Three Comma Club

Throughout history, there have been some incredibly wealthy individuals.

Mansa Musa swept through Egypt on his way to Mecca from Mali, generously donating gold in mosques along the way, while also spending a literal ton of gold on his entourage. This was a financial earthquake for Egypt; inflation persisted for a generation after Musa’s legendary hajj.

It’s tough to measure Musa’s wealth in today’s terms, although historians and scholars have tried plenty of times. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the Mali empire controlled a large portion of the world’s gold supply, so it was sort of like owning his own money printer. It’s tough to compare this to the modern world, but it can be fun to try.

John D Rockefeller’s name comes up a lot too, but in a very different era and with all kinds of caveats. Like Musa, his wealth went way beyond mere ownership and well into control—for John D, it was converting oil from the ground into energy people could use that had built his fortune, and it was this control that made Standard Oil so powerful.

Another thing about Rockefeller that’s interesting is that he’s the first official member of the Three Comma Club, a joke from the TV show Silicon Valley that’s absolutely worth repeating. Here’s a very not-safe-for-work clip I hope you enjoy:

A billion, when written out, has three commas:

$1,000,000,000

So, Rockefeller was the first member of this club because he had more than a billion dollars, right? Well, no. John D lived an incredibly frugal life, and he never had much need for personal cash.

So, he had the money in the bank, right? That’s why he’s a member of the Three Comma Club?

Well, no. His net worth was tied up in his ownership of Standard Oil. In fact, it was the breakup of his Standard Oil monopoly that finally (and ironically) put John D over that threshold in 1916. In 1911, trustbusters had decided that no one man should have that much money, so they broke up his business empire into subsidiaries, causing his wealth to roughly triple over the next five years.

Wait, what?

That’s right: John D became the charter member of 3C in 1916. Prior to that—in 1911, just before the breakup—he was worth about $300 million, give or take. In distant second was Andrew Carnegie, who had sold his steel empire a decade earlier and had been giving away his fortune ever since, so he was now severely impoverished at $100 million, give or take.

Carnegie’s own wealth had peaked at $460 million or so, making him the person with the largest net worth in US dollars up until that point. It’s tough to stack him up against historical figures like Musa, so that’s why we’re sticking with US dollars today. Also: the three comma joke only really works this way.

Apparently, Carnegie didn’t even realize he was supposed to keep going until he crossed the three comma threshold. Anyway, he took the lead from Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, who made his $105 million fortune (at the time of his death in 1877) in railroads, also indirectly helping to provide a business network that both Rockefeller and Carnegie benefitted from. Oil and steel were substantially diminished without railroads.

Vanderbilt took the lead from John Jacob Astor, whose net worth in 1848 (not to be morbid, but the year they die is often the highest the number gets) may have been about $25 million, give or take. The further back you go, the fuzzier the accounting tends to get.

$25 million isn’t zero, but I’m afraid it’s where the starting line for the Three Comma race truly begins. Prior to that, we can’t really measure anything reliably, and even Astor’s fortune is sketchy to pin down.

After Rockefeller, 3C only had one lonely member for a decade or so. Henry Ford joined the party some time in the late 1920s, and John D passed away in 1937, making Ford the lone billionaire until his own death in 1947. Then, it was a sad time for the Three Comma Club: there would be no members for a decade.

J Paul Getty was another oil fortune man, and he joined the club in 1957. He was joined around 1966 by Howard Hughes, and the club grew steadily from there. By 1980, there may have been about 20 global billionaires, and by 1990 there were over 250.

Today’s Three Comma Club has over 3000 members.