I’m fascinated by the history of money, and fascinated by Elon Musk’s antics, so when they coincide I cannot resist reading between the lines, so I read with some interest of the battles ranging across the twitterscape, where bands of cryptocurrency fanatics defend and attack Mr. Musk because their particular coins had gone up or down because of something he did or didn’t say. I have to say that I rather agree with Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman who said that “being disappointed in Elon Musk is a just punishment for caring about what he said in the first place”. In other words, it isn’t Musk’s business acumen that is the basis for the meme wars but his celebrity which derives in part from his wealth. (My personal view is that he is so rich that he really doesn’t care whether some random cryptocoin goes up or down, he just enjoys his power to move them.)
So is he involved in a secret conspiracy to crash Bitcoin and then buy it all up? Or pump dogecoin and then dump it. I doubt it. Rich people being accused of shaping markets to their own benefit is nothing new, of course. So I began to wonder: just how rich do you need to be to have that power? Which then led me to wonder just how rich is Elon Musk in the great scheme of things. Is he the richest person ever? Is Jeff Bezos? Is Bill Gates?
To answer that question, we need a good measuring stick that works across time and space. The richness benchmark must be the proportion of the wealth of the richest nation in the world that is under the control of a single individual. We must exclude the monarchs of old, of course, because in their day the wealth of the state and the wealth of the individual were inseperable. Although if we do take a moment to consider them as a benchmark, then I think I am right in saying that wealthiest person of all time was Masa Musa, the King of Mali. He took 12,000 slaves with him on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Elon has more Twitter followers, of course, but would they really march through the desert behind him carrying bags of gold on his behalf? I think not, especially when quite a few of them are still carrying bags of Dogecoin.
My point is you can’t really compare that 14th century wealth with the wealth of a business tycoon of the present day. So where was the breakpoint between the wealth of monarchs and the wealth of business people that led to the post-medieval settlement between the crown and the city that gave birth to central banks and, ultimately, fiat currencies? Who was the first modern business person to become rich as Midas not by invading somewhere or being born a Royal bastard, but by business?
Fugger U
A great many people would point to Jacob Fugger of Augsburg (Jakob II “The Rich”, 1459-1525). Jakob II lived at a time when it finally became possible for someone to accumulate money without the threat of force, until then the province of monarchs and warlords. He got this rich because the Fuggers established what was, essentially, the prototype for modern business and the first public company. Jakob had studied accountancy and the new-fangled double-entry bookkeeping, an innovation that made the modern extended enterprise viable. In 1441 his father Jakob I had married the daughter of a mint master who went bankrupt (don’t worry, even with pennies costing 1.7 cents to make this won’t happen today) and gone into business with great success. The Fuggers made huge profits, which gave them significant capital to play with.
There’s no need to recount all of his activities, except to note that on his death his firm was the most powerful financial force in the world and he bequeathed a fortune of two million guilders in cash to his nephew Anton. That is considerably more than, say, the Medicis, although In modern terms it seems quite modest: perhaps $100 million or so, not even as much as a Madonna or David Beckham. According to my copy of
The Rich and How They Got That Way , by Cynthia Crossen of the Wall Street Journal, he left another legacy: the first purpose built cottages for workers (known as the fuggerei, they still stand).
While Mr. Musk has promised $45 million per month to Mr. Trump’s PAC, Jakob famously gave Charles V with the money needed to bribe electors to make him Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. Charles in return ennobled the Fuggers and granted them sovereign rights over their lands, including that of coining their own money.
Interestingly, Jakob also secured the right to sell papal indulgences, which increased his already vast fortune tenfold. That’s right: Fugger was rich enough to see people out of purgatory, to create a Holy Roman Emporer (of something that,
as Voltaire famously said , was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire) and, best of all, to coin his own money. You’ve got to have goals, haven’t you! The Fugger’s had their silver mines, perhaps Mr. Musk is looking towards Helium-3 mines on the moon.
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The startup, Seattle-based Interlune, said it will use the $346,000 NASA grant to test a critical part of its technology that it will ultimately use to prepare lunar soil, known as regolith, for the extraction of helium-3, an isotope scarce on Earth but abundant on the moon.
From: A Space Startup’s Moon Mining Plans Get a Boost With NASA Grant — The Information.
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Jakob was the first contender, but he didn’t take the title of richest person of all time. I’m pretty sure that title still belongs to Nathan Rothschild. As is often pointed out, he died in 1836 of blood poisoning — or was poisoned by the Illuminati (our motto: someone you trust is one of us) depending on who you listen to — that could be cured by a few pennies worth of antibiotics today.
The Winner Is
Anyway, why am I telling you about the Jakob the Rich? It’s because Jakob’s favourite saying was, with penetrating insight into the future, “the king reigns but the bank rules”.
Indeed.
Snippings 