Multi-Trillionaire Mansa Musa: wealth founded in gold

The richest man in history. Detail from the Catalan Atlas Sheet 6 showing Mansa Musa, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

A few years ago Jeff Bezos caught some limelight for surpassing Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. Bezos, as of this writing, clocked in (as of February 5th, 2020, before the Dow’s slump, which knocked a couple of billions off his net worth, poor soul) with a net worth estimated by Forbes at around $120B billion. Surpassing Bill Gates’s paltry $100 billion.

That said, both Bezos and Gates are relative pikers compared to the richest man who ever lived, whose name, oddly, is relatively little known. Who was he? Glad you asked!

The great African emperor Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire of the 14th century was the wealthiest person in history.

Richer than Croesus.

Richer than Midas.

Much, much richer than Bezos.

TIME Magazine, ranking Musa’s wealth above that of Augustus Caesar (who, TIME scored at #2 and worth $4.6 Trillion) characterizes Musa simply as “richer than anyone could describe.”

According to Ferrum College history professor Richard Smith, Musa’s west African kingdom was likely the largest producer of gold in the world — at a time which gold was in especially high demand.

…

Some tales of his famous pilgrimage to Mecca — during…