Most Powerful

• #1 Ayman al-Zawahiri
  AfghanistanEgyptPakistan CriminalCriminal EnterprisePolitical 21st Century Illicit NetworksState Power Power: 100
  Ayman al-Zawahiri (1951 – 2022) was an Egyptian militant leader and physician who became the second emir of al-Qaeda, succeeding Osama bin Laden in 2011. He was a central figure in the movement’s transition from local Egyptian jihadist networks to a transnational organization that promoted mass-casualty terrorism. Over decades, he combined ideological writing, organizational discipline, and personal connections to build influence inside clandestine structures that operated across multiple countries.
• #2 Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer
  EgyptUnited Kingdom Colonial AdministrationFinancialPolitical Industrial Finance and WealthState Power Power: 100
  Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer (born 1841) is a british administrator in Egypt associated with Egypt and United Kingdom. Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer is best known for serving as Britain’s de facto ruler in Egypt as Consul-General, restructuring Egyptian finances and administration, and shaping imperial policy toward nationalist movements. This profile belongs to the site’s study of colonial administration and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the industrial age, command moved through factories, rail, shipping, fuel, banking, and the ability to scale production more efficiently than rivals.
• #3 Ferdinand de Lesseps
  EgyptFrance Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Industrial State Power Power: 100
  Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894) was a French diplomat and entrepreneur best known for organizing the construction of the Suez Canal and for later promoting an ultimately disastrous attempt to build a canal across Panama. His influence derived from concessionary infrastructure: securing political permissions, raising capital, and building an international corporation to cut a navigable channel through the Isthmus of Suez. The canal opened in 1869 and rapidly became a strategic artery of global trade and imperial logistics, reshaping shipping routes between Europe and Asia.De Lesseps was not an engineer by training. His role was to assemble a coalition of state support, financial subscriptions, and administrative authority in a colonial setting. The canal enterprise depended on negotiations with Egyptian rulers, on the labor regimes available in a semi-sovereign state under European pressure, and on international diplomacy that balanced British skepticism against French ambitions. Later, when he applied similar methods to Panama, the technical and medical realities proved far more severe. The resulting collapse contributed to a major political scandal in France and damaged public trust in financial promotion. His career illustrates how power can be built through control of chokepoint infrastructure and how the same mechanisms can collapse when technical constraints, governance failures, and speculative finance converge.
• #4 Gamal Abdel Nasser
  Egypt Party State ControlPolitical World Wars and Midcentury State Power Power: 100
  Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) was an Egyptian army officer and political leader who became the central figure of modern Egypt from the 1952 Free Officers coup to his death in 1970. He first rose inside the military as a conspiratorial organizer against the monarchy and British influence, then displaced Muhammad Naguib and consolidated a new republic centered on executive command, security oversight, and state-directed development. As president, he nationalized the Suez Canal, survived the 1956 Suez Crisis, promoted Arab nationalism on a regional scale, and became one of the most recognizable postcolonial leaders of the twentieth century.Within a party-state control topology, Nasser’s power rested on the fusion of military legitimacy, plebiscitary mass politics, administrative centralization, and expanding state command over media, unions, and key sectors of the economy. He did not simply inherit a state and govern it conventionally. He rebuilt Egypt’s political field so that opposition parties, old landholding elites, and autonomous centers of influence were either broken, subordinated, or absorbed. The regime made broad promises of social mobility, land reform, and national dignity, but those reforms operated under a leadership structure that narrowed political competition and placed decisive power in the presidency, the officer corps, and loyal bureaucratic institutions.Nasser’s historical significance lies in both achievement and failure. He helped end the old monarchy, reduced overt foreign dominance, widened access to education and state employment, advanced industrial and infrastructure projects such as the Aswan High Dam, and inspired a generation of Arab nationalist movements. Yet his system also concentrated authority, suppressed dissent, and tied the legitimacy of the state too closely to the prestige of one leader and one commanding vision. The defeat of 1967 against Israel exposed severe weaknesses in military preparedness and decision making, but Nasser retained remarkable public loyalty. His life illustrates how anti-imperial politics, social reform, charismatic leadership, and administrative centralization can combine into a durable but constrained form of state-led rule.
• #5 Hosni Mubarak
  Egypt Party State ControlPolitical Cold War and Globalization State Power Power: 100
  Hosni Mubarak (4 May 1928 – 25 February 2020) was an Egyptian Air Force officer and politician who served as President of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. He came to office as vice president after the assassination of Anwar Sadat and governed through a long‑running state of emergency that expanded police powers, narrowed legal space for opposition, and made the security services central to day‑to‑day politics. Mubarak’s government presented itself as a guarantor of stability and a broker in regional diplomacy, maintaining Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and sustaining a strategic partnership with the United States while also navigating Arab League politics and repeated crises involving Gaza.
