Millionaire is a 19th century relic. It's actually kinda cool that it stuck around though. We've had major inflation over the years but America never had the sort of hyperinflation that would have made millionaire an ironic term. Otoh when I was a kid my parents had billions in ruble-coupons and couldn't buy shit. So of course the word for a rich powerful guy we got out of it is oligarch. And to be honest with you an oligarch... or a magnate or tycoon... better captures what people generally intend to mean in terms of prestige and power when they talk about a m/billionaire. The cash valuation, the "money" isn't where the wealth actually resides with these people, it's control over assets and armies of people. Boiling down power to money is not quite it. Having a billion dollars liquid is like having a big tank of fuel. You can power a lot of shit with that much fuel but unless you power the right shit you can actually just run out. But having a billion dollars in assets is like owning an oil refinery on top of a big well of oil. The process of continous extraction and refinement, the industry fuels itself through its own industry. The colloquial millionaire who isn't an industrialist, just a man with a large fuel tank, is a man with a decent amount of finite power that can be exhausted if used without coherent or consistent intention. This is ultimately not a great power position as while liquidity has the highest amount of potential and the highest flexibility in its use cases, it has a tendency of being easy to drain and syphon. You can steal a million dollars, you can steal a million in gold bullion or you can steal a crypto wallet with a million dollars of bitcoin on it. You can also just lose it carelessly. But it's much harder to lose or misplace an oil refinery. Non liquid assets are more durable precisely because they are difficult to move and difficult to convert, and difficult also to maintain the value of through non-use. Cash liquidity is also easier to lose through inflation. Gold and silver resist the inflation of cash but their durability comes from being actual literal heavy metals, difficult to store, difficult to carry, etc. Crypto has some resistance to inflation but has highly variable price action and relies on some disciple in terms of storage, use, etc... crypto wealth can be lost by losing a usb or forgetting a password. But cash money though prone to inflation has the highest use flexibility and the least problems in storage. And in an interest bearing account it might even gain value... through its non-use. A proper "billionaire" whose worth is consistent and always rising exists in a capital ecology that people who aren't active capitalists rarely appreciate. A lack of wealth is a great constraint (please i need $500) but wealth is also has a great deal of necessary constraints. It is only through understanding those constraints that the wealthy remain wealthy. Failure to appreciate those constraints leads to the simpler constraint of a lack of wealth. Simplistic understandings of money shouldn't have a say in policy conversations because applying such simplistic reasoning to a power operation like the state will inevitably result in a loss of total capacity. Wealth is ultimately about possession of superior long term capacity. A million dollars is a lot of capacity. But each dollar spent is a dollar of capacity lost, unless that dollar is spent toward increasing your capacity by greater than one dollar. Money must be capitalized on to become true wealth. Thus the possession of a million dollars or even a billion dollars tells me nothing about a man's wealth, but possession of a billion dollars worth of assets in productive industries tells me a lot.... to be a millionaire from the lotto is a nice vacation from work but to be a wealthy capitalist is the full time job of putting money to work. Many don't know the difference, even if they're not strictly speaking poor. Sad state of affairs in America.
I hate the term millionaire so much
Yes, he made some good money but being a millionaire means Jack shit nowadays. It means you can own a house in a major metro area outright.