Comment on Petty pedantry

ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• teft@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Mansa Musa of Mali. His wealth was in the trillions. He basically showed up in Cairo with a bunch of his buddies in tow and spent so much and so lavishly including just handing out gold to everyone that he wrecked Egypt’s economy for a decade. He owned something like half the world gold reserves at the time.

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  • too_high_for_this@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    That’s kind of a myth. Musa and the Mali empire were certainly wealthy for the time but you can’t really compare an emperor in the 14th century with a modern oligarch.

    Musa liked to boast about his wealth at every opportunity. Like, he would tell people that gold grows like a plant in Mali while he threw gold bars at them. And all the reports of his immense wealth come from the people he encountered on his pilgrimage.

    The amount of gold he brought (18 tons!) would be worth about $1.5B today. That was likely all of the gold the empire had collected during his reign. And it wasn’t technically his, it belonged to the empire.

    The price of gold in Egypt dropped by about 15%, which was a lot but well within normal fluctuations. He also ran out of gold on the return trip and had to beg for loans which he never repaid.

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