I'm interested in determining who the richest person in history was, or, more precisely, who had the largest percentage of wealth at a given time in history? I'd like to exclude royalty and focus on the time period between the beginning of the industrial revolution and now. My first inclination is that today's wealthiest are the wealthiest comparatively, but I'm not sure.

I'm guessing that richest in history by percentage of wealth is pre industrial. Post, dunno Rockefeller, Vanderbilt?

yeah, i'd imagine these dudes were "wealthier" than guys like bill gates. answer is going to end up being some middle eastern sheik oil tycoon that nobody has ever heard of.

JP Morgan?

this is a family, but deserves mention Rothschild family

Rockerfeller, from my understanding, controlled just shy of 2% of the entire US GDP at one point. That is really, really, REALLY rich. In adjusted dollars, he had considerably more than Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, and the Sultan of Brunei combined. Rockefeller literally could not give his money away fast enough at the end of his life.

Cecil Rhodes was pretty damn rich as well. Not sure on exact figures, but I know DeBeers controlled 70-90% of the world's diamond supply for years. That's worth a ton of money. The Rothschilds were (and are) fabulously rich, creditors to kings and governments throughout Europe. Marcus Crassus, 1/3 of the First Triumvirate along with Julius Caesar, was the richest man in Rome and had enough money to quite literally buy out large numbers of the public offices of the Republic. He controlled enough real estate to make Donald Trump jealous.

I have to go with Rockefeller or maybe Rhodes on this one.

For the US Rockefeller in total but relatively Vanderbilt. The both had the advantage of living at a time without income taxes. In the excellent biography The First Tycoon, the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by TJ Stiles he states that at his peak Vanderbilt controlled 10% of all US wealth. For every 10 dollars in circulation Vanderbilt had one of them!

I love reading about these guys and have read both The First Tycoon and Titan (biographry of Rockefeller) by Ron Chernow. Relatively Rockefeller and Vanderbilt dwarfed the fortunes of guys like Gates and Buffett but if I had my choice I'd rather be simply affluent now rather than mega rich in the late 1800's because life and conviences are so much better now.

Not even close. When he died he had about 25-50 million and Andrew Carnegie said "That's all? I always thought he was rich?"

I agree, people don't realize how lucky they are to live in the modern era. Ease of travel and communication that is available to even the lower middle class is amazing. You can get an iphone for 1-2 days worth of work ffs.

On a side note, has anybody ever known how much money the Rothschilds had? It seems like they would've had to have the biggest percentage of worldwide wealth at their peak.

This is quickly becoming true of the poor in the Third World. I believe cellphone usage passed 50% of the global population 2007.

Apparently that had a big influence in the recent Egyptian uprising. But I'm talking about hot running water, air conditioning and modern denistry and medicine.

I'm sitting in a lazyboy right now in front of a 60 inch high def tv connected to cable and netflix with surround sound with a computer next to me that I am currently typing on with a 21 inch monitor on it where I can surf the net or used to be able to play poker. Vanderbilt and Rockefeller would kill for this setup

There's a wiki on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...orical_figures

I think Rockefeller is the post-industrial winner.

I'd never heard of this guy before though, roaming the desert with $400 billion in gold is pretty baller. So is single handedly crashing the market for gold in Egypt.

Marcus Licinius 'Moneybags' Crassus FTW.

He better be in season 2 of Spartacus: Blood and Sand

They left him out of Rome even. They left the entire first Triumvirate out, actually.

Pretty ridiculous. An almost great series done in by (I assume) a very early decision to compress the entire civil war and the assassination into one season. Had they spent time on Caesar's early machinations and Crassus and the politics of the first triumvirate, they could have had two, three seasons of material.

I wish they would have started with the dictatorship of Sulla and chronicled Caesar's rise from a member of the would-be proscribed victims of that regime all the way to his rise as dictator himself. Would have been way better. As it was, it was more like the story of Octavian, and even most of that had to be edited down to end the show in the 2nd season. Really a shame, because that series went out well before its time.

Yeah, that show was tragic. On the one hand I'm about convinced there'll never be a better portrayal of Caesar, but the original plan was for four or five seasons, and then the budget got cut. There were some issues with accuracy ("Atia of the Julii"? WTF does that even mean?) but nothing you couldn't ignore.

Edit: Though it has to be said I wasn't at all fond of the Zelig-style 'witness to history' **** they were doing with Pullo and Vorenus. It was OK to have them in the first season but after that they should have faded into the background.

I would love to see HBO do a straight-up life of Caesar. You could probably do it in one season even. It's not like his life was dull pre-Civil War.

Agree. The bits with Atia (who wasn't actually part of the Julii clan, of course) were pretty lol, especially her affair with Antony and the fact she was, you know, ALIVE after 43 BCE. But hey, creative liberties. They could have done worse. Frankly, leaving Caesarion alive (and his interesting parentage) was way more eye-rolling.

For economic reasons this would be extremely hard to determine, b/c it is impossible to tell what the total wealth of the world was in the vast majority of history. My "profile" of the richest person ever would definately be around the birth of civilization. Most likely a guy, s prominent conquerer, having complete control of his empire's treasury, most likely viewed as a god. He'd be having neighboring countries by the balls forcing them to pay him annual reparations and stuff.

It has to be one of the international banking families, my money is on these guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family

According to wikipedia:

It has been argued that during the 19th century, the family possessed by far the largest private fortune in the world, and by far the largest fortune in modern world history.

This guy has to be pretty high on the list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homma_Munehisa

Rothschild are probably what we have as the most accurate, but from what it sounds like Crassus is the ''assumed no.1'', however sources are a lot less precise then for the rothschild family.

Crassus definitely.

The man raised an army of 40,000 men, by his funding ALONE, which could rival almost any nation in the world at the time (Crassus was a horrible military commander). The Roman state did everything they could at the time to prevent him from raising this army and taking the war to Parthia, but were unable to because his army was effectively one of the largest privatized military forces in history. And it was his army, not the state's.

The modern equivalent would be a force similar in size and scope to the United States 3rd Army.

The Rothschilds are/were a very large and influential family, so listing them is sort of cheating considering we're talking about the richest person.