The history of billionaires

All right, time for a look back in history, way back in history to 1916. That's when a front page story in the New York Times declared John D. Rockefeller as the world's first billionaire. Now, while historians quibble as to whether the Times jumped the gun a bit on that declaration, Rockefeller's wealth was by any measure unimaginable for the time. Before 1900, there wasn't even a consistent Anglophone definition of the word billionaire. And in 1916, the second richest person at the time, Henry Clay Frick, his net worth, it was barely a quarter of Rockefeller's. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Vincent Astor, their net worths barely a tenth. In fact, almost 50 years later, in the late 1960s, there were still fewer than 10 billionaires worldwide. And in 1982, when Forbes started publishing its list of the 400 richest Americans, there were still only 13 billionaires named. But the computer age of the 1980s and the Internet boom of the 90s would open the floodgates for a new breed of ultra wealthy that vaulted billionaires from a rare curiosity to their own identifiable class. That was when wealth, which for decades had largely been determined by existing physical assets like property and machinery, shifted to more esoteric drivers like intellectual property and the future value of invention. The barometers of wealth moved off the balance sheet and into financial markets. It was in the 1990s that the number of billionaires globally surpassed 100 and by 08 surpassed 1000. Today, in 2025, there are more than 3000 confirmed billionaires, more than six times the number at the start of the current century. In fact, billionaire status, at least as a 10 figure number, that's almost passe. Now, in this new gilded age, it's all about 12 figures. The centibillionaire, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, became the first person ever to cross the 100 billion dollar threshold all the way back in 1999. Amazon's Jeff Bezos hit that milestone in 2017. And as of today, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows 17 people with 12 figure net worth. That includes Carlos Slim, Alice Walton, Jensen Wong and now Larry Ellison, a number that if history is any guide is almost certain to continue growing.