Everyone knew late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was rich—he had a gun made of gold! But he might have been even richer than anyone thought—like, net-worth-of-$200-billion rich, making him the richest person on the planet. Gaddafi was the .0000001%!

"Senior Libyan officials" tell the Los Angeles Times that between investments, real estate, and bank accounts, Gaddafi had about $200 billion in assets, more than twice as much as most people thought and some $125 billion more than Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, whom Forbes estimates to be the world's wealthiest person. Investigators had found about $67 billion Europe and America, and expected that he had "perhaps another $30 billion elsewhere in the world"; as it turns out (assuming the new estimates are correct) he was sending "tens of billions more abroad over the years," and was apparently a decent investor.

Of course, the money wasn't technically his, except that it basically was:

Most of the money was under the name of government institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority, the Libyan Foreign Bank, the Libyan National Oil Corp. and the Libya African Investment Portfolio. But investigators said Kadafi and his family members could access any of the money if they chose to.

It's unclear how much the Libyan government will be able to recover, thanks to "legal barriers created by a U.N. freeze on Libyan assets and national laws designed to ensure seized assets are only released to the legal owner."

[LAT]