How Many Times Can You Meet The Richest Man In The World?
It's not so much a conspiracy theory that these guys all know each other - it's just that the world's a pretty small place.
Tailored suits, chauffeured cars
Fine hotels, and big cigars
Up for grabs, all for a price
Where the red hot girls keep on dancing through the nightThe claim is on you, the sights are on me
So what do you do that's guaranteed?
Hey little girl, you want it all
The furs, the diamonds, the paintings on the wall
- Money Talks, AC/DC
The world’s a small place. And there’s actually a fairly small number of ways to become the richest man in the world.
How do you become the world's richest man, or at least have a shot at coming close? Well, if we want to look at the list since 1900, the list is actually pretty concise. Oil. Cars. Fashion. Finance. Retail done really really well (by which I mean Walmart and Amazon, respectively). Fashion. Software. Telecom. And then some eccentric cases, like bubble real estate in the Japanese economic boom of the 80s/early 90s, or food processing (Tetra Pak). And at least once, as an arms dealer.
In 1980, a wheeler-dealer from Saudi Arabia by the name of Adnan Khashoggi was by some accounts the world’s richest man.
Everyone who looks at that claim and says “Yeah, but no” is correct. It would certainly seem that - for instance - the Saudi royal family was actually richer than he was, even if their wealth was divided amongst many more people. But there’s a polite fiction where these sorts of lists discount the governments of the world’s countries and the heads of state and the royal families, since ostensibly the wealth belongs to the nations. Otherwise, Vladimir Putin is whispered to be the wealthiest man ever, due to shadow holdings of so much of Russia’s economy - officially, of course, he has relatively modest means - or if you prefer; in aggregate, the Saudi royal family has something like $1.3 trillion in net worth (which is, of course, significantly notional stock holdings representing petroleum wealth, combined with real estate holdings of much of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia - not something they’re really at liberty to sell in the open market - but does also include a fabulous amount of art, yachts, planes, amazing cars, and similar luxury assets.)
Khashoggi had achieved his wealth mostly by being the arms dealer to the Saudis and collecting fabulous commissions. He lived exceedingly large and seemingly believed his own hype - hubris is the downfall of many, but especially the billionaire class. Legendary rock group Queen once cut a track called Khashoggi’s Ship about the semi-mythical excesses that took place aboard his yacht; he in fact sold that tremendously impressive vessel and it was subsequently used as in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again as the supervillain’s Maximillian Largo’s yacht - it was subsequently repurchased by none other than Donald Trump and renamed Trump Princess. (The yacht was originally named Nabila, the name of Adnan’s daughter, who is the woman on the right in the picture above; his wife Lamia is the woman on the left.) Also, if you’re curious, Jamal Khashoggi - the Washington Post journalist famously killed and dismembered in the Saudi embassy back in 2018 - was his nephew (interestingly, also the cousin of Dodi Fayed, who was the lover of / killed with Princess Diana in the 1997 car crash, draw your own conspiracy theories - and don’t forget, Fayed and Khashoggi were both involved in the Iran-Contra scandal…)
Now there’s general agreement that J Paul Getty was the richest man in the world (with circa $6 billion) until his death in 1976; Khashoggi may have somewhat officially taken the lead in 1977 (with circa $4 billion to his name) and then been displaced in the early 1980s when the Japanese economy really took off and Yoshiaki Tsutsumi was certainly the wealthiest man in the world by the mid-80s (Forbes credits him with around $20 billion in 1987, he holds the title from 1984-1994, after a number of scandals and a 2005 arrest he was apparently no longer a billionaire as of circa 2007 or so). But for those who were around in the 1980s, you will recall that the United States panicked about the success of the Japanese economy - and after the Japanese economy crested and … well, more stagnated than crashed… Japan didn’t mint nearly as many billionaires as it did during the 1980s.
But briefly, since 1900, the wealthiest men in the world have been (and yes, they have universally all been men):
Andrew Carnegie, who predominantly made his money in steel (until he passed in 1919). Carnegie was born in into poverty 1835 in Scotland, immigrated to the U.S. and got his start as a telegraph operator and railroad worker before founding Carnegie Steel Company. This firm revolutionized steel production with efficient methods like the Bessemer process, fueling America’s industrial boom. By selling his company to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million (roughly $18 billion today), he became one of the richest men in history. Carnegie then dedicated his later years to philanthropy, giving away 90% of his fortune—about $350 million—funding libraries, education, and peace initiatives, including over 2,500 public libraries worldwide. His belief in the "Gospel of Wealth," urging the rich to use their fortunes for societal good, shaped modern philanthropy, though his labor practices, like the harsh response to the 1892 Homestead Strike, remain controversial to say the least.
