section_path: Legacy/Wealth
section_name: Wealth
paragraph_text: Wealth
  
  Mansa Musa is renowned for his wealth and generosity. Online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time. Historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to accurately calculate. Contemporary Arabic sources may have been trying to express that Musa had more gold than they thought possible, rather than trying to give an exact number. Furthermore, it is difficult to meaningfully compare the wealth of historical figures such as Mansa Musa, due to the difficulty of separating the personal wealth of a monarch from the wealth of the state and the difficulty of comparing wealth in highly different societies. Musa may have brought as much as 18 tons of gold on his hajj, equal in value to over US$957 million in 2022. Musa himself further promoted the appearance of having vast, inexhaustible wealth by spreading rumors that gold grew like a plant in his kingdom.
  
  According to some Arabic writers, Musa's gift-giving caused a depreciation in the value of gold in Egypt. Al-Umari said that before Musa's arrival, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, but that it dropped to less than 22 dirhams afterward and did not go above that number for at least twelve years. Though this has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy, the historian Warren Schultz has argued that this was well within normal fluctuations in the value of gold in Mamluk Egypt.
  
  The wealth of the Mali Empire did not come from direct control of gold-producing regions, but rather trade and tribute. The gold Musa brought on his pilgrimage probably represented years of accumulated tribute that Musa would have spent much of his early reign gathering. Another source of income for Mali during Musa's reign was taxation of the copper trade.
  
  According to several contemporary authors, such as Ibn Battuta, Ibn al-Dawadari and al-Umari, Mansa Musa ran out of money during his journey to Mecca and had to borrow from Egyptian merchants at a high rate of interest on his return journey. Al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun state that the moneylenders were either never repaid or only partly repaid. Other sources disagree as to whether they were eventually and fully compensated.