Welcome, and thank you for pulling up a chair. Who is considered the richest man of all time? I have heard that question settled with great confidence in barbers’ shops from Surulere to Sabon Gari, and this article is the conclusion of months of research and years of experience writing about money, power and history. The usual answer is a fourteenth-century West African emperor called Mansa Musa, and I will tell you now that the usual answer is both right and wrong.

Right, because that is who most historians, encyclopaedias and quiz masters will name.

Wrong, because the famous number attached to him is closer to folklore than accounting, and because in June 2026 a man in Texas did something no emperor, pharaoh or oil baron ever managed. He was valued at more than one trillion dollars.

So this is a slightly awkward moment to be asking. The old champion has a legend and no ledger. The new challenger has a ledger that changes every afternoon when the New York markets close. And somewhere behind both of them stands King Solomon, whose wealth is recorded in scripture and nowhere else.

I am going to take you through all three, with naira figures you can check, the points where scholars disagree with the internet, and a seven-step method for judging any “richest ever” claim you meet from now on.

Let us start with the newest part of the story.

Is Anyone a Trillionaire in History, or Is This Brand New?

Until this year, the answer was no.

Plenty of states, companies and sovereign funds had been worth a trillion dollars. No single human being had. John D. Rockefeller is usually described as the world’s first dollar billionaire, a mark he reached in 1916, and for the next 110 years the question was only how many billions the richest person held.

Then, on 12 June 2026, SpaceX shares began trading on the Nasdaq in New York. The company had priced its shares at $135 each, they opened at $150, and by the closing bell Forbes estimated that its founder, Elon Musk, was worth about $1.1 trillion. Reuters, the BBC and the Associated Press all ran the same headline that evening: the world’s first trillionaire.

It did not last.

Within three days his paper fortune had climbed to a record of roughly $1.3 trillion on the Forbes count, with some trackers showing an intraday peak near $1.45 trillion. Within weeks SpaceX shares had slid and he was below the line again. By late July the fall from the peak was being described as the largest loss of personal wealth ever recorded. He reportedly called himself a “former trillionaire”.

And then, on 5 October 2026, Forbes put him back above $1 trillion.

So yes, there is a trillionaire in history, exactly one, and he has held the title twice in four months. That alone should tell you something about what kind of wealth this is.

A word on the naira, because a trillion means something different to us. At the official rate of about ₦1,320 to the dollar this week, which you can confirm on the Central Bank’s daily exchange rate table, one trillion dollars is roughly ₦1,320 trillion. In naira terms, you become a trillionaire at about $758 million.

By that measure Nigeria already has several. Aliko Dangote has been a naira trillionaire many times over for years.

When Nigerians ask whether anyone is a trillionaire in history, then, it helps to say which currency you mean. In dollars, there has been one. In naira, the club is small but it certainly has members.

There is one historical complication, and it is a Roman one. In 2015 Money magazine published a ranking of the ten richest people of all time and gave Augustus Caesar a figure of $4.6 trillion. That number came from a historian’s estimate that Augustus personally controlled wealth equal to about a fifth of the Roman Empire’s entire economy, including Egypt, which he treated as private property. It is an interesting calculation. It is also a modern reconstruction of an ancient economy, which is a very different thing from a share price.

Who Is the No. 1 Trillionaire Right Now?

Elon Musk, and nobody else is close.

On the morning of 8 October 2026, the Forbes real-time list put him at about $1.03 trillion. The second-richest person on the same list, Jeff Bezos, stood at roughly $374 billion. The gap between first and second place is itself larger than any fortune that existed before 2025.

Where does it come from? Two holdings, mostly. He owns around 40 per cent of SpaceX and about a fifth of Tesla, and by one estimate more than four-fifths of his fortune now sits in SpaceX stock alone. The Guardian reported on the day the rocket company listed on the Nasdaq, after it raised $75 billion in the largest share sale ever held.

Let me put that in terms a Nigerian reader can feel.

At ₦1,320 to the dollar, $1.03 trillion is about ₦1,360 trillion. The Federal Government’s entire 2026 budget, as set out in the State House statement on the President’s assent, is ₦68.32 trillion. One man’s shareholding could therefore pay for roughly 20 years of federal spending at this year’s level, covering salaries, debt service, roads and all.