John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune basically came from oil, was the worlds next top dog for wealthiest man (until he passed in 1937). Rockefeller was born in 1839 in New York, gained his wealth American through his dominance of the oil industry via Standard Oil, which he co-founded in 1870 and grew into a near-monopoly controlling 90% of U.S. oil refining by the 1880s. His business acumen, ruthless efficiency, and tactics like predatory pricing and railroad rebates crushed competitors, though they sparked “trust-busting” - what we’d now call anti-trust intervention, leading to Standard Oil’s 1911 breakup by the Supreme Court. Rockefeller’s wealth came primarily from his equity in Standard Oil and its successors (like Exxon and Chevron, but there were many of them), bolstered by shrewd investments in banking, real estate, and railroads. Later, he became a pioneering philanthropist, giving away over $530 million to causes like education, medicine, and science, founding the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was possibly the richest man on this list for a very long time - on an inflation-adjusted basis, circa roughly $400 billion, having basically monopolized the US energy market - though Elon passed him in 2024, which is pretty astounding in and of itself.
Henry Ford then took the lead, building a phenomenal fortune with automobiles and definitely in the lead until he passed away in 1947 - adjusted for inflation, he wouldn’t actually be surpassed until Jeff Bezos got there in there in 2020. Ford was born in 1863 in Michigan, and it’s no stretch to say he revolutionized manufacturing and became one of America’s most influential industrialist by founding Ford Motor Company in 1903 and introducing the Model T, an affordable car that democratized automobile ownership. His pioneering use of the assembly line slashed production costs, enabling mass production and boosting efficiency, which transformed industries worldwide; by 1920, Ford produced over half the cars in the U.S., with his wealth peaking at around $200 billion in today’s dollars, primarily from Ford Motor Company’s profits and his majority ownership. Ford’s $5-a-day wage for workers doubled industry standards, fostering a loyal workforce and creating a consumer base for his cars, though his authoritarian management and anti-union stance drew criticism. Still, he had no shortage of workers, and many of the innovations like the five-day-forty-hour-work week were primarily Ford without union pressure, a tactic he adopted (along with high pay) in order to get the best workers - it seems to have worked.
J.Paul Getty made his money in oil and was the wealthiest until he passed in 1976 (though he hadn’t caught up with Henry Ford). He was born in 1892 in Minnesota, amassed his a fortune as an oil tycoon - and interestingly, mostly this was outside the United States - becoming one of the world’s richest men with a net worth peaking at around $6 billion in today’s dollars, primarily through his leadership of Getty Oil Company. Starting in his father’s oil business, he aggressively expanded through shrewd acquisitions and exploration, particularly in the Middle East, securing massive oil reserves in Saudi Arabia by the 1940s, which fueled his wealth as global oil demand soared. Known for his frugality despite his riches—famously installing a payphone for guests at his mansion—Getty was a savvy negotiator who diversified into real estate and art, amassing a world-class collection now housed in the Getty Museum; it’s truly spectacular and you should see it if you can. His personal life, marked by five marriages and a controversial kidnapping of his grandson in 1973, drew public scrutiny, as did his reluctance to pay the ransom initially. The movie All The Money In The World dramatizes this - but not especially well.
Adnan Khashoggi, pictured above, made most of his money as arms dealer to the Saudis - he had a number of other business ventures, but most of them quickly went the wrong direction once Khashoggi fell out of favor politically. His involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal (again, as arms broker) did not help his reputation as he had hoped being willing to quietly help the Reagan administration might boost him back into the center of the action but instead it put him in a spotlight that everyone was eager to avoid.
Now, the somewhat unsuccessfully suppressed book By Hook Or By Crook (by Steven Martindale) - about Adnan Khashoggi and his role in the Iran-Contra affair, as well as about Mohamed Al-Fayed who owned Harrods at the time - and their efforts to broker a deal or otherwise extract a great deal of money from the Sultan of Brunei, who Martindale points to as the wealthiest man in the world at that point with circa $40 billion in assets as an absolute monarch - and apparently the only one willing to “open his books” to validate that number. But as estimates of that number are still in that same $40 billion ballpark, it’s rather startling to note how much the wealthier the world’s richest people have grown today, as compared to even the heads of countries. (I note above: Martindale’s book was “somewhat unsuccessfully suppressed” - no further print run was made outside the UK, many of the copies were bought back and destroyed/suppressed - though you can still find it on collectors sites, and that’s where I found a copy back when I was curious enough to go looking, and perhaps more notably author Steven Martindale died not long after its publication - though it appears he died of AIDS so that isn’t particularly likely to have been foul play.)
