John D. Rockefeller. It happened on Sept. 29, 1916, and newspapers made it a big deal, just as modern media have done with Musk.
The first millionaire and multi-millionaire was John Jacob Astor.
Here is a question where I was too lazy to do all the research and math, so I asked ChatGPT.
In the history of America since the country was founded, who has been the richest American … as a percentage of the country’s economy? (I think Anderson Cooper’s book suggested it was John Jacob Astor, but I have not verified that in any way.)
Here is the answer it gave:
By pure CPI calculation, Rockefeller’s fortune only amounts to $30 billion, but that is deceptive. CPI inflation does not grow nearly as fast as the overall economy, stock market, population, or national wealth. It’s pretty obvious that Rockefeller, with wealth at 1.5% of GDP, was far wealthier than a man with $30 billion today. To illustrate the point, consider the logical extension ad absurdum. Clearly a man with $30 billion when everyone else has nothing is richer than a man with $30 billion when everyone else has $29 billion. Rockefeller is closer to the former, but was still not as rich as Musk. No matter how you do the calculation, Musk comes out on top.
Here are some variations:
(1) Business Insider calculated, “What would a fortune of the same relative economic weight be today?” by using a variety of factors. They calculated that the weight of Rockefeller’s wealth would be equivalent to $499 billion today, still leaving Musk twice as rich.
(2) If you use the gold standard, Rockefeller had enough wealth to buy 43.5 million ounces of gold. That would be worth some $180 billion today. So he was still nowhere near Musk’s league. Musk would be about six times as rich as Rockefeller by that measurement.
(3) Another interesting measurement is the ratio of the wealthiest man to the nearest contender, Musk is now 3.6 times as wealthy as Larry Page, who is in second place. As far as I can tell, none of the historical tycoons ever reached that ratio between them and their nearest rival. Astor made it to 3x. Bill Gates made it to 2.5x at one point. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt were approximately 2x.
No matter how you shake it out, Elon is now the top dog. Elon is not just rich because of inflated dollars. He is the richest American in history. He is at least twice as rich as John D. Rockefeller or JJ Astor ever were. To use an old-fashioned term, he is the ultimate tycoon.
Semi-related:
I was curious about where such a strange word came from.
Also from AI:
The word tycoon comes from the Japanese word taikun (大君), which literally translates to “great lord” or “supreme commander.” Its journey into the English language is a fascinating historical shift:
The Japanese Origin: During the Edo period, Japanese officials used taikun as a diplomatic title for the shōgun (the supreme military dictator) in communications with foreigners. They wanted to convey that the shōgun held the ultimate power in Japan, independent of the emperor.
American Adoption (1850s–1860s): Following trade negotiations in the 1850s, the term made its way back to the United States. During the Civil War, aides to President Abraham Lincoln adopted it as an affectionate nickname to highlight his supreme leadership authority.
Modern Meaning: By the 1920s, the term evolved to describe exceptionally wealthy, powerful, and influential leaders in business and industry
$1 billion in 1916 is worth roughly $30.5 billion in 2026. Depending on which inflation calculator is used.
CPI inflation does not grow nearly as fast as the overall economy, stock market, population, or national wealth. It’s pretty obvious that Rockefeller, with wealth at 1.5% of GDP, was far wealthier than a man with $30 billion today.
But still not as rich as Musk. No matter how you do the calculation, Musk comes out on top.
If you use his % of the nation’s economy, Musk as about 2-3 times as rich as Rockefeller and Astor.
In yet another calculation, Business Insider calculated, “What would a fortune of the same relative economic weight be today?” by using a variety of factors. They calculated that the weight of Rockefeller’s wealth would be equivalent to $499 billion today, still leaving Musk twice as rich.
If you use the gold standard, Rockefeller had enough wealth to buy 43.5 million ounces of gold. That would be worth some $180 billion today. So he was still nowhere near Musk’s league. Musk would be about six times as rich as Rockefeller by that measurement.
No matter how you shake it out, Elon is now the top dog.
To be fair, how much of Elon’s wealth is actually fungible vs Rockefeller would be a more interesting question. Elon can’t really access much of that SpaceX money at the moment, whereas I picture Rockefeller swimming around in a vault full of cash like Scrooge McDuck.
