10 Richest People Of All Time
1. Augustus Caesar ~ $4.6 Trillion
There are many things the disgustingly superrich can splurge their stupefying fortunes on. How about a mid-ranking Premier League football team, whose subsequent and inevitable success lionises its new chairman, entirely deflecting attention away from the provenance of their problematic providence? Perhaps a flotilla of yachts to rival the naval strength of several small nations? Or maybe a chain of tropical islands snatched from those very same small nations?
All these things would have been trifles for Augustus Caesar. At one point, he owned Egypt.
As ruler of the Roman Emperor around the turn of the first millennium AD, Caesar presided over a principate which gave rise to approximately 30% of the entire world's economic output. As brilliant a statesmen as he was, he wasn't above a little idle kleptocracy, creaming off over one-fifth of the empire's wealth to stuff down his toga. In modern terms, that amounted to just under $5 trillion - about a quarter of the United States' gross domestic product today. Wowsers.