Illustration: Kimberly Elliot for Bloomberg
What the First Billionaire Reveals About the First Trillionaire
As Elon Musk nears $1 trillion, the story of John D. Rockefeller shows how fortunes of that scale reshape markets, politics and public opinion.
We seem to be entering our trillionaire era. As recently as late 2017, no one on Earth had ever been worth more than $100 billion. Less than a decade later, 18 people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index clear that mark. A successful SpaceX initial public offering could make Elon Musk, whose fortune now tops $670 billion, the world’s first trillionaire. And at this rate, he may not be the last this decade.
If this feels unprecedented, it is. But it’s also reminiscent of another era. At the turn of the 20th century, bewildering social and technological changes, polarized politics and soaring wealth at the very top left Americans feeling anxious and confused. Among the concepts they struggled to grasp was the word “billion” itself. As the first billionaire fortune came into view, a newspaper noted in 1903 that a billion dollars is “as many dollars as there have been minutes since the dawn of Christianity.”