If Elon even tried to sell a substantial share of his positions, the stocks would drop like rocks and so would his net worth. Cash is king (and cash equivalents). The rest is marketing.
On the Japan front, taiko was also a convenient title for someone like the unifier of Japan, Hideyoshi, who could not be a shogun because he wasn’t of noble birth, unlike the other two great figures of 1500s Japan, Oda (one of the badassest rulers ever, but didn’t live long enough to make Shogun) and Tokugawa, who founded the last Shogunate. Hideyoshi, who later in his life went crackers and thought he could conquer China, is often described as looking like a monkey. Japanese history of that period is fucking amazing.
A fellow named George Hudson would probably have been “the richest man in Britain” if Forbes had been around in the 1840s.
I suspect Musk is going to end up like him.
I hope not. If Elon goes bankrupt, so follows all of our retirement accounts. We’re kind of entwined with his businesses whether you like it or not.
True. When a man is worth more than 3 percent of GNP, the nation kinda needs him to succeed.
In addition, the things he’s working on are important. He allows us to finance space exploration without opening our own wallets. He works on AI and he looks beyond fossil fuels. Like him or not, he’s marching us into the future.
On the other hand, I would like to forget his sloppy work in DOGE and his destruction of Twitter.
You say the word “he” as if he’s the engineer actually creating rocket propulsion. His company and the engineers and scientists inside it are doing it. Not him. When he took over Twitter, he took a pickup truck and ripped servers out of a loaned datacenter on a random likely drug induced manic – which would get anyone fired and prosecuted.
Musk and his wealth could disappear tomorrow like DB Cooper and the company itself would run absolutely fine. He’s an opportunist, and that’s about it. Given the funding there are multiple thousands of people who could do what he’s done, and probably better.
Apple is doing fine without the “genius” of Steve Jobs, Microsoft persists without Bill Gates and Paul Allen, etc, etc. An idea eventually coalesces regardless of the person in charge, so the whole ‘great man theory’ of reality really needs to be put to bed permanently.
The question is not whether his work could continue without him, but whether it would have even existed without him.
The engineers are fungible, but the driving force behind them is not. Greatness is about vision, not execution. Apple, for example, has not had a world-changing idea since Jobs left. It is still running on the fumes of the innovations from his time. Tim Cook has been good at making money, but Jobs was good at changing the world. We’ve probably seen the last history-making new Apple product unless another visionary comes along.
Also, your point is directly contradicted by the facts. When Steve Jobs left Apple the first time, it went straight into the crapper and was on the verge of bankruptcy.. Things were so bad that Wired was compiling a list of “101 Ways to Save Apple” without one of them involving Jobs coming back as CEO! Then he did come back, and saved the day.
Wasn’t Apple being in the crapper in the first place the reason Steve Jobs was fired? I forget the details, but I think it was generally assumed that his greed and meglomania/Messianic complex had gotten the better of him.
There are some arguments, though debated, that Apple helped innovate surveillance pricing. That’s not a consumer product innovation, but businesses have benefited enormously at the expense of the consumer.
It’s also the case that many of the best innovaters are government researchers who remain largely unknown. I suspect that without these people Elon Musk could not have done what he did. Success always involves a great deal of luck of timing and other people having paved the way.
Finally, if Elon Musk fails because ultimately he was outcompeted/out innovated that would not lead to anybody’s downfall but his own. I think that would be hard for anybody to achieve against Space X/Star Link, but although Americans don’t really know about it, Chinese owned EV makers have done that to Tesla in the rest of the world.
Jobs wasn’t fired. He lost a power struggle with the Pepsi guy, and quit rather than continue in the sorta honorary position they gave him. The Pepsi guy had no ideas to speak of. He was a classic maintenance manager, which is fine in the soft drink business, which is not innovation-driven, but is the kiss of death in tech, which is almost totally innovation-driven. That guy was the CEO at Apple for ten years, of which about eight years were after Jobs left.
I think the Pepsi guy is still alive, and still has no ideas. I kinda-sorta knew him just before he left Pepsi, but soft drinks were never one of my categories when I was a product manager at 7-Eleven, so my contact was impersonal.
