Who was the richest person ever?

The vignette 1.3 of the book “the haves and the haves not” of Branko Milasnovic (basic Books, New York, 2011) is dedicated to this question. Since is still difficult to convert roman sesterces in dollars at the same purchasing power, taking into consideration the further difficulty to compare different bundles of goods and services (no smart phone in Roman times), Milanovic compares the annual income of the person considered to the mean income and by this way calculated the number of people that could have been hired with said income.

The results are shown in the table below: