What is a Billionaire?
Defining the problem is a vital first step
When I first started diving into the power of billionaires (and how to counter that power) I thought it would be helpful to answer the journalists’ 5 Ws. This article is an attempt to answer the question of “What is a Billionaire?”
I mentioned before, when I explored Exponential Greed, that a Billionaire makes a good, tangible stand-in for the abstract notion of greed. This is true, but to be truly tangible and concrete the word needs a definition. So let’s define what it means to be a billionaire.
The Simple Answer
Actually, at its most basic level, Billionaire is a simple word to define. A Billionaire, according to my computer, is:
“Someone possessing at least a billion dollars worth of assets.”
Okay, that was easy. What’s the problem?
Well, there are a couple of problems. First, it might be very easy (and potentially not incorrect) to make the argument that simply having a billion dollars worth of assets isn’t such a big deal. Second, like an examination of greed (the billionaire’s abstract twin), defining billionaire will again require some exponential thinking.
So, we’ll address the first question, well, first. Let’s say the US rocks some post-World War II Hungarian inflation, and we print the dollar equivalent of the 100 Million Billion Pengo note (yes, that was a thing) with President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho on the front. If this were the case, being a billionaire would be meaningless. We’d all be billionaires, so it’s not really about the number it’s about what the number represents.
The Actual Answer
This is where the exponential thinking comes in, but please stay with me, this is important. Let’s dive just a little bit deeper into our definition. If a billionaire is someone with a billion dollars, what’s a dollar?
Let’s think of a dollar as a sliver of pie. In this case, the pie is our global economy. According to Credit Suisse’s 2019 Global Wealth Report, the total value of the World’s pie was $360 Trillion, which means that each dollar is one sliver of a pie with 360 trillion slivers (1/360,000,000,000,000th). So, a billionaire is someone who controls 1 billion of those 360 trillion slivers.
It is vital to point out that this 360 trillion includes the value of ALL assets, including those that are publicly held, meaning that a billionaire’s share of total private wealth is much, much higher.
Now we’re getting somewhere; being a billionaire is only relevant in relation to the total available wealth. Or, put another way, being a billionaire isn’t about how many dollars you have, it’s about how much of the world’s economy you control in relation to others.
So let’s talk about those slivers of control and how big they get.
As of mid-February 2025, according to Bloomberg magazine, Elon Musk controls about 348 billion slivers of the global pie (and that’s after seeing his net worth drop by $89 billion!). To try (and fail) to put that in perspective: if the global pie was split into equal Elon-sized slices, there would only be about 1000 slices of pie. Or for one last attempt at perspective, Elon Musk, one man, controls 1/1000th of the world’s economy. Even in comparison to the power of your run-of-the-mill, bare-minimum billionaire (1/360,000th), that is staggering.
That’s one person, but the billionaire problem isn’t about one person. As of 2024’s Forbes list, there were 2,781 billionaires worldwide with a combined net worth of about 14.2 trillion dollars! This is bewildering. Two thousand seven hundred eighty-one people, or about the number of people in two average city blocks in New York, control about 4% of the world’s total wealth (Remember, the percentage of private wealth is far, far higher)!
But that’s a story for another day. Today we just wanted to answer the question: What is a Billionaire? And I think our answer is this: A billionaire is a person who controls at least 1/360,000th of the slices of the world economic pie.