He spent his money on people, not property

The first Muslims were not all merchants and clan leaders. Several were enslaved, and they had no family strong enough to shield them. When it became known that they had accepted Islam, they were punished in public, partly to break them and partly as a warning to everyone watching.

Bilal ibn Rabah was one of them. He was enslaved to a man of Quraysh, and the reports of what was done to him under the Makkan sun are among the hardest passages in the early biographies.

Abu Bakr bought him and set him free. And Bilal was not the only one — the sources describe him doing this repeatedly, using his own wealth to purchase enslaved Muslims and then release them.

It is worth sitting with what that meant in Makkah. Wealth was status, and status was safety. He was spending his down, deliberately, on people who could give him nothing back. The biographies describe him as having far less by the time he left Makkah than when he began; the specific sums that circulate in popular retellings are not something SahabaMate can stand behind.