Yes, but the reason for this battle in the first place was because Jobs was driving Apple into the ground. His greed was driving Apple into the ground, making Apple proprietary so that other companies couldn’t work with it (unlike IBM) and charging exorbitant prices for Apple products.
His meglomania/Messianic complex was also widely reported at this time.
It’s not a Messianic “complex” when you really are the Messiah. Jobs was right. The Pepsi guy letter admitted he had fucked up by ousting Jobs, but it was too late. The reason Apple failed is that they failed to maintain the premium brand identity that Jobs had established. At first, they tried to compete with higher-priced computers. That failed, as people switched to cheaper products. As soon as they became price marketers, like Pepsi competing with Coke, their margins went all to hell, and their strategy of donating free Mac computers to every school just didn’t pay off. When those kids graduated, they bought Windows computers. With margins fucked on computers and no innovation, their sun slowly sank into the sea.
Apple had done very well in the years before they were Pepsified. Profits were soaring year after year:
Net profit in millions:
1976 .4
1977 .8
1979 5
1980 12
1981 31
1982 65
1983 76
—————–
Then Pepsi Dude took over and the company stagnated
1984 64
1985 65
There were some good years, but in 1993, the year the board nuked Pepsi, profits were tumbling fast
1992 510
1993 87 (!!!!)
Things got even worse before they hired Jobs back
1996 -816
1997 -1,056
The wolves were circling the campfire.
Jobs first year back was 1998
1998 309
1999 601
2000 786
the iPhone was introduced in 2006, and the company went nuts
2006 1,989
2007 3,495
2008 4,834
2009 8,235
2010 14,013
2011 25,922
2012 41,733
Jobs died at the end of 2011, and the company again stagnated
2013 37,037
2014 39,510
profit vacillated around the 40s and 50s through 2020
It wasn’t until 2021 that the company’s profits really started growing again, through pent-up post-COVID demand, and high demand for the 5G products, iPhones 12 and 13.
Jobs may have been an asshole, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that he really was the Messiah.
Indy, one of your comments really annoys me. It’s DAN COOPER, not D.B Cooper.
I agree more or less with the second part. We see this with many inventions that there’s usually a race to be the first (airplanes being one of the best examples with the Wright Brothers competing with the U.S government among others. Calculus was discovered by both Newton and Leibniz independently around the same time….
I don’t know if this was true with Space X, but certainly Musk worked closely with the Obama Administration that was trying to get the government out of many space inventions and exploration.
In my field of economics, Tim Harford in England published The Undercover Economist at around the same time Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner published Freakonomics, both 21 years ago now. I presume the reason for this was that the economists who are obsessed with calculus (the ‘quants’) were taking over the discispline and those who were primarily concerned with economics concepts were fighting back. (The quants unfortunately ultimately won.)
While it may be the case that Harford’s book was more likely to get published due to the success of Freakonomics, Harford had been writing conceptually on economics for a number of years at the Financial Times as The Undercover Economist. Harford’s book is the first mention I’m aware of of what is now known as Surveillance Pricing. His advice at the time was to not do any of the Facebook games and puzzles.
Jobs had a mixed track record in terms of innovation and it’s well known that he got most of the ideas for the Apple computers from Xerox. In terms of the ‘great man’ theory, there were apparently many people who worked for Xerox who (later) said they appreciated the possibilities of these innovations even as the Xerox executives didn’t.
In terms of Apple and product innovation, this is an ongoing issue that isn’t just at Apple and there are many possible reasons for it, it’s the subject of much debate in economics.
Of course, this is an issue only when it comes to consumer product innovation, business to business product innovation seems to be increasing not decreasing, and Apple apparently is one of the leading innovators in cloud computing and other things (like Surveillance Pricing.) Generative A.I is almost certainly best seen as a business to business innovation (however real it is) though there are the consumer components.
A couple of the more popular explanations are:
1.Consumer product innovation has increased in cost significantly as the complexity has increased (there really are no more products developed in somebody’s garage anymore.) As disciplines have become more specialized, the costs of engineers/scientists communicating with each has increased significantly. I gather one of the purposes of generative A.I is to try to lower these costs through some kind of instantaneous translation.
Given this increase in costs, most businesses don’t think it’s worth it. Consumers famously don’t really know what they want, even when it’s something that they say they want. Businesses (ang governments) on the other hand, often ask for specific products to be developed. So, even if the costs for business to business product innovation has also increased significantly, there is a much greater chance the invention will pay off.
