Everyone Has a Wealth Number. What’s Yours?
Our new index gives everyone in the world a number, from -2 to 11.
The world needs a more precise way to describe wealth. “Millionaire” is too broad, covering everyone from random pikers with a scant $1 million in net worth all the way up to people just shy of billionaire status. “Billionaire” has the same problem. There’s a huge difference between your local anonymous rich person who just clears the $1 billion mark and, say, Jeffrey Bezos or Bill Gates. The language down the scale of wealth is even more impoverished. “Thousandaire” isn’t even an accepted word, let alone “hundredaire.” Yet that’s the net worth space where most of us live.
We have a solution. It’s a scale of net worth based on scientific notation, or powers of 10, which you (should have) learned in fifth grade. One million is 10 to the sixth power, so a basic millionaire is a 6 on our scale. Bezos and Gates are 11s. At the poor end of the scale, someone with $1 in net worth is a zero, and someone with 1/10th of a dollar (a dime) to his or her name is a -1.