A look at the richest men in history as Elon Musk approaches trillionaire status

On 4 November, shareholders in US car-maker Tesla voted overwhelmingly in favour of a massive new pay package for CEO Elon Musk, already the world's richest man. Let’s take a look at how that compares to some previous record holders.

How much!?

Under the new deal, Musk will receive one trillion dollars in shares if he can meet an ambitious set of goals that include selling 20 million vehicles, rolling out 10 million fully autonomous "robotaxis" and increasing the company's market capitalization six times over to $8.5 trillion.

If he manages to come through on his promises, this deal would likely make him the highest paid CEO of all time and the world’s first ever trillionaire.

It should be mentioned, however, that highest paid CEO isn't a category that Guinness World Records has monitored in quite a long time. This is partly because the full details of executive pay packages are often not disclosed, but also because of the complexities of these sorts of deals. It's hard to compare the pay of two CEOs when they're configured in drastically different ways and on different schedules, accompanied by varying balances of share options, cash bonuses and a constellation of performance-related perks.

Historic comparisons

Back in simpler financial times, this record was a staple of the "Business World" pages of Guinness World Records. The earliest appearance of this category was in the 1958 edition. Here's the full entry from that year (on p.150):

The highest paid executive (as opposed to proprietor) in 1956/57 was Mr Eugene Gifford Grace, 81, Hon. Chairman of the Bethlehem Steel Corp. of U.S.A., with a salary of $809,000 (£288,930). He began as a 15-cents-an-hour crane driver in 1901 and became president in 1916.

Mr Harlow Curtice, president of General Motors, has received an annual average of $556,000 (£198,570) per annum in salary and bonuses since 1947.

Adjusted for consumer price index (CPI) inflation, Mr Grace was taking home a paltry $8.7 m (£6.6 m) a year. Though, in fairness, there are several alternative ways of calculating inflation with sums of this scale, all of which suggest its modern equivalent would be higher than that. Relative to average wages, or "labour value", it works out to $25 m, and relative to US GDP, or "economic share", it would be closer to $50 m. (Incidentally, even the most generous interpretation of these figures wouldn't get him into the top 30 highest paid CEOs in the USA today).

As we've already mentioned, however, Musk's pay deal is calculated over 10 years, so of the two pay packages mentioned in the 1958 edition, that of Mr Curtice makes for the better comparison. Adjusted for CPI inflation, the CEO of General Motors (then the largest company in the world) trousered the equivalent of $68.8 m in the period from 1947–57 ($119.8 m according to relative labour value and $488.3 m as a proportion of GDP).

That is, for anyone keeping track with their calculators at home, around 0.048% of Musk's latest pay deal.

The richest of all time?

Even without taking this latest deal into consideration, Musk is still the world's richest man, with a net worth – as calculated by Forbes – of $486.2 billion at the time of publication.

This is the highest dollar value ever amassed by a single person, but it isn't actually enough to earn him the title of richest man in history. Again, this is where inflation and the fluctuating value of money comes into play.

There are many potential candidates for this record, but it's worth laying out a few basic rules that GWR uses to thin the herd a little. The first is that we don't count the estimated fortunes of absolute rulers, such as kings or dictators. The reason for this is that it's impossible to draw a dividing line between the personal wealth of the monarch and the wealth of the nation they rule.

This excludes out popular claimants to the title such as Mansa Musa – a 14th century king of the Mali Empire who famously brought several tons of gold with him when he travelled, just as walking around money.

The second rule is that there needs to be some concrete evidence of the extent of their wealth. Someone like Roman statesman Marcus Licinius Crassus was undoubtedly rich, but how rich is impossible to do more than guess at.

A gilded-age tycoon

Of those remaining, the richest of all time is most likely the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. At the peak of his financial success in 1913, Rockefeller's net worth was $900 m, equal to $631 bn in 2024, relative to the size of the US economy at the time.

After some successful early business ventures, Rockefeller had moved into the oil business in 1863, buying shares in a new refinery that was designed to operate more efficiently than its rivals.

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Over the course of the 1870s, he brought more and more of the US oil industry under his control, either through acquisitions or by making rivals his partners in a cartel called the Standard Oil Trust. By 1879, Standard Oil was responsible for 90% of all oil refining in the United States.

As oil became an increasingly essential part of the American economy, politicians and the public turned on Rockefeller and his monopolistic and aggressive business strategies – even though he had largely stepped back from the day-to-day running of Standard Oil in the 1890s. He was widely vilified and subject to various court orders in the 1900s, and in 1911 the government ordered that the Standard Oil Trust be broken up.

Rockefeller split up his fortune over the course of the 1910s, dividing it amongst his children as well as various trusts and philanthropic organizations. Although he was widely described as having a net worth in the billions at the time of his death in 1937, his personal fortune was actually only about $26 m (though admittedly this is the equivalent of around $1.7 bn in 2025).

A renaissance rival

Rockefeller isn't the only possible candidate, however. There is a lot of uncertainty in inflation calculations, and this only becomes more extreme the further back in history you go. There was another business magnate, centuries earlier, who may have been even richer.

That person was the German merchant Jakob Fugger (1459–1525). Fugger made his fortune through investments in silver mines, but later diversified into all manner of goods. His business agents, with their pale leather monogrammed bags and flashy clothes, were a common sight in the banking centres of renaissance Europe.

During his lifetime, Fugger's wealth was the stuff of legend. He could stop wars by calling in debts, bankrupt nations with a well-placed trade and the dynastic struggles in the courts of Europe were often decided by his preferences.

On his death in 1525, his estate was worth 2,032,652 Rhenish gulden. It's harder to be sure what the modern equivalent of this would be, as his business activities weren't confined to one country with a consistent currency. However, relative to the approximate size of the European economy of the time, biographers have estimated the present-day value of Fugger's estate at somewhere between $450 bn and $650 bn.

Can Elon Musk beat Rockefeller and Fugger?

As part of the deal agreed last week, Musk will draw no salary from Tesla until his 10-year contract is up. That doesn't mean that there isn't scope for his net worth to increase, however. He already owns a large amount of stock in Tesla, as well as other ventures such as launch company SpaceX, which means that his net worth will rise if the valuations of those companies continue to go up.

Reaching the target would mean adding the equivalent of the entire personal fortune of someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Jensen Huang of Nvidia, but given that Musk's fortune was only $24 bn just five years ago, it's not impossible.

Read more about the world’s richest ever residents and loads more amazing superlatives in Guinness World Records 2026 – on sale now!

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