When you think of billionaires today, perhaps Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or maybe even Taylor Swift come to mind. But paving the way for them all was John D. Rockefeller, the world's first dollar billionaire. At the time of his death in 1937, the oil dynasty founder boasted an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion, the equivalent of $21.7 billion (£17bn) in 2024. However, some financial scholars have even suggested he may have been worth somewhere in the region of $400 billion (£315bn) in today's money.

Read on to discover how Rockefeller built his astonishingly profitable empire after a very humble childhood, and find out what happened to his enormous fortune. 

All dollar amounts in US dollars.