And, at the risk of diverging too far into this article just being Martindale’s perspective on wealthy men of the 1980s, he does have an interesting observation for us: for when he published By Hook or By Crook in 1987, he did actually count both royalty and business magnates. Martindale calls out the wealthiest people at the time as Yoshiaki Tsutsumi with around $20 billion and some of his other Japanese peers at values approaching that, Sam Walton at $8.7 billion, Canadian newspaper tycoon Roy Thompson at $5.5 billion - but also King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at approximately $20 billion, Sheik Jabar el Sabbah of Kuwait at circa $5 billion, and not to be overlooked, Queen Elizabeth II at roughly $8.7 billion - the only woman on the list. But Martindale insists that, as of his writing, the man at the very top of the chart was the Sultan of Brunei - not surprisingly, the target of most of the intrigue and machinations in the story he tells, as everyone is eager to exploit the rather fantastic slightly-over-forty-billion-dollar fortune that is his nation’s treasury and under his absolute control, and thus, de facto, his. It’s an interesting story; it unsurprisingly doesn’t go entirely well, but I can tell it another time if there’s interest - for the moment, let’s steer back to talking about the parade of wealth contenders.
Depending on when you measure Adnan Khashoggi’s economic fall from leadership - it’s a little difficult to say, the man was a profligate spender and prone to overextending himself, so when things turned against him they quickly went very wrong - it’s possible that 1982 briefly crowned shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig; he was relatively reclusive and far less ostentatious about his wealth (and probably was at the time worth circa $2-3 billion). But the boom in the Japanese economy soon would eclipse… everyone.
Yoshiaki Tsutsumi and a small handful of Japanese oligarchs atop their various zaibatsus rose to power very quickly in the 1980s, but that was basically propelled by hyperleveraged inflation in the Japanese real estate market. In 1987, the top ten list of wealthiest people in the world (again, discounting heads of state) was mostly Japanese real estate investors: Taikichiro Mori, Shigeru Kobayashi, Haruhiko Yoshimoto, Yohachiro Iwasaki, and Keizo Saji (technically, Saji owned Suntory - brewer and distillery - more than “just” real estate) - but notably, the ten richest people in the world were six Japanese men, two Canadians, one Swede, and a Saudi Arabian banker - not Khashoggi, who had already fallen off the billionaire list by that point.
Then Sam Walton took the title in 1990, with the ever-increasing success of Walmart. He was the king for a few years - but then he passed away, and his heirs were all individually very wealthy but not at the top of the chart. Yoshiaki Tsutsumi (and - not to put too fine a point on it - the Japanese real estate bubble) briefly had the title back - though arguably it might have been Li Ka-Shing out of Hong Kong, depending on how the exchange rate went.
It went for a bit to Gad Rausing (CEO of Tetra Pak in Sweden) in 1993 or 1994, and then rather famously Microsoft stock steamrolled the scene and Bill Gates became the world’s richest man for quite a while.
He was the first one of these gents I actually met. But I’ll come back to that, let me run through the timeline.
Legendary investor and “the Oracle of Omaha” Warren Buffett edged ahead in 2007 as Berkshire-Hathaway outperformed the market; Gates came back in 2009 and then Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim took the lead in 2010 and held it for a few years; Gates reclaimed the lead in 2013. Gates and Buffett became fast friends during this time and have maintained a friendship and respect for one another, despite having fundamentally relatively different views on many things, and have been famously aligned on charitable goals through the Gates Foundation for many years.
To the surprise of many, Amancio Ortega pulled ahead at the end of 2015 with Zara and the associated fashion business; Gates came back again in 2017 but then was dethroned by Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s rising stock soon left all competitors in the dust. Tesla stock rocketed up in 2021 and put Elon Musk on top of the stack; when it pulled back Bernard Arnault (Louis Vuitton / LVMH) was the world’s richest man - again putting the fashion business on top.
Thanks to meme-stock power, Tesla came back in 2023 putting Elon back on top, and Bezos and Elon traded positions in 2024 and then back again - so as I write this, currently Elon Musk is at the top of the wealth stack (followed by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg). Quick edit: a sudden surge in Oracle has brought Larry Ellison to the second-wealthiest man at the moment.
