Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Cairo was one of the biggest cities in the world at that time, with a population of several hundred thousand.
The accounts of the wealth taken on the trip were staggering.
Assuming each carried 175 pounds of gold, that would total 14,000 pounds or about 6,350 kilograms.
And if the gold price today is $42,000 per kilo, that would equal around $266 million.
If your spending money for a trip is a quarter of a billion dollars, then it's probably fair to suggest you're a billionaire many times over.
So Musa was incredibly rich.
But was he the richest man of all time, worth 400 billion US dollars?
Where does this figure and this title originate?
If you search Google using the terms Mansa Musa and richest, before 2012 you find a few references to him being the richest of the Muslim kings or Mali being the richest realm in Africa.
But in 2012, Mansa Musa all of a sudden became big news, not because of historical research, but because of an article on the US website CelebrityNetWorth.com.
This is a website that publishes lists like the 50 richest skateboarders, and their current front page features this shocking headline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Celebrity Net Worth don't give any details about how they calculate any of the figures on their website, never mind their research into a 14th century African ruler.
They wouldn't talk to us and we're not the first ones to have this problem.
There are people whose whole lives are spent calculating the wealth of the super-rich, such as Kerry Dolan, an assistant managing editor at Forbes.
Kerry edits the list that ranks the world's billionaires.
She wouldn't rely on celebrity net worth.
So there's no real reason to trust the 400 billion US dollar figure.
But even if we could come up with a better figure, there would still be a problem with comparing it with the wealth of the people at the top of Kerry's list.
Rich lists, such as the one at Forbes, use known figures and shares to estimate the wealth of an individual, but they exclude monarchs and rulers.
If you look at the equivalents of Mansa Musa today, like the King of Saudi, they don't appear in any rich list because it's difficult to say where the wealth of the Saudi royal family ends and the Saudi state begins.
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