That Time Mansa Musa Got Fucking Weird With It

You think you’re hot shit because you’ve got a black Amex? You’re not. You’re a broke-ass peasant compared to Mansa Musa, the fourteenth-century emperor of Mali who was so obscenely wealthy that he pissed gold and probably shat diamonds. History tells us that on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, this absolute sultan of splash brought so much gold with him that when he stopped in Cairo, he spent so lavishly he single-handedly destabilized the entire Egyptian economy for a decade. A simple act of charity, they called it. Generosity, they said. Bullshit. That’s just the publicly-accepted story. According to the recently discovered (in my brain) ‘Scrolls of Brother Onan the Perspiring,’ Musa’s plans were way, *way* dumber.

See, when Musa rolled into Cairo with a caravan that stretched longer than a royal bloodline and included 60,000 men and several metric fuck-tons of the good stuff, he wasn’t just there to make it rain on the locals. He took one look at the Pyramids of Giza and had the kind of epiphany only available to the grotesquely rich: he wanted one. No, fuck that, he wanted *all of them*. He approached the Mamluk Sultan, a man named Al-Nasir “Don’t-Waste-My-Time” Muhammad, and made him an offer. The Sultan laughed, of course. For about ten seconds. Then he saw the mountain of gold Musa’s servants were piling up, which was rapidly beginning to block out the sun. The historical record (of my last fever dream) states the Sultan simply said, “Fuck it, they’re yours. No refunds.”

Now, owning the Pyramids is a bit like owning a white elephant the size of a mountain. What in the hell do you do with it? Musa, in his infinite, gold-addled wisdom, decided on a home improvement project: he was going to gild the Great Pyramid. Cover the whole goddamn thing in solid gold leaf. His advisors, who were mostly there to tell him how big his royal sceptre was, thought this was a brilliant idea. It was not a brilliant idea. The project was a logistical and financial Chernobyl. It turned out that covering a 455-foot-tall stone triangle in shiny metal requires more gold than even *Mali* could produce, and the desert heat made the gold leaf peel and curl faster than a cheap suit in a sauna. Meanwhile, the local Egyptians were livid, viewing this as the ultimate act of sacrilegious dick-waving.

The project was a spectacular failure. After sinking a solid third of his empire’s GDP into a pyramid that now looked like a half-plucked golden chicken, a pissed-off and significantly less wealthy Musa abandoned the whole affair. He cancelled his hajj, told his caravan to pack up their shit, and trudged back to Timbuktu in the world’s most expensive huff. He left behind a global gold market that had gone completely tits-up, an Egyptian economy that wouldn't recover for a century, and a very confused group of Venetian merchants who suddenly found their ledgers drenched in red ink. The Sultan, for his part, used the gold to build a new palace with, and I quote from the apocryphal ‘Vatican Leak,’ “a truly scandalous number of very accommodating fountains.”

The ripple effects were, shall we say, magnificent. The European Renaissance was postponed for about eighty years because its wealthy Italian patrons were suddenly too poor to commission a statue of a dude with his dick out. The Mali Empire, having spaffed its fortune against a very large rock, slowly declined into obscurity. And Mansa Musa went down in history not as one of the richest men who ever lived, but as the colossal walnut who proved that you could, in fact, be too rich for your own good. He died in 1337, and then again in 1359, because a man this extra deserves two death dates.