Richest Man in History

by Dvorkkey

When searching up on google "the richest man in history" Mansa Musa comes up. After that, searching up his net worth gets you $400 billion. However, when you searched up Augustus Caesar's net worth, you find that he has a net worth of $4.6 trillion which is about 10 times more than Mansa Musa. Then, according to history how is Augustus not the richest man in history?

sowser

Someone else is better equipped to deal with the specifics of the individuals you've mentioned than I am, but you might find this old answer - including this follow up in it - helpful, as well as this one. Measuring historical wealth in terms we can understanding by comparison to our modern ideas about wealth is a very complicated task, and that challenge becomes more complicated the further back we go. Many historians will tell you that there is little, if any, value to trying to understand pre-modern wealth in modern terms. Historians working with historical wealth and questions of economy will generally only use modern comparisons as illustrative examples to help modern readers understand the scale of historical wealth or inequality, and will try to work with measurements as contemporaries understood them.