The view from Billionaires’ Row overlooking Central Park in New York (via MarketWatch).
A billionaire is someone whose wealth is equal to at least a billion pounds or dollars: $1,000,000,000.00. This post, written in 2019, will use current US dollars, worth 2.0 grams of silver.
There are currently 2,135 known, living billionaires according to Forbes magazine. New York has 103, Hong Kong 93, San Francisco 74, Moscow 69, and London 62. Only 14 are Black, Oprah Winfrey among them. Oxfam says the top 26 billionaires are as rich as the bottom half of humanity.
Isabella dos Santos of Angola, $2.3 billion.
Some famous billionaires (those in grey are dead, adjusted for inflation):
- > $100 billion
- 440 Mansa Musa (Mali Empire)
- 374 John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil)
- 350 Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel)
- 298 Nicholas II of Russia
- 220 Henry Ford (Ford Motor)
- 220 Muammar Gaddafi (Libyan dictator)
- 200? Vladimir Putin (maybe only 70)
- 199 Basil II of the Byzantine Empire
- 199 Crassus of Rome – crushed the Spartacus slave uprising
- 197 Cornelius Vanderbilt (NY & Harlem Railroad)
- 182 Amenhotep III of Egypt, Nefertiti’s father-in-law
- 168 Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s queen
- 150 Sam Walton (Walmart)
- 135 John Jacob Astor (American Fur Company, Times Square real estate)
- 131 Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post) – before his divorce settlement with wife MacKenzie
- 112 Cleopatra
- 101 Koch brothers
- 101 Richard B. Mellon (Gulf Oil)
- > $10 billion
- 97 Bill Gates (Microsoft)
- 83 Warren Buffett
- 79 Jay Gould (Union Pacific Railroad)
- 78 Marshal Field
- 76 Bernard Arnault & family (Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy, Christian Dior)
- 64 Carlos Slim
- 62 Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
- 59 J. Paul Getty (Getty Oil)
- 56 Michael Bloomberg
- 53 Leland Stanford (Central Pacific Railroad, Transcontinental Railroad, Stanford University)
- 51 Larry Page (Google)
- 51 Howard Hughes Jr (TWA, Hughes Aircraft, etc)
- 47 J. P. Morgan (General Electric, US Steel)
- 35 Sheldon Adelson (Las Vegas Sands casino)
- 21 Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)
- 19 Rupert Murdoch & family (News Corp, 21st Century Fox, Fox News)
- 13 Sackler family (OxyContin, opioid crisis)
- 11 Aliko Dangote (Nigerian industrialist) – world’s richest living Black man
- > $1 billion
- 8.3 George Soros
- 7.9 Steve Jobs (Apple)
- 7.8 David Geffen (DreamWorks) – richest in Hollywood
- 7.2 John Malone (TCI, cable television)
- 5.4 George Lucas (Star Wars)
- 4.6 Sumner Redstone (CBS, Viacom, BET, Paramount Pictures)
- 4.1 Richard Branson (Virgin)
- 3.7 Steven Spielberg
- 3.7? Donald Trump (maybe more like 1.1)
- 3.6 Oleg Deripaska (murky Russian oligarch)
- 3.6 George Schultz (Starbucks)
- 2.8 Oprah Winfrey – world’s richest Black woman
- 2.3 Isabella dos Santos (Sonangol oil) – second richest Black woman
- 2.2 Ted Turner (founded CNN, TBS)
- 1.9 William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane)
- 1.6 Tom Steyer (impeach Trump)
- 1.1 Michael Jordan
- 1.0 Kylie Jenner
Trump: Forbes puts Trump at $3.7 billion. But in 2005 it put him at $2.7 billion when Deutsche Bank said he was worth only $788 million.
Queen Elizabeth II is not a billionaire. Nor was any US president before Trump, even adjusting for inflation.
Bob Johnson became the first Black American billionaire in 2001 when he sold BET to Viacom.
