Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, according to the 2019 Forbes billionaires' list released this week. With an estimated fortune of $131bn (£99bn) he is the wealthiest man in modern history.
But he is by no means the richest man of all time.
That title belongs to Mansa Musa, the 14th Century West African ruler who was so rich his generous handouts wrecked an entire country's economy.
"Contemporary accounts of Musa's wealth are so breathless that it's almost impossible to get a sense of just how wealthy and powerful he truly was," Rudolph Butch Ware, associate professor of history at the University of California, told the BBC.
Mansa Musa was "richer than anyone could describe", Jacob Davidson wrote about the African king for Money.com in 2015.
The 10 richest men of all time
- Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth incomprehensible
- Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)]
- Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable
- Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable
- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn
- John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn
- Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn
- Mir Osman Ali Khan ( 1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn
- William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn
- Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn
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Note that the only two private citizens on the list (non-royalty or heads of state) were products of the American experiment.
