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Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

Fun facts, Mansa Musa (Musa Keita) who's king in Mali Empire in Western Africa is the richest person ever lived [1].

It's reported that he unintentionally disrupted Eqyption economy for at least ten years. He did that by spending and giving charity in gold enroute to pilgrimage or Hajj in Mecca while staying about 3 months in Egypt. Allegedly he had hundred camels in towing, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold. Pilgrimage to Mecca is the journey that every Muslim has to make once in a lifetime if they can afford it.

[1] Mansa Musa: The richest man who ever lived (105 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951

[2] Mansa Musa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350951

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As your wikipedia link states:

>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to calculate accurately.

We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be considered more wealthy?

Nobody really know for sure to be honest but he's most probably one of the top ten.

The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10 richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even in the list [1].

The 10 richest men of all time:

1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable

2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)

3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable

4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable

5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn

6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn

7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn

8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn

9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn

10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn

[1] Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458

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

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 ;)

Soon.

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.

fwiw Mughal≠Mongol

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Mansa Musa was illiquid and could not exchange much wealth for goods and services and had nothing to invest in during a time where the gini coefficient around him would have been 1.0

It is marvelous he found gold and even then he could only give it away freely

Presumably his wealth would go down massively in PPP terms since if gold was so abundant in Mali back then its buying power couldn’t be that high.

In a way it’s similar to the Spanish silver mines in the New World it resulted in a significant increase in prices and a lot of wealth shifting around.

Document-only claim without any archeological support means that I'm highly skeptical.

That’s the vast majority of antiquity unfortunately.

In Classical history, we've got a number of competing historiographers that we can compare with each other, and a large about of archeological remains. Our estimates of how wealthy any given period of the Roman empire was are based on numismatics, built artifacts, etc. In comparison, this sort of thing is just a wild claim taken at face value (also something not done in Classics).

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