What $1.5 billion looks like in $100 banknotes.
A billion US dollars in 2019 is equal to:
- Half of the Empire State Building.
- Three Boeing 777 jet airliners.
- 2,000 metric tons of silver, which comes to about 77,500 talents or 67,000,000 crowns.
- $70,000,000 or £14,400,000 in 1925 (when the dollar and pound were still on the gold standard).
- The net worth of 7,000 ordinary White American households or 98,000 Black ones (based on median wealth in 2014, adjusted for inflation).
With a billion dollars you could buy three Boeing 777s.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
“I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health – is wrong.”
Fox News:
“Well, first of all, I mean, the fact is ringworm isn’t deadly …”
– Abagond, 2019, 2020.
Update (January 30th 2020): A billion dollars comes to about 2,000 metric tons of silver, not 2 metric tons as I had it!
Sources: mainly Forbes (2019); US Inflation Calculator (to adjust for inflation); “Outliers” (2008) by Malcolm Gladwell (for the dead billionaires); LA Times (1951) for Hearst; Business Insider (2018) for Putin; The Independent (2012) for Mansa Musa and Gaddafi.
See also:
- US dollar
- The 1%
- racial wealth gap
- The Panama Papers
- billionaires:
- Mansa Musa
- Vladimir Putin
- Cleopatra
- Koch brothers
- Elon Musk
- Steve Jobs
- Donald Trump
- Oprah
- Kylie Jenner
- helped to create billionaires:
- Nefertiti
- Mali Empire
- Byzantine Empire
- The BET Fallacy
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- crowns
- Attic units
626
Abagond 
What! no Mansa Musa? “Mansa Musa net worth: Mansa Musa was the Emperor of the Mali Empire who had a net worth of $400 billion. Mansa Musa was born in 1280 and passed away in 1337. He was the 10th Mansa which means “King of Kings” or Emperor.”
The wealth gap ain’t what it used to be.
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The net worth of 7,000 ordinary White American households or 98,000 Black ones (based on median wealth in 2014, adjusted for inflation“ Le sighs
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Reblogged this on Reveries of Thy Black Lady and commented:
A post by Abagond about billionaires. It is notable that according to Abagond, “the net worth of 7,000 ordinary White American households or 98,000 Black ones (based on median wealth in 2014, adjusted for inflation,” is equivalent to 1 billion. Note the stark contrast in white vs. black net worth overall.
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Good information for whatever it can be used for.
Money has a tendency to move into less hands as times go by.
The interest paid on money held in investments assures the growth of wealth. Billionair’s cannot spend as much as the interest and investment gains they earn.
Much of the value of billionair’s is in their stock which can go up or down. (See Depression of 1929)
A “new deal” is required from time to time. High tax rates for the super rich have been used in the past.
High inheritance tax rates helps reduce the passing of wealth in families.
What will the current US policies be? What will the world policies be?
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@ gro jo
Thanks. I found a source for Mansa Musa and Gaddafi and added them.
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What about the Rothschild family?
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No, no way. Aliko Dangote is an owner of cement factories not oil fields. He grew his capital up today first as a trader and then as an industrialist (tomato processing, sugar refining, etc and finally cement production). This mistake probably comes from the assumption that rich people in an oil producing country became rich exactly by operating in that filed. That is wrong. Even if a country becomes an oil producer other activities (like agriculture for example) remain important for its economy and there are people who feel themselves at home operating in those areas.
Only very recently Dangote turned his focus to oil and even then not in oil extraction but in oil processing (so again, he remains an industrialist) . He is building one of the largest oil refinery in the world and in addition a petrochemical plant, a fertilizer plant and a power plant and associated infrastructure (pipelines, port, etc)
I wrote a comment, two years ago, about Dangote, see https://abagond.wordpress.com/open-thread/open-thread-9/#comment-379432
I think that the initiatives Dangote has been pursuing are a game changer in the industrial landscape in Black Africa. Usually large, and even medium sized industries are owned and operated by the state or foreigners. The state as an operator of industries is oft not very efficient, so we are left with foreigners when it comes to owning and well managing of medium to large factories. The exception is South Africa where the industrial base belongs mainly to some local White South African families.
