Billionaire

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For other uses see Billionaire (disambiguation).

A billionaire is a person who has a net worth of at least one billion units of currency, such as United States Dollars (USD), Pounds or Euros.

Though a "billion" used to be a million million in much of the Commonwealth of Nations, the American version (one thousand million) is commonplace now; so in Britain a billionaire is someone with a net worth of at least 1,000,000,000 British Pounds. [1] According to Forbes Magazine, the year 2006 saw not only the biggest increase in billionaires around the world, but also was witness to the biggest economic expansion in history. It is believed that in that period, the world economy grew at an extraordinary rate of 25%. The two cities that seem to have the largest concentration of billionaires are New York and London.

[edit] Trends

The first Forbes ranking of billionaires in 1986 found 140 billionaires around the world. The 2007 Forbes ranking counted a total of 946 whose accumulated wealth measured US$3.5 trillion.[2] John D. Rockefeller was the first billionaire in 1916.

[edit] See also

• Lists of billionaires
• List of countries by the number of billionaires
• Pareto distribution
• Gini coefficient