Top 11 Wealthiest Families In The World

While the majority of the world struggles from paycheck to paycheck or worse, there are people in the world who aren’t just wealthy, but they have more money than we can ever imagine, such as the members of these top 11 wealthiest families in the world.

You’ve probably heard the names of the families on this list, but what you might notice is that their names don’t appear on lists such as Forbes’ even though one of the richest families in the world, Rothschild, has assets worth some 2 trillion dollars! Well, that’s because the wealth is divided among many members of said family, money may be kept privately, or the transactions they make are simply low-key. Truth of the matter is that we may never really, trully, know just how much money these families have, even though some of their members will make it onto Forbes’ yearly list. What we can do, however, is rely on approximations and calculations made by experts.

The list of the richest families in history includes names like Rockefeller, or, if you want to go back in time, Money magazine estimated that Mansa Musa, the king of Tumbuktu, who lived in the late 1200s, was the richest man in history.

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Nowadays, there are rumors that the Rothschild family is worth about $500 trillion, but that’s impossible. Global wealth back in 2015 was of about $250 trillion in total, so there’s no way that number can be accurate for a single family. In fact, estimates indicate the wealth of the family is a lot lower than that.

The richest family in the US, the Walton family, which is behind the Wal-Mart empire, is also on the list, but you’ll also find other names you’re probably quite familiar with, from all over the world. That being said, the list of the richest families in the world in 2017 is pretty much unchanged from the list of the richest families in the world in 2016, although the sums they’ve gathered have probably gone up a bit with the new wealth amassed.

You can also read up on the 10 most powerful families in the world, if you want to get a better sense of who rules the world.

In order to create our list today, we checked a few sources, including Investopedia, and Forbes, to name a few. We ranked the families on the list by the estimated wealth they share between members.

Here is the list of the wealthiest families in the world.