On Friday, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, became its first trillionaire after a record-breaking IPO of SpaceX, his rocket and artificial intelligence company.
The company ended the day valued at more than $2 trillion, pushing Mr. Musk’s net worth at $1.2 trillion.
The milestone, which garnered international headlines, suggested that a new era had arrived with frenzied market interest in technology and artificial intelligence, and some in the mood to party.
Executives from JPMorgan Chase, one of the banks involved in the IPO, planned to eat tomahawk steaks before celebrating with a celestial light show atop the bank’s headquarters on Park Avenue in New York.
Others were less enthusiastic about the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire.
“Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, long a progressive critic of wealth inequality, wrote on social media that the average American household would have to work more than 11 million years to reach Mr. Musk’s level of wealth.
It may be hard to imagine in a world with at least 3,300 billionaires — with more than 900 in the United States alone — but not so long ago, no one had ever met a billionaire.
That changed on September 29, 1916.
On that day, Gilded Age oil baron John D. Rockefeller became America’s and almost certainly the world’s first billionaire, according to Christopher McKnight Nichols, an Ohio State University history professor who has studied the Gilded Age in depth.
A billion dollars in 1916 is worth more than 30 billion dollars today.
As The New York Times reported on its front page at the time, Rockefeller had reached the milestone after a boom in Standard Oil stock pushed prices above $2,000 a barrel.
And like the reaction to Mr. Musk led a public obsession with wealth – fueled by both a desire for it and an abhorrence of its excesses – to a fascination with Rockefeller’s new status, according to Professor Nichols, who noted that there were rankings of the rich at the time, similar to the famous list maintained by Forbes.
“People really thought the way we do now as contemporaries, ‘Oh wow, now he’s getting twice as much as the next highest person on the list,'” he said.
People at the time most likely had no idea how wealthy a billionaire actually was, just as many people today may have a hard time imagining a billionaire.
“I think a billionaire then is like a trillionaire now,” Professor Nichols said. “You simply cannot grasp that many zeroes.”
The average person on the street in 1916, he said, would not have been happy that a billionaire had suddenly materialized on the national stage, he said, especially at a political moment — the Progressive Era — when the federal government had to rein in extremes of wealth.
(Professor Nichols pointed out that Rockefeller became a billionaire at least in part because he had been forced to break up Standard Oil in 1911 into dozens of smaller companies that became quite valuable in subsequent years.)
About 100 years before Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, who had made his fortune in real estate in New York City, became America’s first millionaire.
When exactly he reached this milestone is somewhat unclear, but Professor Nichols said it was most likely mid-life, or around the 1820s.
When he died in 1848, he was worth tens of millions of dollars.
The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few was less of a concern at the time, Professor Nichols said, and Astor’s riches were not sensational like those of the Rockefellers or Mr. Musk.
Few ordinary people would even have known the extent of Astor’s wealth.
Of course, Astor wasn’t the last millionaire, and we’ve seen hundreds of Rockefellers in the US – at least in terms of their wealth – since his death in 1937.
So when will we see another trillionaire?
Professor Nichols says he thinks it will be soon and that AI will be the cause.
“I would suspect that in the very short term through AIIPOs we will see another trillionaire,” he said.