It is also about 2.7 times the size of Nigeria’s whole economy, which the International Monetary Fund projected at around $377 billion for 2026.

I find those comparisons useful and slightly dangerous. Useful, because they give scale. Dangerous, because they suggest he could write that cheque.

He could not. If he tried to sell even a tenth of his shares, the price would fall as he sold, and the fortune would shrink in his hands. A Guardian columnist made a sharp version of this point just before the listing, in an opinion piece on what the flotation reveals about the man behind it: investors are paying today for technologies whose markets have not yet matured. A trillion dollars of that kind is a forecast with a name attached.

Rather like the value of a plot in Lekki that everyone agrees is worth ₦500 million until the day you need a buyer.

Keep that thought, because it matters enormously when we set him beside a medieval emperor.

Is Elon Musk Really Richer Than Mansa Musa?

On paper, yes. In every way that makes the comparison interesting, it is far less clear.

First, who was he? Musa was the ninth mansa, or ruler, of the Mali Empire, and he reigned from about 1312 to about 1337. At its height his realm covered territory in what are now Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea and Mauritania, around 1.3 million square kilometres. It did not include any part of modern Nigeria, although Hausa merchants were among those who travelled to trade in Timbuktu.

His wealth came from position more than from digging. Mali sat across the routes that carried gold north from the Bambuk and Bure fields and salt south from the Sahara, and the empire taxed and controlled that traffic. By one estimate, about two-thirds of the gold circulating in the medieval Mediterranean came from West Africa.

Then came the journey that made him famous.

In 1324 Musa set out on the Hajj. He reached Cairo in July, stayed three months, and gave gold away so freely that an Egyptian official later told the writer al-Umari that the price of gold fell from 25 silver dirhams per mithqal to under 22, and stayed there for at least twelve years. That is a drop of about 12 per cent caused by one visitor’s generosity. A 2019 Guardian Life profile of the Malian emperor tells the story well.

Compare that with a pilgrim today. According to Voice of Nigeria’s report on the revised 2026 Hajj fares, a pilgrim from the southern states paid ₦7,991,141.76 this year. At the current gold price of around $4,100 an ounce, that fare is worth about 46 grams of gold, which would sit comfortably in the palm of your hand.

Musa is said to have travelled with 80 camels carrying gold dust.

Now for the part the viral posts leave out.

The famous figure of $400 billion did not come from a historian. It came from a celebrity finance website, which published an inflation-adjusted list of the richest people in history in October 2012 and put Musa first. Newspapers around the world repeated it, including ours, and it has been copied ever since. Nobody has ever shown the working.

Scholars who study the period are blunt about it. The historian Hadrien Collet has argued that Musa’s wealth is impossible to calculate accurately. The Arabic chroniclers gave wildly different figures for the caravan and its gold, and modern historians read those numbers as expressions of amazement, the medieval equivalent of saying “money pass money”. Musa himself encouraged the legend by letting it be believed that gold grew like a plant in his kingdom.

Here is a calculation of my own that I found sobering. The highest modern reconstruction of the gold he carried is about 18 tonnes. At this week’s price, 18 tonnes of gold is worth roughly $2.4 billion, or about ₦3.1 trillion. That is an astonishing sum to carry across a desert. It is also less than a quarter of one per cent of Elon Musk’s current fortune.

There are other inconvenient details. The same sources that describe his generosity also say he ran out of money on the way home, borrowed from Egyptian merchants at high interest (one loan is recorded at 50,000 dinars), and that some of those lenders were never fully repaid. Malian oral historians, the jeliw, remember him less fondly than outsiders do, and some regard him as the man who wasted the empire’s treasure.

Does that mean he was not rich? Of course not.

It means his wealth was a different kind of thing. A mansa did not own shares. He commanded the tribute, the trade taxes, the armies and the gold reserve of an empire, and no court could tell him otherwise. Musk owns pieces of two companies and answers to regulators, shareholders and judges. One had total control over a smaller economy. The other has partial claims on a far larger one.

So is Elon Musk richer than Mansa Musa? In countable money, almost certainly. In command over the world he lived in, I would still back the emperor.

