth $121 Billion

#15 Richard Fitzalan 10th Earl of Arundel – Net Worth $118.6 Billion

#16 John of Gaunt – Net Worth $110 Billion

#17 Stephen Girard – Net Worth $105 Billion

#18 A.T. Stewart – Net Worth $90 Billion

#19 Henry Duke of Lancaster – Net Worth $85.1 Billion

#20 Friedrich Weyerhauser – Net Worth $80 Billion

#21 Jay Gould – Net Worth $71 Billion

#22 Carlos Slim Helu – Net Worth $68 Billion

#22 Stephen Van Rensselaer – Net Worth $68 Billion

#23 Marshall Field – Net Worth $66 Billion

#24 Sam Walton – Net Worth $65 Billion

#25 Warren Buffett – Net Worth $64 Billion

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