[qwytw]

Technically it was illegal for senators to engage in any commercial activity besides agriculture so they still had to really on the equites who directly exploited the natives in the provinces to give them their cut (tax collection was privatised in the republican period). So it's not unlikely that there were individual equites who were more wealthy than many Senators.

[philipov]

That's fair, since senatores was a political class, not an economic class, and equites was technically the top economic class. I tried to simplify things to make the analogy possible, and I think the spirit of it is instructive even if the details could be more complicated.

The important point is that no one should mistake the equestrians for anything close to even the top end of the middle class.