- America has more billionaires than ever, led by Elon Musk, who’s estimated to be worth $744.6 billion.
- Figures such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were known as the richest men of their time.
- Today’s tech leaders, including Musk and Jeff Bezos, are among the richest Americans in history.
America has never had as many billionaires as it does now.
But how does the wealth of historic figures, such as the industrialists of the Gilded Age, compare to that of the richest people in 2025?
In many historic calculations of net worth, individual fortunes weren’t measured in isolation; instead, they were compared to the GDP of the US at the time. When the US economy was much smaller than it is today, the wealthiest families and individuals carried more weight in the economy than others during more prosperous times.
One of the richest Americans of all time is widely considered to be Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth, at its peak in 1937, was equal to 1.5% of the country’s GDP. His estimated net worth would be around $499 billion today, when adjusted for inflation.
Elon Musk’s current wealth, however, is understood to have now eclipsed that of Rockefeller’s. On December 29, Forbes estimated Musk’s fortune to be $744.6 billion.
To identify some of the richest Americans of all time, we consulted Forbes’ 2007 list of history’s wealthiest figures, based on estimates by economist Peter Bernstein. It calculated individuals’ wealth at their peak and compared it to the country’s GDP at the time to convert it to 2006 dollars. This was then adjusted to today’s dollars using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator.
For living individuals, we cited estimated net worths as reported by Forbes on December 29.
While estimations of historic wealth may not be perfect, they help paint a picture of the level of wealth enjoyed by some of America’s most notable figures in business, and put it into context with today’s billionaires.
Here are 28 of the wealthiest Americans in history.
Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937)
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Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Getty Images/Getty Images
Jay Gould (1836-1892)
Bettmann/Getty Images
Sam Walton (1918-1992)
Paul Matthews/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Marshall Field (1834-1906)
Bettmann/Getty Images
Bill Gates
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Michael Bloomberg
PAC NYC/Getty Images
Frederick Weyerhaeuser (1834-1914)
Bain News Service/Library of Congress
Alice Walton
Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images
Jim Walton
Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images
Rob Walton
Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images
Alexander Turney Stewart (1803-1876)
The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images
Richard B. Mellon (1870-1933)
: HUM Images/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Michael Dell
NurPhoto/Getty
Warren Buffett
Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage
Steve Ballmer
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Stephen Girard (1750-1831)
Icas94 / De Agostini via Getty Images
Jensen Huang
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
John Jacob Astor (1763-1848)
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg
Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Sergey Brin
Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
Jeff Bezos
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images
Larry Ellison
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Larry Page
Kimberly White/Getty Images for Fortune
Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877)
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Elon Musk
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