Dangote is opening, by example, a new world where hopefully it will be normal to see serious Black African entrepreneurs operating medium and large sized industries.
Another side note: Isabel dos Santos is possibly the richest Black woman in Africa* but when it comes to billionaires there are others (especially in Nigeria) with a similar status. Forbes usually lists them too.
*In her home country, Angola, Isabel dos Santos is seen not as Black but as mulatto. The term Black is, in the former Portuguese colonies, applied exclusively for unmixed indigenous (Black) Africans.
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@ munubantu
This is why I put him down for oil. I changed it to industrialist. Thanks.
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would be nice to have some follow-up posts related on this, eg,
— How many became billionaires off the backs of blacks / Africans, Chinese or Indian coolie labour, by seizing land from natives, etc.
more about the top world billionaires, including some from Russia, China and Hong Kong.
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Looking at a billion dollars stacked up on that platform doesn’t look as much as I imagined it would. I could easily go through that stack in a week, LOL>
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I would like to meet one of those elderly billionaires with a heart condition!
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@jefe
There is probably a way to trace the wealth back to slavery or somekind of colonial exploitation.
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Bill Gates computers, Walton’s food, Bezos new wealth, Oprah entertainment,. I am sure some of the people from the old south may have become rich; however, the period after the Civil War did a good job of wiping out a lot of the Plantation owners wealth.
The majority of slave owners only owned about 5 slaves or less. Many slaves lived in the homes with their masters. (Interesting subject if one chooses to go back in history and read and study about it)
Billionaires earn money from their investments (Buy low and sale high) and the only way to reduce their wealth is thru proper taxation. See Roosevelt and his tax policies.
There is no doubt that misusing people is a part of getting richer!
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The thing is there needn’t be a higher percentage tax bracket. Paying the same percentage without loopholes would fix and funding problems.
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No loop holes for the rich no loop holes for anyone. Most tax write off’s help grow the business and increase employment. Taxes must be on personal income.
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Arthur Hayes is a black American and a self made billionaire who doesn’t appear on your list. He is co founder to Bitmex, a crypto trading platform operating out of Hong Kong. His partner Ben Delo is the U.K.’s youngest self made billionaire at 34.
Bitmex had a notional trading volume of around a trillion dollars for 2018 and considering Hayes founded Bitmex in 2014 that is pretty impressive.
Hayes recently donated $2.24M To The Jackie Robinson Foundation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-01/bored-with-banking-this-former-citi-trader-went-full-crypto
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Really interesting. Of all of those the only one which surprises me is Elizabeth I. I had no idea she was so rich.
I cannot comprehend of such ludicrous personal wealth when so many people die of starvation every single day. There has to be a point where any more money makes no difference to your life so unless you give lots away being so rich seems pointless to me
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@Abagond Surely you must know of Robert F Smith the “current” richest African American net worth of 5 Billion. His story is very interesting, as he is very much a liberal democrat who isn’t scared about calling out racism and discrimination. Also Robert Smith unlike Oprah, Johnson or even Michael Jordan he actually goes into Black community personally helping people.
@munubantu Silly comment regarding race , let’s get ONLY one thing straight the Portuguese were invaders and have no say so on anything, also her Father (comment about him) is Black African, whatever that means to race realist minded Europeans.
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Update: A billion dollars comes to about 2,000 metric tons of silver, not 2 metric tons as I had it!
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@ abagond Weight of money is a good subject for conversation; however, nobody is carrying around money in any volume. It be credit cards today!
Some rich do not even carry money!
Good conversation!
I am not going to pay someone to beat my brains in for a little cash.
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Why can’t I meet a billionaire to marry with a weak heart?
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