Dollar Billionaire

By Deane Barker tags: idiom, wealth
Updates
This content has been updated 1 time since it was first published. The last update happened .

This presumably refers to a person who has wealth equivalent to a billion U.S. dollars (as opposed to a billion units of some other currency).

I went looking for some validation of this, but I didn’t find any explicit definitions. What I did find were a lot of contextual quotes indicating this was the correct definition.

When anyone around the world speaks of a “billionaire,” you should technically ask “a billion of what currency?,” though it’s likely commonly accepted to mean “dollar billionaire” when used in English.

Why I Looked It Up

I heard the word at a conference in London. A Russian speaker said something like:

He became a billionaire… a dollar billionaire.

It had never occurred to me that someone might claim to be a billionaire but really just have a billion units of some other currency. While they wouldn’t technically be lying, they couldn’t be considered a “billionaire” in the colloquial sense.

I set out to find the cheapest currency in the world, in which you could technically claim billionaire status. As of this writing it’s the Iranian Rial – you could be an Iranian billionaire (a “rial billionaire”) and only have about $24,000 U.S. dollars.

Update

Added on

The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade mentioned “peso millionaire/billionaire” in a couple of places.

Links to this – What I'm Doing Right Now August 31, 2024
Personal We traveled to Des Moines for the baby shower for our upcoming grandson. We had a lovely time. Driving across the Midwest is one of my favorite things to do. Isabella is back to college this month for her junior year. Gabrielle started working in the NICU this month. She’s working three...