Currently the richest person in America – and the second-richest in the world – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a fortune of $199 billion. But how do his riches compare to those of the wealthiest US citizens over the last century?
From the Roaring Twenties to the 2010s, read on to discover who the richest American was in the decade you were born.
In the period between World War I ending (1918) and the Great Depression starting (1929), America enjoyed a brief spell of economic prosperity. Dubbed the "Roaring Twenties," this decade made many Americans rich – and none more so than John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil.
According to Forbes's inaugural Rich List in 1918, Rockefeller was worth $1.2 billion, which is the equivalent of around $25 billion today.
This is dwarfed by Bezos' fortune. However, as it represented 1.5% of America’s GDP at the time, Rockefeller technically owned a greater percentage of US wealth than anyone else in history.
The only billionaire in the country at the time, Rockefeller was the richest American of the 1920s by a considerable margin. Second and third on Forbes' 1918 Rich List were Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, who had net worths of $225 million and $200 million respectively. That equates to $4.7 billion and $4.1 billion in today's money.
Both men had formed their own businesses, with Frick – who founded the H.C. Frick & Company coke firm in 1871 – later becoming the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company.
At the time, Forbes reporters wrote: "Nine persons in every ten, if asked, 'Who do you think is the second richest man in America?' would instantly reply, 'Andrew Carnegie.' They would be wrong, according to our best-posted bankers. H.C. Frick, the coke king and steel magnate, is rated above Carnegie."
However, both men died in 1919, leaving the spot for the second-wealthiest American of the 1920s open...
With a net worth of $150 million in 1918 (the equivalent of over $3 billion today), George F. Baker became the second-richest American after the deaths of Frick and Carnegie. Baker had made his fortune in the banking industry and was nicknamed the "Dean of American Banking."
The son of a shoe store owner, Baker never went to university and, according to The New York Times, didn't speak in public until he was 84 years old.
Yet this unassuming figure made millions by co-founding the First National Bank of New York City in 1863. He died in 1931 at the age of 91.
Unsurprisingly, John D. Rockefeller (pictured here in 1933) remained America's richest man until he passed away in 1937 at the age of 97.
In his later years, the controversial businessman focused on philanthropy, giving away more than $530 million – the equivalent of almost $11 billion today – according to his obituary in The New York Times.
These bequests included a donation of almost $35 million ($719m today) to the University of Chicago, which Rockefeller once described as his "best investment."
When George F. Baker died in 1931, The New York Times estimated that he "probably was the country's third richest man, his wealth being exceeded only by that of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, the latter for many years his warm personal friend and occasional golfing companion."
Ford (pictured), an industrialist who built the first mass-produced motor car, was rumored to have never hired an accountant and calculated invoices by weighing them. But his unorthodox approach to business didn't stop him from from amassing an incredible fortune, which estimates have placed at around $230 billion in today's money.
His precise net worth in the 1930s is unknown, although it was undoubtedly huge as his eponymous Ford Motor Company was manufacturing roughly one-third of the world's cars by 1932.
After Rockefeller's death, Ford stepped into his shoes as America's richest person.
Despite being a pacifist who initially protested the USA's involvement in World War II, Ford later joined the war effort by manufacturing bombs and fighter planes in his factories. In 1940, Ford even claimed that his River Rouge factory (shown here that year) in Michigan could produce 1,000 warplanes every day.
However, Ford wasn't steadfast in his support of the US. In 1938, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a German medal typically bestowed on foreign diplomats, and he continued to do business with Nazi Germany after the Second World War broke out.
By 1948, controversial oil tycoon Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. – better known as H. L. Hunt – had overtaken Ford as America's richest man according to Life magazine.
A ruthless businessman, Hunt primarily made his fortune through his vast portfolio of oil holdings. He's widely believed to have inspired the character of J.R. Ewing in the 1980s TV show Dallas and was no stranger to scandal, even committing bigamy in the 1920s.
Hunt, who was tipped to have the highest net worth in the world when he died in 1974, reportedly had a fortune of $600 million by 1948. That's the equivalent of around $7.8 billion in today's dollars.
J. Paul Getty, patriarch of the infamous Getty family, was born in Minneapolis in 1892.
By 1957, Fortune magazine had dubbed him the richest living American. Notoriously frugal to the extent that he even haggled over his kidnapped grandson's release terms in the early 1970s, Getty had inherited money from his oilman father George Getty.
He's estimated to have grown the family fortune to somewhere between $700 million to $1 billion, or $8 billion to $12 billion in today's money. When asked how he felt about being named the richest American by Fortune, J. Paul Getty reportedly replied: "You know, if you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars... But remember, a billion dollars isn't worth what it used to be."
The only woman to appear on this list, Ailsa Mellon Bruce was one of the heirs to the so-called "Mellon millions".
When Fortune released its ranking of the richest Americans in 1957, Mellon Bruce and three other members of her family – her brother Paul and cousins Sarah and Richard King – all appeared within the top 10. Ailsa was estimated to have a fortune of "at least" $500 million, which would equate to more than $5.6 billion today.
Mellon Bruce inherited the bulk of her wealth from her financier father Andrew Mellon, who left her with "more money than anyone could give away sensibly," according to a friend who was quoted in Ailsa's 1969 New York Times obituary.
Mellon Bruce is known to have donated millions to the arts throughout her lifetime.
It'll come as no surprise that J. Paul Getty was still the richest American of the 1960s and 70s – and he just kept getting richer.
In 1966, the Guinness Book of Records named him "the world's richest private citizen". At the time, he had a fortune of $1.2 billion, which works out at around $11.6 billion in 2024.