• #6 Lord Kitchener
  EgyptSouth AfricaUnited Kingdom MilitaryMilitary CommandPolitical World Wars and Midcentury Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Lord Kitchener (1850 – 1916) was a British field marshal and imperial administrator whose career moved between colonial campaigns and the highest level of wartime government. He became widely known for commanding campaigns in Africa and for organizing British military expansion at the beginning of the First World War. His public image, reinforced by recruitment propaganda, embodied the expectation that empire could mobilize resources and manpower on demand, even as the realities of industrial war strained that assumption.Kitchener’s importance lay in his ability to convert political authority into military organization. He supervised campaigns that depended on railways, supply depots, and administrative control of territory, and as Secretary of State for War he helped create the mass volunteer armies that Britain fielded on the Western Front. His career ended abruptly in 1916 when he died at sea after the cruiser HMS Hampshire struck a mine, turning him into a symbol of wartime sacrifice and a focal point for both admiration and criticism.
• #7 Saladin
  EgyptLevantMesopotamiaSyria MilitaryMilitary CommandPolitical Medieval Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, c. 1137–1193) was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and one of the most consequential rulers of the medieval eastern Mediterranean. Rising from a military household of Kurdish origin, he became vizier of Fatimid Egypt and then transformed that office into sovereign authority. By bringing Egypt’s fiscal resources into a wider coalition and by absorbing large portions of Syria and Mesopotamia, he built a state capable of challenging the Crusader kingdoms on both the battlefield and the balance sheet.His victory at Hattin in 1187 shattered the military system that protected the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and led to the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem. The campaigns that followed, including the confrontation with the Third Crusade, showed how his power relied not only on cavalry and fortresses but on revenue, grain supply, port customs, and patronage networks that held a coalition together. In later memory he became a symbol of chivalry in some European sources and a model of Sunni political renewal in many Muslim accounts, though his wars were also marked by coercion, siege suffering, and hard bargaining over lives and ransoms.
• #8 Alexander the Great
  BabylonCentral AsiaEgyptGreeceMacedonPersia Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical AncientAncient and Classical Military CommandState Power Power: 99
  Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BCE), known as Alexander the Great, was a Macedonian king and military commander who created one of the largest empires of the ancient world in little more than a decade. Succeeding his father [Philip II](https://moneytyrants.com/philip-ii-of-macedon/) in 336 BCE
• #9 Mark Antony
  EgyptRome Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical AncientAncient and Classical Military CommandState Power Power: 94
  Mark Antony (83 BCE–30 BCE) was a Roman commander and politician whose career became one of the decisive pathways by which the Roman Republic yielded to single‑ruler empire. Rising as a close lieutenant of Julius Caesar, he translated battlefield loyalty into political leverage at Rome.
• #10 Ptolemy I Soter
  Egypt Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical AncientAncient and Classical Military CommandState Power Power: 89
  Ptolemy I Soter (367 BCE – 282 BCE) was a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great who seized Egypt in the aftermath of Alexander’s death and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty.
• #11 Ptolemy II Philadelphus
  Egypt Imperial SovereigntyPolitical AncientAncient and Classical State Power Power: 84
  Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309 BCE – 246 BCE) was a Ptolemaic pharaoh who ruled Egypt during the period when the successor kingdoms of Alexander’s empire were still consolidating their borders, fiscal systems, and dynastic legitimacy.
• #12 Naguib Sawiris
  Egypt TechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Technology Platforms Power: 80
  Naguib Sawiris (born 1954) is an Egyptian businessman and investor known for building telecommunications and media holdings through the Orascom group of companies and for later cross-border investments in mobile operators, cable and broadcast outlets, and commodities. He became prominent during a period when mobile telephony expanded rapidly across emerging markets, a business environment in which influence depends not only on engineering and finance but also on the ability to secure spectrum licenses, negotiate with regulators, and operate in political contexts where telecommunications are treated as strategic infrastructure. His career is often discussed as a case study in technology platform control because telecom networks are platforms in a literal sense: they mediate communication, shape the reach of digital services, and create gatekeeping power over access, pricing, and market entry.
• #13 Antiochus IV Epiphanes
  EgyptIranian plateauJudeaSeleucid EmpireSyria Imperial SovereigntyPolitical AncientAncient and Classical State Power Power: 77
  Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 215–164 BCE) was a Seleucid king who reigned from 175 to 164 BCE. A younger son of [Antiochus III the Great](https://moneytyrants.com/antiochus-iii-the-great/)
• #14 Nassef Sawiris
  EgyptInternational FinancialFinancial Network Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 72
  Nassef Onsi Sawiris (born 1961) is an Egyptian businessman and investor who became one of the most internationally connected members of the Sawiris family’s construction-and-industrial dynasty. He rose through Orascom Construction and later led and reshaped OCI, a business group that combined construction, cement, chemicals, and fertilizer-linked holdings through a series of restructurings that placed key assets under Dutch and other international corporate frameworks. Over time he developed a diversified investment posture through family office structures, taking large stakes in global public companies and building a profile in sports ownership.
• #15 Samih Sawiris
  EgyptEurope IndustrialIndustrial Capital Control 21st Century Industrial Capital Power: 72
  Samih Sawiris (born 1957) is an Egyptian-Montenegrin businessman and resort developer best known for building large-scale destination projects through Orascom Development, a company associated with integrated towns and tourism real estate in Egypt and Europe. His influence is rooted in the industrial capital control logic of master-planned development: securing land, permits, and long-horizon financing, then coordinating construction, hotels, services, and sales under a single developer-led plan.