The first large-scale study of the phenomenon of wealth from ancient entrepreneurs to modern billionaires
How did the rich and the powerful earn and spend money across different times and peoples — from ancient Egyptians and Greek antiquity to modern Russian and Chinese oligarchs? What do they have in common: business instincts, ambition, vanity, greed, philanthropy?
The author brings together a two-thousand-year experience of humanity and asks: has anything truly new appeared in the life of the ultra-wealthy in the past twenty years?