If I were to to put out a new product, I’d look at one of the books written on ‘inventions that were ahead of their time.’ If the cost of production has declined (as opposed to the cost of innovation) it may be worth investing in.
2.Big companies are no longer interested in consumer innovated because they make more profit from their already existing products due to copyright and patent protections. Not that this is new, but the real inventive ideas for big corporations is in gaming the system. Prior to the Iran War anyway, a liter of printer ink was the most expensive liquid in the world, costing more than a liter of gasoline. This is entirely due to the way that the tech companies have gamed their copyrights and patents to propertize printers so that they own them even when a consumer buys one.
This theory concludes that there are actually quite a lot of new consumer products, including maybe those invented in garages, but that they’re all bought out by the big companies to prevent competition.
A couple smaller points on this
1.Arguably the Apple MacIntosh was meant primarlly as a business to business computer unlike IBM computer, although it could be used at home but by professionals. It was meant for use in graphics like design, advertising architecture and engineering
2.According to one of the ‘inventions that were ahead of their time’ websites, the Commodore Amiga was light years ahead of Apple computers at that time (mid 1980s) but obviously marketing is a big part of business and not just the product itself.
Give me a break. “Its about vision”, you know when Woz engineered the Apple II that Jobs had nothing to do with. Or he stole from Xerox PARC the mouse paradigm.
Bell Labs, Stanford Research, DARPA and other scientific and engineering think tanks of mostly non-household brilliant engineers built the underlying crux of our technological scaffolding we all live by today.
The reason why we have a secure connection to communicate on right now and your site is up is because of public key infrastructure and mathematicians like Ron Rivest creating asymmetric algorithms. Sure it doesn’t come with all the glory of such vision as putting a smaller case i in front of a device and copying what someone else did in a sexier marketing package, but if it wasn’t Jobs – someone else would have did it.
Point being, take the percentage of GDP of technical positions that guys like Musk or Jobs made out of any given industry, and the world as we know it would stop. Musk or Jobs disappear, the world goes on, because the system self selects for someone else to take over the figurehead position and the scientists and engineers keep moving on.
I know you would like it to be about engineers, but it just isn’t. It’s about the guy who hires them and tells them what to work on. And it’s about somebody with the ability to recognize that the world wants a phone, music and video player, camera, and touch-screen computer on one device. And it’s about somebody who can convince the bankers to trust his vision. Without all of those things, the iPhone doesn’t happen. When it does happen, it changes the world’s behavior about as much as anything ever has, including TV, the internet, and even electricity. While not a direct engineer, Jobs authorized the funding and acquisitions required to build the device. He empowered Apple’s software and hardware teams to innovate, and equally important, pushing them to deliver a consumer-friendly experience. He convinced the bankers to trust him, to hold off on debt servicing for a failing company, and even to give him more money.
Sure, we need geniuses who can make those dreams come true, but we first need the dreamer.
As much as I hate cell phones, and rarely use them myself, I can’t deny that they have altered human behavior. Unfortunately, it’s not always in positive ways. I own one, like everyone else, but what do I need it for? I use it to see how my sites look on a cell phone, and I could do that with a sim on my computer. Once in a while I get a phone call or text, which is no different from having a land line and an answering machine. I sometimes watch a YouTube video when I’m waiting for a doctor or a mechanic or something, but if the phone weren’t there, I could read a magazine like in the old days. So, basically the only value of it to me is that many web 2FA sites require it to log in. I need that but if the phone did not exist, they would do that another way.
But the lack of value to me is unimportant. The fact of the matter is that almost everyone is on their cell phones half of the time.
Why the hell people stand in line for every new iPhone release when they already own the previous one, which is 99.99% identical, is utterly baffling to me. But the reality is that they do. It’s marketing genius. The only business skill better than actual innovation is the ability to convince people that you’re innovating. (I used to say you can only milk that so far, but Apple seems to be proving me wrong.)
