John D Rockefeller was the richest American to ever live, as well as being the founding member of the three-comma club as the worlds first billionaire.
At the height of his fortune a few years before his death he was worth an estimated 1 billion dollars which may not sound like much compared to today's tech bro’s, but this was back in a time where the USA’s annual GDP was only 39.1 billion dollars.
This meant that his fortune was 3% of America’s GDP. Adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars this would give ol John D here a fortune of 450 billion dollars. Or more than Elon, Bill, and Jeff combined.
But where is this fortune today?
Of course John himself died almost a century ago but if there was any fortune that was going to indefinitely set up future generations surely it would be this one right?
The same goes for most of these historic moguls, the fortunes of everybody from carnage, to the medici have more or less faded into total obscurity, outside of maybe a few names plastered on random buildings… (buildings that they don’t even own mind you)…
Now you might think you already know the answer, oh these fortunes get split up amongst children and then children’s children and then children’s children’s children until it was spread so thin amongst latter generations that it became almost totally irrelevant.
But that’s not entirely true… What’s more is that the real reason for the fall of these financial empires can tell us a lot about how money works as it has been passed down through generations and history.
