Remember when megabytes were a meaningful amount of memory? Then came gigabytes, terabytes, etc. As computers became more and more powerful, someone had to keep coming up with a name to represent the next order of magnitude of memory.
A similar phenomenon is happening now when we talk about money, or about people who have a lot of money. Wealthy The billionaire was an exalted figure that could be applied to anyone who was wealthy enough to act differently from the general public. There were a few billionaires in the 20th century, but they were very few.
But now, if you own a home, you're basically a millionaire, and there's so much of a word called millionaire. billionaireThe word “wealth,” which once referred to an incredibly rare disease, seems a bit flat and doesn't really convey the privilege and power that comes with having a net worth in the tens or even hundreds of billions.
So publications that write about such people need to update their terminology to keep up. One percent new WealthyBut that idea quickly faded as people realized that that 1 percent was actually several million people, most of whom were far from billionaires.
Principality of Monaco, Monte Carlo
in terms of serviceBecause analyzing the habits of the extremely wealthy is central to our mission, we have never provided a comprehensive representation of the 0.001 percent. When we write about the extremely wealthy, we focus on individuals and their families at a level of specificity that makes generalizations unnecessary.
So, too rich? billionaire not enough? Super rich? The ultra-rich? Hyper Rich? (Another candidate, Mega RichBeauty product marketers seem to make claims like “mega-rich facial serum.”
Recent New Yorker Book Review A favorite phrase for the history of the fabulously wealthy is Super rich (Hyphenated, because New YorkerThis makes even modern coins look archaic. The ultra-rich The article also mentions a Texan who recently gained $26 billion in wealth. Super-billionaireMaybe this is too nit-picky, but a super-billionaire is someone with a net worth of $100 billion, which means a quadrillionaire. We're not there yet.
of The New York Times In the style guide, Mega Sometimes used informally to imply large size (Huge amount, Mega Yachts, Megachurches), but any unit of measurement can be expressed as 1 million (Megabytes, Megaton, Megawatts). Times It prefers to be applied to the very wealthy, Super rich is the clear winner, Mega Rich Sometimes appearing The ultra-rich Mostly never.
of The Wall Street Journal It's a bit more balanced, Super rich and The ultra-rich It's used almost equally. Millionaire has also infiltrated. Hyper Rich Not used.
Of course, much of the vast amount of writing about the super-rich is about the elevator problems in their skyscrapers and how they still commute to work in old Toyotas. How we refer to them doesn't necessarily help us understand them.
James Rochert is the copy chief Town & Country.