Who Is Considered the Richest Man of All Time? The Direct Answer

If you only read one paragraph of this article, make it this one.

Mansa Musa of Mali, who ruled from about 1312 to 1337, is the person most widely considered the richest man of all time: Encyclopaedia Britannica describes him as widely considered the wealthiest person in history, and Money magazine ranked him first in 2015 while declining to put a figure on his fortune because he was “richer than anyone could describe”. That reputation rests on his control of West Africa’s gold and salt trade and on eyewitness accounts of his 1324 pilgrimage, while the popular estimate of $400 billion comes from a 2012 website list and is not accepted by historians. The largest fortune ever actually measured belongs to Elon Musk, who in June 2026 became the first person valued at more than $1 trillion and stood at about $1.03 trillion in early October 2026. Other names that appear in the same conversation include Augustus Caesar, King Solomon, the Mughal emperor Akbar, Emperor Shenzong of Song China, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and the German banker Jakob Fugger, and which of them “wins” depends entirely on whether you count money, share of the economy or raw power.

That is the short version: Musa by reputation, Musk by measurement.

Everything else is a matter of what you choose to count, which is why the next comparison is harder still.

Who Was Richer, King Solomon or Mansa Musa?

This is the argument I enjoy most, because in Nigeria it is rarely only about money. Solomon belongs to the Bible and, as the Prophet Sulaiman, to the Qur’an. Musa was a devout Muslim king and an African one. People bring loyalties to this question, and I want to treat both figures with the respect they deserve.

Start with what the texts say.

The First Book of Kings records that the weight of gold Solomon received in a single year was 666 talents, on top of what came from merchants, traders and governors. A talent is usually reckoned at around 34 kilograms, so that is about 23 tonnes of gold a year. At this week’s price, 23 tonnes is worth roughly $3 billion, or about ₦4 trillion, every year. The same chapter says the Queen of Sheba brought him 120 talents, around four tonnes, as a gift.

Scripture gives him a reign of 40 years. If you took the annual figure literally and held it steady, the gold alone would come to something like $120 billion at today’s price. You will see far larger figures online, some as high as $2 trillion, and I have never found the arithmetic behind them.

Now look at the evidence for each man.

For Musa we have accounts written within a generation by people who met him or met those who did. Al-Umari visited Cairo about twelve years after the pilgrimage and interviewed officials who had hosted the Malian party. Ibn Battuta travelled to Mali during the reign of Musa’s brother. In 1375 a mapmaker in Majorca drew the mansa on the Catalan Atlas holding a nugget of gold, and described him as the richest man in the region. There are standing buildings in Timbuktu associated with his reign.

For Solomon, the Bible is the source. Archaeology has not so far produced records, inscriptions or treasure that confirm wealth on the scale described, and scholars continue to debate how large his kingdom was. For believers the text is sufficient. For a historian trying to compare two balance sheets, it is an account written down long after the events.

My own view, offered with humility: on the numbers written in the sources, the two look surprisingly similar, each associated with roughly 20 tonnes of gold. On the quality of the evidence, Musa is on much firmer ground. If you ask who was richer, Solomon or Mansa Musa, the careful answer is that Musa’s wealth is better documented, Solomon’s is described as greater, and neither can be audited.

That may disappoint whoever is waiting to win the argument. It has the advantage of being true.

Estimated Fortunes of History’s Richest Men Compared

The table below sets the main contenders side by side. Naira conversions are my own, at about ₦1,320 to the dollar, and the final column is my assessment of how far each number can be trusted.

Name	Era	Main source of wealth	Popular modern estimate	How firm is the figure?
Mansa Musa	Ruled c. 1312 to 1337	Gold and salt trade, tribute	About $400 billion (roughly ₦528 trillion)	Weak. A 2012 website estimate that historians reject
King Solomon	10th century BC	Tribute and trade, 666 talents of gold a year	About $3 billion a year in gold at today’s price	Weak. Scripture is the only source
Augustus Caesar	Ruled 27 BC to AD 14	Imperial revenue, personal control of Egypt	$4.6 trillion (Money, 2015)	Weak. Based on a share of the Roman economy
Andrew Carnegie	1835 to 1919	Steel	$372 billion (Money, 2015)	Fair. A documented fortune, adjusted by economists
John D. Rockefeller	1839 to 1937	Standard Oil	$341 billion (Money, 2015)	Fair. A documented fortune, adjusted by economists
Elon Musk	October 2026	SpaceX and Tesla shares	About $1.03 trillion (roughly ₦1,360 trillion)	Strong but volatile. Repriced every trading day
Aliko Dangote	September 2026	Cement, refining, fertiliser	Above $50 billion as reported (roughly ₦66 trillion)	Strong, though it moves with the naira

