I was intrigued to see that the word "millionaire" was first used in 1719 in French, used in English in a letter by Thomas Jefferson in 1786, and first used in print in 1826 (in a novel by Benjamin Disraeli).
Many of us bandy about the word while thinking of it in absolute terms, but actually I believe very few here are real millionaires in the original sense.
According to Wikipedia (and I don't think the calculations are far off), a million US dollars in 1900 is equivalent to $28,400,000 in 2015:
Similarly, the first actual US dollar billionaire was John D. Rockefeller in 1916. As of last year, there were 1,826 US dollar billionaires worldwide according to Forbes, with the largest number (536) of them in the USA.
Kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it. Most of us are comfortable, and many of us are quite well off, but I think we clearly recognize that we're not in that class. How many helipads does your megayacht offer?
Many of us bandy about the word while thinking of it in absolute terms, but actually I believe very few here are real millionaires in the original sense.
According to Wikipedia (and I don't think the calculations are far off), a million US dollars in 1900 is equivalent to $28,400,000 in 2015:
- $24,766,584.77 using the consumer price index,
- $21,224,697.05 using the GDP deflator,
- $61,441,702.95 using gold[14]
- $114,128,571.43 using the unskilled wage,
- $162,813,054.25 using the nominal GDP per capita,
- $641,531,874.47 using the relative share of GDP,
Similarly, the first actual US dollar billionaire was John D. Rockefeller in 1916. As of last year, there were 1,826 US dollar billionaires worldwide according to Forbes, with the largest number (536) of them in the USA.
Kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it. Most of us are comfortable, and many of us are quite well off, but I think we clearly recognize that we're not in that class. How many helipads does your megayacht offer?