[adventured]

Rockefeller was never worth $337 billion.

He was worth between $1 and $2 billion in his day, per the best biographies and historical information on the man.

That's a lot closer to $25 to $50 billion today.

The false hundreds of billions number is usually reached one of two ways: 1) by pretending Rockefeller still owned his former share of Standard Oil, represented in the form of the children oil companies today (Exxon et al.); 2) by taking Rockefeller's wealth as a share of GDP, and then claiming based on 2007's GDP he'd be worth X amount.

Both are absurd.

[Retric]

Note: I used relative wealth for a reason, doing a direct $ to $ conversion misses out of things like the US being on the gold/silver standard well into the 1900's. "Nixon Shock” Often people use things like how much bread cost back then forgetting that bulk food has become ridiculously cheap over time. A better measure is how much it costs to bribe a Politian.

In the end, there are a lot of ways of calculating wealth. However, the ROI was generally much higher in 1800's than today so simply looking at the value people were willing to pay back then is a poor way of calculating wealth. Looking at NPV corrects for most of this based on those calculations you get ~300B.

Also, 1) Ignores dividends so it's actually not nearly as inflated as you might think. And 2) is useful to figure out influence aka things like how much land some historical figure could buy. Or how many people they could employ.