4 ms·
Too good to be true (the overnight millionaire scam)
- gruseom 18y agoI find it interesting that the word "millionaire" still has the emotional allure it had in the 1920s, despite having deflated so drastically that "billionaire" would now be a more correct equivalent.
- netcan 18y agoPeople say 'multimillionaire' a lot now. In Ireland I think it has replaced millionaire which was always a favourite in that part of the world.
- mixmax 18y agoAgree - several of my friends are millionaires, but I don't consider them ultrarich. Neither do they sonsider themselves ultrarich.
- josefresco 18y agoUltrarich is a dumb word and means nothing. Sort of like a college kid saying everything is 'epic'. Ultrakill means more to me than ultrarich, at least I can define it.
- josefresco 18y agoWow, so you need to have 1 thousand million dollars to be considered ultra rich? I'll take 'only' 500 million and slum it then.
- gruseom 18y agoYou've got my point exactly backwards. You don't need a billion to hit "millionaire" status now, whereas (adjusting for inflation) you did when the word first became popular. Actually, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaires, inflation has been by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, rather than 3. That doesn't change the point. The reason "billionaire" comes up here is simply that we don't have a good word for money between 10^6 and 10^9, other than "multimillionaire" which is the same order of magnitude as "millionaire". The Wikipedia article lamely suggests "decamillionaire" and "hectomillionare", which only confirms that there aren't any words for this that actually get used.
- ojbyrne 18y agoSo the point of this article is "Don't listen to late night infomercials promising overnight wealth?" Is that anything other than obvious? In fact isn't there an obvious corollary involving not reading Seth Godin's blog posts?
- aneesh 18y agoAnd what part of this post isn't common sense?
- tlrobinson 18y agoI hope that most of us already realize this.