Read down the last column and a pattern appears: the further back you go, the bigger the claims and the thinner the proof. The only figures you could defend line by line belong to people who lived after proper company accounts existed.

How to Compare Fortunes Across Centuries

I have lost count of the times someone has sent me a graphic declaring a medieval king “worth $400 billion” and asked whether it is true. Here is the method I now use, and you can apply it to any name in under ten minutes.

1. Find where the figure first appeared, because a number that traces back to an entertainment website deserves less trust than one from a named historian or a published study.
2. Ask what kind of wealth is being counted, whether personal property, a state treasury the ruler controlled, or shares in a company that others also own.
3. Convert any gold or silver into weight first and money second, using about 34 kilograms for a biblical talent, 4.25 grams for a mithqal and 31.1 grams for a troy ounce.
4. Price that weight at today’s market rate and then into naira at the official exchange rate, noting the date, since both the gold price and the naira move daily.
5. Compare the fortune with the size of the economy around it, because Rockefeller’s $900 million in 1913 was about 2.3 per cent of American output and that tells you more than any inflation adjustment.
6. Check whether the person could actually spend it, since a king could melt his gold tomorrow while a founder who sells his shares pushes the price down as he goes.
7. Write down how confident you are, in plain words such as measured, estimated or legendary, and keep that label beside the number whenever you repeat it.

Step five is the one I would not skip.

When Musk’s fortune stood at about $970 billion on the eve of the SpaceX listing, it equalled roughly 3 per cent of the entire American economy, which is a larger share than Rockefeller ever held. That single comparison did more to convince me the modern figure is historic than any headline.

And if you ever need to present this, whether to a classroom in Ibadan, a quiz night in Abuja or your own followers online, a few styling tips will save you from misleading people. Use a horizontal bar chart, since the names are long and the eye compares lengths easily. Give measured fortunes a solid colour and estimated or legendary ones a hatched or faded fill, so the difference in certainty is visible before anyone reads a word. Put the date and the exchange rate in the caption. And resist the temptation to show Augustus at $4.6 trillion on the same scale as everyone else, because one speculative bar will flatten the rest into nothing.

A chart that is clear about its own doubts is more persuasive, not less.

Final Thoughts on Who Is Considered the Richest Man of All Time

So, who is considered the richest man of all time?

Mansa Musa still holds the title in the way that matters to most people. He is the name in the encyclopaedia, the face on the medieval map, and the one African ruler whom the whole world agrees was wealthy beyond description. I think that reputation is deserved, and I think Nigerians and other West Africans are right to take pride in it.

But I would let go of the $400 billion. It was never his number. It belongs to a website, and repeating it does his story no favours when the real evidence, a gold market shaken for twelve years by one man’s gifts, is far more impressive.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, owns the largest fortune ever counted, and he may not own it by the time you read this. His wealth is real in the sense that markets will lend against it, and fragile in the sense that it rose and fell by hundreds of billions of dollars in a single summer.

And Solomon remains where he has always been, a figure of faith whose riches are recorded in scripture and cannot be weighed against anyone’s.

Three different kinds of wealth, then: commanded, traded and believed. Once you see that, the argument becomes more interesting than any single answer.

Here is where I would begin:

• The next time you see a historical net worth, trace it to its first source before you share it, and say so when you cannot find one.
• Work one example yourself this week, converting Solomon’s 666 talents or Musa’s 18 tonnes into naira at today’s gold price and the official exchange rate.
• When you quote a living billionaire’s fortune, add the date, because a figure without a date is already out of date.