The tycoon hit headlines in 1973 when it was revealed that he'd refused to pay a $17 million ransom for his kidnapped grandson, who was being held by a gang in Italy. Getty claimed that paying the amount in full would make his other grandchildren attractive targets for kidnappers and eventually paid just $2.2 million, the maximum amount that was tax-deductible, to secure the teen's release.
By the time he died in 1976, Getty had secured a net worth of $6 billion ($33 billion today), easily making him the richest man in America at the time.
Howard Hughes had many strings to his bow and built a vast fortune thanks to his various interests across cinema, aviation, real estate, and engineering.
The son of a successful businessman, the young Hughes was particularly fascinated by technology and reportedly built Houston's first wireless radio transmitter when he was just 11 years old. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1948 and was one of the most renowned businessmen of the following decades.
However, he also struggled with intense obsessive-compulsive disorder, with some sources even suggesting that he wore tissue boxes on his feet to protect them from germs in later life. The increasingly eccentric Hughes also adopted a largely reclusive lifestyle.
Although Hughes's precise net worth in the 1960s isn't known, he's thought to have left a fortune worth well over $2 billion ($10.5bn today) by the time he died aged 70 in 1976. Coincidentally, J. Paul Getty passed away that very same year.
Forbes might have released its inaugural Rich List all the way back in 1918, but it didn't publish its first Forbes 400 list until 1982.
When it did, a surprising name emerged as the richest American. Daniel K. Ludwig was a reclusive billionaire who was as unknown as he was wealthy. According to a more recent Forbes article, he had "quietly amassed" a $2 billion fortune in shipbuilding and real estate, with his fortune worth around $6.5 billion in 2024 dollars.
In total, the riches of the people named on the 1982 edition of the prestigious list represented 2.8% of America's GDP, with 13 billionaires included. Around one-fifth of the fortunes listed came from the oil industry, while just 3% were via the burgeoning technology sector.
By the mid-80s, Daniel K. Ludwig had passed the mantle over to Sam Walton, the founder of retail giant Walmart.
Walton had amassed a net worth of $2.8 billion, which is the equivalent of over $8 billion in today's money. He opened the world's first Walmart store (then styled "Wal-mart") in Arkansas in July 1962 and swiftly grew the family-owned firm into a billion-dollar business over the next two decades. Walton's business had over 200 stores and 21,000 employees when he was declared America's richest person.
Today, the Walton clan has a combined wealth of $267 billion, making them one of the richest families in the world.
While just 3% of the wealth listed on the 1982 edition of Forbes 400 came via tech, the rapidly inflating dot-com bubble meant that a third of the Americans who joined the list in the following decade had made their fortunes via that very same sector.
These newcomers included Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who first appeared on the Forbes 400 list in 1986 with a fortune of $315 million ($897 million in 2024 dollars). He then went on to hit the list's top spot for the first time in 1992, with a net worth of $6.3 billion ($14 billion today).
Just seven years later, his wealth had ballooned to $85 billion. That's the equivalent of $160 billion today, a figure that exceeds the philanthropist's current net worth of $127 billion.
The second richest American for much of the 1990s was John Werner Kluge, who boasted a net worth of $5.6 billion by 1990. That's $13.4 billion in today's dollars.
German-American Kluge had made his money in the TV industry, becoming the chairman and majority shareholder of the Metropolitan Broadcasting Corporation in the 1950s.
By the time of his death in 2010, Kluge had a fortune worth $6.5 billion ($9.3bn today). The decline of his wealth was partly due to his philanthropy, which saw him give away millions to organizations such as the Library of Congress, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia.
Although Microsoft's share price plummeted when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Bill Gates remained the wealthiest American for most of the next decade.
In 2006, the qualifier for making the Forbes 400 changed, meaning that all featured names had to have a fortune of at least $1 billion. With $53 billion ($82 billion today) to his name, Gates comfortably topped that year's rankings.
Just one year later, the global financial crash wiped billions of dollars off the list, with Gates himself losing $18 billion (around $25 billion today) between 2008 and 2009.
In 2008, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett temporarily surpassed Bill Gates as the richest person in America.
That year, the so-called "Oracle of Omaha" recorded a net worth of $62 billion, the equivalent of $90 billion in 2024, and briefly became the richest person on the planet. Buffett currently boasts a fortune of $131 billion, making him the world's sixth-richest person.
Like Gates, Buffett has pledged to give away the majority of his wealth within his lifetime via The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic campaign the pair launched together to encourage the super-rich to give money to good causes.
In 2010, America's billionaires had a combined net worth of $1.4 trillion – but the world's richest person from 2010 to 2013 wasn't even from the US.
Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim was worth $53.5 billion in 2010, the equivalent of around $77 billion today, making him wealthier than anyone else on the planet. His wealth climbed to $73 billion by 2013. The following year America was back on top and Slim was overtaken by none other than Bill Gates, who boasted $76 billion ($100 billion in 2024).
Gates and his now ex-wife Melinda are pictured here delivering the commencement speech to Stanford graduates in 2014.
Bill Gates maintained his top spot until 2018 when he was overtaken by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who crashed into first place with a $112 billion fortune. That's the equivalent of around $139 billion in 2024 money, and $60 billion less than his eyewatering net worth today.
In the years since, Bezos has been regularly battling it out with controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk and French luxury conglomerate owner Bernard Arnault for the title of world's richest person. Today, Arnault wears the crown with a fortune of $215 billion. But if history tells us anything, it's only a matter of time before America boasts the world's top billionaire once more...
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