Have you ever wondered who the richest people to ever walk the Earth were? Maybe you have also wondered who the richest fictional characters of all time were. Money is hard to come by. You could work all your heart out but it can turn in two ways – to generate money or maintain your income. We will discuss a couple of rich people who have reached a billion dollars or more because of big business in real estate, oil, or billionaires who belonged from a great empire in history. Here are some of the wealthiest historical figures in the present and the past.
John D Rockefeller – $600 Billion
When it comes down to the absolutely richest person to have ever lived you probably don’t need to look much further than this chap. His money came from the astonishing success of The Standard Oil Company and he was the first person to ever reach a personal fortune of $1 billion. Making him the richest man and the first American to earn billions. He lived until 1937 when he died at the age of 97. Analysis of his wealth at the time of death suggests that in today’s money it would have been an incredible $600 million. In fact, Rockefeller’s money was about 1.5% of the entire US GDP at the time?
Scrooge McDuck – $65.4 Billion

This guy didn’t really exist but he is a regular fixture on the Forbes Fictional 15 list of rich characters. He was last recorded as having $65 billion but that could be lower than his real wealth. After all, in one of the cartoons, he was said to have “11 octillion dollars”. Making this duck richer than any living American. I don’t know exactly how much that is but it sounds like a hell of a lot of cash for a duck.
Mansa Musa – $400 Billion
Ok, so you have heard of Rockefeller and you are familiar with the mean Scottish duck. What about this guy, though? Musa was the emperor of Mali in the 14th century and had a fabulous wealth. When he traveled he had an amazing entourage of 70,000 people with and gave away thousands of pounds of gold dust to people he passed on the trip. During one of his famous journey, he gifted 300,000 pounds of gold, which caused the value of the precious metal to be seriously devalued for years afterward. Some people say he had more money than Rockefeller while others reckon he was just a little bit less filthy rich.
Carlisle Cullen – $46 Billion
This person is a fictional vampire who tends to always be near the list of the wealthiest fictional characters. It has been suggested that investments and compound interest have earned him his fictional net worth wealth. What would a vampire do with all that money anyway? And since when did vampires invest in the stock market and worry about interest rates?
Andrew Carnegie – $300 Billion
If we go back to real life we find the famously philanthropic Scottish immigrant Carnegie. He sold his steel company for $492 million and at one point his personal fortune topped maybe $300 billion. Of course, we can still see today the wonderful contributions to society he made with his money.
Batman – $9.2 Million
Bruce Wayne isn’t anywhere near as rich as the other people we’ve looked at so far. However, I thought it was worth including him, as I’ve always wondered just how rich he is. He inherited a fortune when his parents died but the best he could think of to do with it was build a weird car and fight evil. Huh? With that net worth, I’d have bought an island in the Caribbean and left Gotham City to the Joker while I frolicked on the beach.
King Solomon – $2.1 Trillion

Another of history’s famously wealthy people was King Solomon. He had tributes piling in at the rate of 25 tons of gold a year, which is a pretty nice sort of passive income when you think about it. He filled his palace with gold objects and might just have been the richest person to have ever lived.
William the Conqueror – $228 billion
William the Conqueror became Duke of Normandy at the age of eight and King of England later on. William gave great military services in the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and after the battle, William received large parcels of land that were worth so much in today’s currency. He was well known to be largely responsible and with great influence in making Britain the most powerful nation in during William’s empire.
Carlos Slim Helu – $68 billion
Carlos Slim Helu is a Mexican self-made billionaire, investor, and a philanthropist. In 2000, Slim Helu founded the Foundation for the Historic Centre of Mexico City. Slim Helu was ranked one of the wealthiest people in American history. He was the richest person in the world between 2010 and 2013. Slim Helu is holding plenty of prestigious Mexican companies under his belt aside from being currently the CEO and Chairman of big telecommunication companies – América Móvil and Telmex.