Related Articles

If you would like to bring the question closer to home, my earlier piece asking who is the richest African in the world looks at Aliko Dangote and the continent’s other billionaires, and at how a fortune built on cement and refined fuel differs from one built on technology shares.

And if Mansa Musa’s story left you wondering how a region that once moved the world’s gold price came to be associated with hardship, I worked through that puzzle in why Africa is rich but poor, which follows the same West African resources from the medieval caravan routes to today’s export figures.

Key Takeaways

• Mansa Musa of Mali is the person most widely considered the richest man in history, but the $400 billion figure comes from a 2012 website list and historians say his wealth cannot be calculated.
• Elon Musk is the only dollar trillionaire there has ever been, first crossing $1 trillion on 12 June 2026 and standing at about $1.03 trillion, roughly ₦1,360 trillion, in early October 2026.
• Solomon and Musa are each linked in the sources to about 20 tonnes of gold, so the fair comparison turns on evidence, where Musa has eyewitness accounts and Solomon has scripture alone.

Frequently Asked Questions: Who Is Considered the Richest Man of All Time?

Who is considered the richest man of all time?

Mansa Musa, who ruled the Mali Empire from about 1312 to 1337, is the person most widely considered the richest man of all time. His reputation rests on control of West Africa’s gold and salt trade, although historians say his fortune cannot be given a reliable figure.

Is Elon Musk richer than Mansa Musa?

In money that can be counted, almost certainly yes, because Musk was valued at about $1.03 trillion in October 2026 against a popular estimate of $400 billion for Musa. The comparison is weak, though, since Musa’s figure is a modern guess and he commanded an empire’s resources outright.

Who is the no. 1 trillionaire?

Elon Musk is the only person ever valued at more than one trillion dollars, and Forbes placed him at about $1.03 trillion on 8 October 2026. The second-richest person on the same list, Jeff Bezos, was worth roughly $374 billion.

Is anyone a trillionaire in history?

Only one person has reached a trillion dollars on a recognised wealth tracker, and that is Elon Musk, who first crossed the mark on 12 June 2026 when SpaceX listed its shares. Estimates that give Augustus Caesar $4.6 trillion are modern reconstructions of the Roman economy and not measured fortunes.

Who was richer, Solomon or Mansa Musa?

Nobody can say with confidence, because Solomon’s wealth is recorded only in scripture and Musa’s only in travellers’ accounts. Both are linked to roughly 20 tonnes of gold in the sources, but the evidence for Musa is closer to the events and comes from several writers.

How much was Mansa Musa worth in today’s money?

The figure you will see most often is $400 billion, which comes from a list published by a celebrity finance website in 2012. Historians such as Hadrien Collet argue that his wealth is impossible to calculate accurately, so that number should be treated as legend.

How did Mansa Musa become so rich?

The Mali Empire controlled and taxed the trade routes that carried gold from the Bambuk and Bure fields northwards and Saharan salt southwards. Musa inherited a gold reserve built up over generations and added tribute from the cities and territories he brought under his rule.

What happened when Mansa Musa visited Cairo?

He arrived in July 1324 on his way to Mecca and gave away so much gold over three months that its price fell by about 12 per cent. The writer al-Umari reported that the price had still not recovered twelve years later.

How much gold did King Solomon receive each year?

The First Book of Kings says he received 666 talents of gold in one year, which is about 23 tonnes. At the gold price in October 2026 that would be worth roughly $3 billion, or about ₦4 trillion.

How much is Elon Musk’s fortune in naira?

At about ₦1,320 to the dollar, a fortune of $1.03 trillion comes to roughly ₦1,360 trillion. That is about 20 times the Federal Government’s ₦68.32 trillion budget for 2026.

Are there any naira trillionaires in Nigeria?

Yes, because at the current official exchange rate anyone worth more than about $758 million holds at least one trillion naira. Aliko Dangote, whose fortune was reported above $50 billion in September 2026, is a naira trillionaire many times over.

Why can historians not agree on who was the richest person ever?

Rulers such as Musa, Solomon and Augustus controlled state treasuries and whole economies, which is not the same as owning shares that have a daily market price. There is no fair exchange rate between the fourteenth century and the present, so every ranking depends on what the person compiling it chooses to count.