Top 10 Greediest People in Recent World History

Welcome to WatchMojo, where today we’ll be looking at the greediest individuals of the century so far.

#10: Jim McNerney

From 2005 to 2015, Jim McNerney was Boeing’s CEO. His leadership was highly controversial, especially since he was earning over $23 million annually at one point. Many criticised his huge pay checks, especially since Boeing was laying off thousands of workers, alongside freezing pensions. Many analysts believe McNerney prioritised cost-cutting over quality and safety, which likely set the stage for the Boeing 737 MAX crisis. Although it happened after his departure, the company’s development philosophy began with him. This means during his tenure, the company seemed more interested in making money and beating Airbus, rather than making their planes safe.

#9: Larry Ellison

Oracle Corporation is a tech company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison—who was CEO until stepping down in 2014. As of 2025, he’s one of the top 3 richest people alive, with over $250 billion to his name. He’s so obscenely wealthy, he owns 98% of an island in Hawaii. This means the majority of residents are economically dependent on one person—a dynamic resembling feudal systems. Under his leadership, Oracle launched one of the most hostile takeovers in history against PeopleSoft. Despite his absurd wealth, Ellison has given relatively little to charity, especially compared to figures like Bill Gates.

#8: Mark Zuckerberg

The man who co-founded Facebook and Meta has become a symbol of modern tech greed. One of his most controversial decisions was to extract and sell data of Facebook users, prioritising profit over privacy. This led to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in the 2010s, where roughly 87 million Facebook profiles had their data harvested. Facebook is also known for amplifying things like hate speech, fake news, and even ethnic violence in places like Myanmar. Zuckerberg and his underlings resist correcting these issues, since such algorithms are good for engagement and revenue. Zuckerberg even has his own private $100 million compound in Hawaii.

#7: Jeff Bezos

Amazon has exercised monopoly-like power for years. At the helm is Jeff Bezos, who was the wealthiest man alive from 2017 to 2021. Unfortunately, most of his workers are way less wealthy than he is. Amazon has frequently been accused of mistreating its workers. Working in an Amazon warehouse is an exceedingly difficult job, where your bathroom breaks are timed and you’re held to absurdly high standards. When workers have tried to unionize to improve conditions, Amazon has often cracked down and tried its best to stall these efforts. On top of all that, the company has frequently avoided paying taxes in countries like the UK, despite having an annual revenue in the hundreds of billions.

#6: Jeffrey Skilling

The Enron scandal was one of recent history’s most infamous cases of financial fraud. Its primary architect was Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron Corporation—which was founded in 1985. The energy company declared bankruptcy in 2001 after years of corrupt practices. Under Skilling’s rule, they encouraged a system that rewarded deception and harshly punished whistleblowers. Skilling made millions selling his shares just months before they declared bankruptcy, suspiciously due to “personal reasons.” When legal action was taken, Skilling claimed he had no idea the fraudulent practices were taking place, despite being considered the main instigator. In the end, he was put in jail in 2006, where he stayed for 13 years.

#5: Bernie Madoff

The largest Ponzi scheme in history was worth an estimated $65 billion. Of course, to do a crime like that, you’d have to be extremely greedy, which is exactly what Bernie Madoff was. According to him, he began the scheme in the ‘90s, but some witnesses claim it started two decades earlier. It relied on promising reliable returns to investors, which worked by paying old investors with new ones. This meant they weren’t making profits; they were just stealing investments. When the scandal was revealed, Madoff was tried and sentenced to 150 years in prison. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t live out the whole sentence and died in prison in 2021.

#4: Sam Bankman-Fried

Given cryptocurrency’s decentralised nature, it’s no surprise that it’s often used for shady things. One of the biggest crypto criminals was Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. In 2022, the company went bankrupt when it was revealed that Bankman-Fried had stolen billions from customers. In 2023, he was tried for his crimes and convicted on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy. They sentenced him to 25 years behind bars, where he currently remains. It’s especially ironic when you learn he supposedly believed in “effective altruism.” In hindsight, this was essentially weaponizing morality to take heat off his back, which didn’t work in the end.

#3: Martin Shkreli

For a brief period, Martin Shkreli was the internet’s #1 enemy. As CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, he bumped up the price of the drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill. This is an essential medicine to a lot of people, so he was sacrificing the lives of the sick and poor to fatten his wallet. Two years later, he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy, then sentenced to 7 years in prison. In 2022, he was released early, but he’s now banned from ever serving as an officer of a publicly traded company. Another controversy of his was buying the only copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album, then taunting the public with it.

#2: Elon Musk

If you’re the richest person in the world, then you’re instantly considered greedy, since no one realistically needs that much money. Since 2021, Elon Musk has been that person. He has a net worth of over $400 billion. He’s not exactly the most supportive boss for his workers, proclaiming himself “anti-union.” According to the National Labor Relations Board, his retaliation against workers violates labor laws. When he took over Twitter, he unjustly fired 80% of its staff. Musk is also entirely convinced he’s a self-made man, despite coming from an already wealthy family from South Africa. Musk was also briefly in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, where he implemented immense cuts to government services.

#1: Donald Trump

America’s 45th and 47th president considers himself a self-made man. Evidence against this includes Trump’s famous quote that his father gave him a “small loan of a million dollars.” His business endeavours haven’t always been successful, resulting in multiple bankruptcies. He’s walked away relatively unscathed from all of these, while workers were left to struggle. Trump also ran the Trump University scam, which was the subject of three lawsuits alleging fraud. He paid $25 million to settle those cases in 2016. As president, he’s also routed government and foreign spending to his own properties, raising his profits even further.

If you had as much money as the people on this list, what would you do with it? Let us know in the comments!