And without Jobs, as I illustrated with the profit numbers, Apple or a company like Apple may have existed in the first place, in some form or another, but it certainly would not exist today. Apple would have been belly up somewhere around 1998. Even its engineering was terrible. Quick time player and .mov crashed as often as they worked. If you lost a couple of bytes in download, the entire video would crash because they never built in adequate error-correction routines. If you tried to play Quick Time for Windows, the entire computer could crash. I finally ended up throwing all my Macs in the trash with my fax machines, and deleting all .mov files from my windows computers and my Unix servers. That company was on life support in every way until Jobs returned.
This is the dumbest, most clueless, most insulting argument in the history of this site.“You didn’t build that?” Ridiculous. There would be no Apple without Jobs. There would be no SpaceX or Tesla without Musk. Not at that scale or with that cultural force.You have absolutely no understanding of what goes into creating, building, leading, financing, risking, recruiting, inspiring, and dragging a transformational company into existence.Engineers matter. So do scientists, mathematicians, mechanics, designers, and the coffee guy. That doesn’t mean the founder and leader is fungible. If you had Elon’s money and Elon’s opportunity, you wouldn’t even think to start one of his companies. If you did think of it, you wouldn’t get it off the ground. If by some miracle you got it off the ground, you’d be out of business in a year. It certainly looks easy from the couch. I’ll give you that.
The real value added by CEOs and options compensated managers is pretty grossly exaggerated. (Present company excepted.)
And Elon’s accomplishments, such that they are, are pretty spotty.
His MO at this point is to make an outrageous promise he can’t possibly keep, fail to deliver, rinse and repeat.
AI is pretty much a Ponzi scheme at this point and Elon is late to the party. The added value from LLMs is also pretty marginal and that bubble’s ripe to burst. He’s driven Twitter into the ground.
He’s destroyed demand for Teslas and the Chinese make better electric cars anyway. His self-driving car AI doesn’t work.
The landing rocket boosters are pretty impressive (not his baby), but Starship is a white elephant that’s simply never going to work. Orbital data centers are nonsense, the Moon and Mars are a fantasy. The rocker equation is not mocked.
His robots are obviously being remote controlled.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are LOSING billions of dollars a year.
The whole house of cards is propped up by idiot retail investors bidding up the stock prices like Bitcoin, and it’ll have the same staying power.
The other thing about Elon Musk, aside from his now obvious racism whether he’s a Nazi or not, is his bizarre views, apparently held by a lot of the ‘tech bros’ on immortality and the need for humanity to spread out to the entire universe. This is all over the prospectus on the IPO.
This isn’t just some run of the mill libertarian or racist authoritarian libertarian (freedom for me but not for thee) this is a genuine ‘out there’ visionary with virtually unlimited funds to pursue his aims.
RE: “It’s not about engineers its abut the ‘great man’ with the ‘vision'”
You know, these geniuses enough to have ‘vision’ to put things into a shinier box or have access to nearly infinite capital to manipulate the system. You know, the dead guy who was smart enough to try a juice diet to combat pancreatic cancer that killed him instead of going to chemotherapy, and the current one addicted to ketamine while others work around him. Great men indeed.
Meanwhile this country is getting our ass kicked by China in EVs when not one person could name the Tesla equivalent in China. Throw in the fact the greatest single threat to WW3 is TSMC’s engineering feats with semiconductors in Taiwan and we absolutely 100% CANNOT lose our access to their engineering and manufacturing capabilities if China takes it over.
Yet somehow every politician threatens that China is passing us by, with a social structure completely set up the opposite of the ridiculous idea that someone sitting in conference calls at the top of a hierarchy is the real driver behind things. And we’re damn near willing to go to nuclear war for access to TSMC semiconductors no one else can engineer and create at that scale.
All while you’re communicate these ideas via TCP/IP protocols developed by DARPA via the taxpayer, over an internet structure fleshed out by Universities, through the HTTP protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee, and a vast majority of countless infrastructure and software libraries created by tens of thousands of open source contributors.
Pretty ironic, eh? May want to take those Ayn Rand glasses off and check into some history of how we got to where we are today, and why we have the ability to do what we do – all in organizations that absolutely did NOT have a billionaire sitting at the top of it to feed their ‘vision’. Much less ones thinking they’re smart enough to cure themselves of cancer or being an absentee father to 14 kids while addicted to ketamine.
Dude that’s unfair.
You forgot to mention the botched penis implant or how he used IVF to only get sons (and failed!).
