The World's Richest Person Every Year, Rockefeller to Musk (1900–2026)

Data sources

Forbes, The World's Billionaires (1988–2026); Forbes' first international list (1987 — published as bands such as "over $5 billion", used here as lower bounds, plus the two figures Forbes gave in prose); the Forbes 400 (1982–1989 — the 1985, 1986 and 1987 tables as the Los Angeles Times reprinted them in full, the earlier years from UPI and New York Times reports); Forbes' first rich list (30 Americans, 1918); Fortune's surveys (69 Americans in 1957 and 66 in 1968); Fortune's world billionaires lists (1987–1993); Forbes' rankings of royals and rulers (1999 and 2002–2011); appraised valuations wherever one survives (probate and estate-tax records in England and several US states; a French inventaire après décès; Japan's 1946 capital-levy assessment of personal net worth) and documented estimates where none does (TIME, the Guinness Book of Records' "richest men" entries, a 1961 US State Department memorandum, Rudolf Martin's yearbooks of German millionaires (1911–1914), and period accounts) — the years before 1982 are interpolated between those. Forbes excluded royals and heads of state from its billionaires ranking "because their wealth derives more from political heritage than from economic effort"; Fortune included them. Sovereign fortunes are included here throughout, taken from whichever of the two published a figure. Where a published list exists for a year, no reconstructed value is allowed to exceed it. Some fortunes are counted as families, the way the sources count them; family fortunes that no source ever stated for one person (the Rothschilds, the Guggenheims) are not drawn as a single bar. Portraits: Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Forbes profiles, TIME covers, newspaper archives, and the subjects' own foundations and institutions.