The Richest Person In Every Century

Who was the richest person alive in every century from 1100 to 1900? This video counts down the single wealthiest human being in history each hundred years, from Suryavarman II and Kublai Khan to Mansa Musa, Jakob Fugger, Aurangzeb, Heshen, Nathan Rothschild, and John D. Rockefeller, and how each one made a fortune and then lost it. We start in ancient Rome with Augustus, an emperor so rich that a human life and a wine cup cost him about the same. Then we line up the single richest person alive every hundred years from the 1100s to the 1900s. A Khmer god-king who turned water into rice and rice into gold. Genghis Khan's grandson, who conquered China and paid for it with paper money. A Mali king whose pilgrimage handed out so much gold it wrecked Egypt's economy for a decade. A Florentine banker who bought a whole city without ever wearing a crown. A German who bought an emperor his throne and then sent him the bill. A Mughal ruler who owned a quarter of the world and refused to spend a coin of it on himself. A palace guard who skimmed an entire empire. A banker blamed for a Waterloo stock trick he never pulled. And the oil man whose government breakup accidentally turned him into the first billionaire. Nine fortunes, and how most of them slipped away. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱ CHAPTERS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0:00 Augustus and the Price of a Life 1:00 The God-King Who Built His Own Tomb 2:07 The Khan Who Printed Money 3:12 The Pilgrim Who Crashed the Price of Gold 4:30 The Banker Who Bought Florence 5:36 The Man Who Bought an Emperor 6:48 The Richest Man Who Wouldn't Spend 8:03 The Guard Who Robbed an Empire 10:58 The Banker and the Waterloo Myth ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Wikipedia, Vedius Pollio The lamprey pool, the broken crystal cup, and Augustus smashing the rest and sparing the slave, drawn from Seneca, Dio, and Pliny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedius_Pollio Wikipedia, Suryavarman II The usurper w