Who Was The First Billionaire In The World?
Ever wonder who the very first billionaire was?
These days we hear about billionaires constantly. Elon Musk does says something on X, media goes crazy. Jeff Bezos buys a yacht, TMZ is all over it. But there was actually a time when having that much money was unheard of.
Obviously there were rich people before billionaires existed. The word “millionaire” showed up around 1719-1720 in France, describing people with more than a million francs. But even that was super rare.
The Challenge of Pre-Modern Wealth: Was It Mansa Musa?
Before the 1900s, kings and emperors weren’t measured in dollars. Their wealth was in land, armies and gold.
Mansa Musa was the emperor of Mali in the 1300s. He’s often called the richest person ever. He had more than half the world’s gold supply at the time. His legendary pilgrimage to Mecca included 500 slaves carrying gold staffs, and hundreds of camels loaded with gold. In Cairo, he distributed so much gold that it devalued the metal and disrupted Egypt’s economy for decades.
Historians can’t really put an exact number on his wealth. He may have had hundreds of billions, maybe trillions in today’s money, it’s impossible to say for sure.
The point is: extreme wealth existed, but “billionaires” didn’t. There was no Forbes list, no stock market tracking people’s net worth every day, no way to really verify if someone had a billion dollars.
Plus, inflation makes everything confusing. A dollar from 1850 is worth about 35 dollars today. So until we had proper accounting systems, stable currencies, and modern banking, you couldn’t even prove someone was that rich.
But by the early 1900s, things changed. Standardized money made it possible to actually measure someone’s net worth.
Rockefeller: The First Official Billionaire
John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839 in New York.
As a teenager, Rockefeller worked as a bookkeeper, carefully tracking every penny. He supposedly kept a ledger where he wrote down everything he spent. That habit stuck with him forever.
When oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, Rockefeller saw his chance. He started Standard Oil in 1870, and within ten years, it dominated the American oil business.
He made secret deals with railroads, undercut his competitors, bought them out when they struggled, and cut costs wherever he could. By 1880, Standard Oil controlled about 90% of all oil refining in the United States.
In later life, he pivoted to philanthropy. He founded the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University). His donations helped eradicate hookworm and other medical breakthroughs.
When he died in 1937 at age 97, his remaining fortune was “only” about $26 million as he had given most of it away.
Since then, the club has grown exponentially, fueled by tech, finance, and globalization. Yet Rockefeller’s story remains a benchmark.