Depends how you define richest while saying "in history"<p>From Forbes... By the time Rockefeller died in 1937, his assets equaled 1.5% of America's total economic output. To control an equivalent share today would require a net worth of about $340 billion dollars.
Sam Walton used to be the richest person ever until he died and his wealth was split up amongst his children. He had $100B in 1992. (<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/university/sam-walton-biography/sam-walton-net-worth.asp" rel="nofollow">https://www.investopedia.com/university/sam-walton-biography...</a>)
Considering WalMart stock is up 5x since then, and not even accounting for inflation or dividends that would make him worth $500B today.<p>It makes sense that retail would lead to “richest person we’re aware of.”
The article itself contradicts the headline. Is CNN really taking a page out of BuzzFeed?<p><i>"The Amazon CEO's net worth reached $105.1 billion Monday</i>"<p><i>"Gates ... net worth was briefly above $100 billion back in April 1999, when the internet stock bubble helped to inflate the value of his holdings. Adjusted for inflation, $100 billion in 1999 would be worth $148 billion today.</i>"
Does anyone else see this as a scary evidence that technology is accelerating the consolidation of money to the few that succeed? How long did it take historical figures to reach this level of wealth vs Bezos in the last ~20 years?
This should be a huge warning sign to nearly everyone, instead of celebrated.
One caveat: Bezos is the richest out of people that we can get an accurate and publicly available estimate of their wealth. It doesn't count people like Vladimir Putin because we don't actually know how much he's worth- but many suspect that it could be more than 100 billion. It also doesn't count families, such as the House of Saud, which has several members worth over 10 billion, and the entire family might be worth over a trillion.<p><a href="http://fortune.com/2017/07/29/vladimir-putin-russia-jeff-bezos-bill-gates-worlds-richest-man/" rel="nofollow">http://fortune.com/2017/07/29/vladimir-putin-russia-jeff-bez...</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud</a>
According to this list, Rockefeller and Carnegie were several times richer:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...</a>
It's a sad commentary on capitalism that two of the richest people in history (Bezos and Walton) companies treat many of their employees like shit.
This was pretty interesting in terms of all time wealthiest people:<p><a href="http://time.com/money/3977798/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time-2/" rel="nofollow">http://time.com/money/3977798/the-10-richest-people-of-all-t...</a>
I'm always in awe of Amazon's sustained growth. Bezos has built a company that has innovated constantly (after a tumultuous start in the late 90s) and at scale:<p>- AWS was launched in 2006 when Amazon had < 15k employees.<p>- Kindle was launched in late 2007 with 20k employees.<p>- Echo was launched in 2014 with 150k employees.<p>It's no surprise he's the richest in history. Will be really interesting to see how he spends his money over the next 2-3 decades.