# Who is the most overrated figure in history?

> Reputations built on other people's work, other people's poems and a few well-placed memoirs. Nobody here is a nobody, which is what makes it an argument.

*By YPB Team · Published August 18, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-overrated-figure-in-history*

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## Current results (3 votes)

1. **Christopher Columbus** — 100% (3 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Credited with a discovery he did not make, in a place he misidentified until he died.
2. **Thomas Edison** — 0% (0 votes · score 600/1000)
   Held over a thousand patents and a reputation for taking credit earned in his own workshops.
3. **Ferdinand Magellan** — 0% (0 votes · score 551/1000)
   Credited with the first circumnavigation despite dying less than halfway round.
4. **Marie Antoinette** — 0% (0 votes · score 494/1000)
   Remembered for a sentence she never said and a frivolity her letters do not support.
5. **Cleopatra** — 0% (0 votes · score 494/1000)
   Famous for a beauty no contemporary described and remembered mostly through Roman propaganda.
6. **Alexander the Great** — 0% (0 votes · score 350/1000)
   Inherited the best army in the world from his father and is rarely asked to share the credit.
7. **Paul Revere** — 0% (0 votes · score 257/1000)
   One of several riders that night, and the only one Longfellow put in a poem.
8. **Richard the Lionheart** — 0% (0 votes · score 257/1000)
   England's warrior-king icon who spent about six months of a ten-year reign in the country.
9. **Napoleon Bonaparte** — 0% (0 votes · score 257/1000)
   Brilliant at sixty battles and remembered less for the two that finished him.
10. **Nikola Tesla** — 0% (0 votes · score 257/1000)
   A genuinely great engineer turned into an internet saint who supposedly invented everything.
11. **Julius Caesar** — 0% (0 votes · score 257/1000)
   Wrote the definitive account of his own campaigns, which is one way to secure a reputation.
12. **Henry Ford** — 0% (0 votes · score 257/1000)
   Did not invent the car or the assembly line, but got his name on both.
13. **Winston Churchill** — 0% (0 votes · score 143/1000)
   Topped a national poll of greatest Britons, and remains the subject of the fiercest reputational argument of any of them.
14. **Amelia Earhart** — 0% (0 votes · score 143/1000)
   A real pioneer whose fame rests more on how she disappeared than on what she flew.

Tags: all-time, overrated