So of the lot of these guys, the one I know best is Jeff Bezos. I used to work for Jeff - I sold my first company to him and spent a few years there afterwards; my office was just a few doors down from Jeff at Amazon and I’ve got a number of interesting stories that I’ll have to relate at some point. He had a very distinctive laugh, which you could famously hear half a floor away; of the lot of these guys, he’s the one I have the most experience with - but I will caveat that: though at the time, Amazon was a powerful company and Jeff was clearly wealthy, he was by no means the world’s wealthiest man, nor had he adopted certain of the mannerisms (nor the additional physique) that he sports today.
I also met several runners-up - Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer were both in the Microsoft circle as well; I met Ballmer extremely in passing and Allen rather more closely and I’ll relate that story some other time. I’ve mentioned Mark Zuckerberg above but I’ve not actually encountered him in person, I’ve met Larry Ellison in passing though it’s been decades at this point. I’ve met any number of venture capitalists and investor types; Marc Andreessen was actually making things happen at Netscape when I met him but everyone knows him as a VC these days. The story of how I know Travis Kalanick of Uber fame is worth of its own post - we’ll put him on the list for the moment and perhaps I’ll tell it another day, it’s not entirely brief. I met Steve Jobs - actually quite a while back, while he was at NeXT - but I spent a enjoyable evening a couple years later talking with Apple's cofounder Steve Wozniak; didn’t turn out nearly as famous but remarkably interesting fellow. Mackenzie Scott (nee Bezos) qualifies, though she is doing her best to give it away. John Overdeck is one of the smartest investors you will ever meet and Two Sigma has been fantastically successful.
For what it’s worth, the ones pictured in this article are are the ones I’ve actually met. No, I probably can’t introduce you, and of course, a couple of them have passed away. But you may get some more stories about some of them.
Now you will note some similarities about almost all these people.
Almost universally this wealth came from business - and generally from entrepreneurship: founding, scaling, or (sometimes) investing in companies but if so it was rarely passively. Holding significant equity in successful companies is key. A few, like Francoise Meyers, inherited wealth (L’Oreal), but even they generally grow it through business decisions. Real estate, commodities, or finance also play roles for some, but business ownership or creation is the core driver for most, as seen in Forbes and Bloomberg billionaire rankings.
Many of these fortunes are created by disrupting a previous industry - eg Ford, or Microsoft, or Carlos Slim’s bet on Latin American cellular with Telemex - though arguably it can be said that these fortunes are even more correctly attributable to monopoly or regulatory capture positions, such as with Standard Oil, US Steel, Tetra Pak, all the Japanese zaibatsus during the 1980s, Microsoft, Carlos Slim’s huge conglomerate play in Mexico, and probably the rise of Apple and Google to their respective heights in the smartphone and search eras (but for whatever reason, that has gone largely unchallenged, or in the case of smartphones, accepted as an Apple-Alphabet duopoly). Others, by successfully building in one industry and expanding at the right time - Amazon and Oracle both successfully stepped into cloud services in a big way and by different paths; whereas Microsoft, IBM, and even Google have been less dramatically successful in that space.
But all of them share a high tolerance for (calculated) risk and are adaptable as situations evolve; they have a long term vision and are persistent in seeing it through where they see big opportunities - although they may end up taking a different path to get there than initially envisioned, because as a rule most of these people are pretty innovative and good at problem-solving (and when they aren’t themselves, they tend to hire people who are, which is roughly the same thing as long as you listen to the people you hire!) And as much as the sour-grapes types like to complain about short-sighted rich guys, a thirst for knowledge is a pretty unifying factor here - there’s a lot of effort invested in understanding what’s going on, how to stay ahead, and how to make an impact in the world.
And - having now met more than a couple of these folks, I will say - nearly all of them have a certain theatrical manner that they put on for dealing with people. They’ve generally got a few rehearsed stories they like to tell - parables or soundbites, neatly honed and practiced; they come across smoothly and they sound sagacious to the listener. It’s only when you’re in proximity long enough that it’s evident “oh, I’ve heard this story before” and that you’re not so much having a conversation as listening to the visionary tell the parable to the disciples. It is a good leadership skill - you should learn it if you are to lead people, and aligning everyone to the same general vision is ideal - but do also be prepared to follow up (or delegate) when someone wants to dive deeper because very few people will dare raise a hand and ask a question of such a prestigious individual.
Great stuff! Ill listen out for the well worn stories... and also hone mine on my way to super wealth :)