Gaius Appuleius Diocles Is The Highest Paid Athlete Of All Time Earning More Than $15B.

No. You can’t compare inflation this way. It’s unsound for a variety of reasons. A better way to do it is to look at purchasing power parity vs. today with goods that existed then and that exist now. Even that is by no means perfect, but it’s better than the garbage numbers from the article.

Diocles was indeed very wealthy, but at most (depending on how you do the calculations above), he won no more than $200 million or so in today’s money. He wasn’t even as rich as Michael Jordan or other top-earning athletes.