Or how his drive for immense wealth was to further his belief in Apartheid.
As I said, without Steve Jobs, Apple is bankrupt before 2000.
And not only that, without Jobs even their engineering was poor because management allowed them to release products that were not customer friendly.
Sure, Jobs was a weird guy, and Elon is a complete douche – and yet they made miracles happen.
Your anger is pointed at the wrong people. It’s not the builders. It’s the bankers, the VCs, private equity, hedge funds, investment bankers. Don’t blame the people who see the future and drag us there kicking and screaming. Blame the greedy parasites who have created a vast system designed to extract all value from the builders, the workers, and the masses. They manipulate markets, create a crumb factory with the IPOs, which literally only exist for the finance people to exit at your expense. Idiots like sanders and warren want to take Elons money instead of fixing the system around him of bankers, lawyers, and bureaucrats who make fortunes off of musk and call it “collaboration”. The politicians won’t touch those scum because they are also called “donors”. I live this every day. Big business and big government are in cahoots.
Your mistake is assuming that Elmo isn’t one of those parasites. He’s not a visionary. He’s just another asshole with money buying up existing companies.
Your problem is you don’t understand the idea of convergent evolution. Electric car tech and reusable spacecraft started long before Elmo. Same goes for cellphone technology and Jobs. They both got lucky and had a moment a few years before anyone else. That’s it.
PS Warren and Sanders do go after the parasites. Or would but the GOP block them tooth and nail. The donor class prefers the GOP for a reason.
The irony of this statement shows all the problems with this system that people have been pointing out for decades. Tying retirement accounts and passive index funds so the peasants get coins out of the couch cushions from the richest hoarders in society is one of the absolutely dumbest laws put into place in history. There’s no human imperative that ownership has to be defined in this way – its all made up. I’m guessing the taxpayer won’t be getting any share of this company like a venture capitalist would, despite much of the funding coming from exactly that.
Gee, its almost as if its been orchestrated by billionaires to give them as much as possible. By the way, you have a choice NOT to do this, and I don’t do it on principal. I take less via T-Bills, maybe that means less new metal and plastic toys but who gives a shit? People don’t have to perpetually maximize return.
Hope Musk falls on his ass and his stock tanks.
Who’s we? All my 401k went into the most conservative money market fund available a month ago specifically to avoid this bullshit and the catastrophe from Hormuz the market is still Wile Coyoteing above.
My 22nd great-grandfather, John of Gaunt, was said to be the richest man in the 14th century, with vast estates in nearly every county of England.
That’s an impressive heritage. I’m sure you must know that he’s one of the most important figures in European history, not because of his wealth, but because of his DNA. He was the father of Henry IV, and therefore the progenitor of the Lancaster line; great-great-grandfather of Henry VII, and therefore also progenitor of the Tudor line; great-grandfather of the famous Spanish Queen Isabella (and her daughter, who became Henry VIII’s first wife, meaning that John was an ancestor of both the bride and groom in Henry VIII’s first wedding).
Genealogists estimate that the number of John’s descendants may be greater than the entire population of the U.K. You have between fifty and a hundred million cousins that can claim a branch of that family tree. He had 14 children by four different women, and 8 of them (from three of the four women) survived to adulthood and multiplied.
Interesting. Are you descended from Blanche, Constance or Katherine?
—-
All of this is very familiar to me, not because I’m a history buff, but because I once played your multi-grandfather in a local production of Ricky Two, as we called it. In addition to appearing in every nook and cranny of English (and Spanish) monarchy, his character delivers the famous Shakespearian “scepter’d isle” monologue on his deathbed.
The IPO that made Musk an paper “trillionaire” is widely recognized as absolute bullshit that is somehow being foisted on NASDAQ and being incorporated into uncounted index funds. When it inevitably fails to meet its ridiculously unattainable targets and the bubble ultimately bursts, who will be left holding the bag? I suspect it will not be this idiotic South African.
Given that Elon is a total douche, his failure would be proper schadenfreude for most of us.
We bought a Tesla in 2020 and it was a very good vehicle for us. But we became so frustrated with Musk’s malevolence that we ditched it last October and bought an EV from another company. The guy has some talents, but that does not make him a wise or good human being.