Long Scale Billionaires/short Scale Trillionaires
In countries that use the long scale number naming system, a billionaire would have one million million (1,000,000,000,000) units of currency. Under the short scale number naming system, an individual with such a fortune would be a trillionaire. There are no known euro or U.S. dollar trillionaires – in U.S. dollars, such a fortune would be roughly equivalent to the entire 2010 gross domestic product of Mexico. However, some individuals have attained fortunes of over one trillion units in other currencies. According to VnExpress, 9 Vietnamese had stock market assets valued at over one trillion đồng (US$47.5 million) by the end of 2011. According to the Korea Herald, there were 16 Koreans with stock market assets valued at over one trillion won (US$895 million) on March 9, 2012. According to the Jakarta Globe, 116 Indonesians had assets worth over one trillion rupiah (US$117 million) in 2011.
In countries affected by severe hyperinflation, some individuals can become trillionaires as currency units are printed in larger and larger denominations, although in such cases the currency itself quickly becomes virtually worthless.
Read more about this topic: Billionaire
Famous quotes containing the words long, scale and/or short:
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)