S1 EP.2 – Doom owes $200 – A Review of billionaires in comics pt.2

The guys (Kareem, Ken, and Pat) continue their conversation about what money means in comics. Tangents include Tony Stark wearing Walmart sweatpants, Like Cage the loan officer, magic money vs. science, and more.

Show Notes

A Billion is…How Much Again?

The problem with the idea of being a billionaire is that most people don’t quite understand exactly how much money a billion dollars, pounds, or euros is. That is a thousand million dollars. Do you know how long it would take you to spend that kind of money?

Let’s put it into perspective — it would take you 274 years to spend 10,000 dollars a day. Most people don’t live past 90.

Topic 1: Duration:30-45 mins

1. Main point – the history behind billionaire

A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least one billion (1,000,000,000, i.e., a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, the euro, or the British pound.
The American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first confirmed U.S. dollar billionaire in 1916, and still holds the title of history’s second wealthiest individual.[2] – He retains this title despite the battle between Gates, Bezos and Musk through adjusted inflation – modern period, wealth can be measured more or less objectively via inflation adjustment, e.g. comparing the nominal GDP of the United States of the respective periods, and then converting it into contemporary United States dollars.
More recently, in 2017 an Oxfam report noted that just eight billionaires have as much net worth as “half the human race”.[6][7] However, the Oxfam report has been criticized for considering debt as negative wealth, which leads to wealthy people with large amounts of debt to be considered poor or not wealthy.[21]
In 2019, 19 people became billionaires. Four of the members joined as a result of death or divorce, including Julia Koch and Jeff Bezos’s former wife Mackenzie Bezos.[22]
New members now also include more and more women. In the last five years, the number of female billionaires has grown by 46 percent, that is more than the number of male billionaires in the same period (39 percent). There are now 233 female billionaires in the world, a steep growth from 160 in 2013.[9]

The growth of international Billionaires

The 1970s saw something of an explosion in the number of billionaires worldwide. Americans such as John Donald MacArthur, David Rockefeller, Daniel Keith Ludwig and Ross Perot (briefly) joined the ranks, as did several Middle Eastern oil tycoons, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi (pictured), France’s Jean-Baptiste Doumeng and possibly Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, who owned swathes of the British colony by 1979.
At this time Japan was nearing the height of an asset price bubble, during which real estate and stock market prices mushroomed. So perhaps unsurprisingly the world’s richest person in 1987 was Japanese property investor Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who was worth $20 billion, the equivalent of $45 billion (£35bn) today. Tsutsumi was followed by fellow countryman Taikichiro Mori, whose fortune that year was estimated at $15 billion, the same as $34 billion (£26bn) in 2019.
In fact, Japanese billionaires dominated the 1987 top 10, filling six spots, and US billionaires didn’t feature in the global round-up. In fact, it would be at least another 10 years before they would be included in the list. Other notable billionaires featured in the first full list included Swedish-born packaging tycoons Hans and Gad Rausing, Canada’s Reichmann brothers and notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (pictured).