Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. Who was the first billionaire?

[NEW YORK] On Friday (Jun 12), the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, became its first trillionaire, following a record-setting initial public offering from SpaceX, his rocket and artificial intelligence company.

The company ended the day valued at more than US$2 trillion, pushing Musk’s net worth to US$1.2 trillion.

The milestone, which garnered international headlines, suggested a new era had arrived of frenzied market interest in tech and AI, and some were in the mood to party.

Executives from JPMorgan Chase, one of the banks involved in the IPO, planned to dine on tomahawk steaks before celebrating with a celestial light show atop the bank’s headquarters on Park Avenue in New York.

Others were less enthused about the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire.

“Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City wrote on the social platform X.

US Senator Elizabeth Warren, long a progressive critic of wealth inequality, posted on social media that the average US household would have to work more than 11 million years to attain Musk’s level of wealth.

It may be hard to imagine in a world of at least 3,300 billionaires – with more than 900 in the US alone – but not too long ago, no one had ever met a billionaire.

That changed on Sep 29, 1916.

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That day, John Rockefeller, the Gilded Age oil baron, became a billionaire, America’s and almost certainly the world’s first, according to Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State University who has studied the Gilded Age extensively.

A billion dollars in 1916 is worth more than US$30 billion today.

As The New York Times reported on its front page at the time, Rockefeller had achieved the milestone after a boom in Standard Oil stock pushed prices over US$2,000 per share.

And, much like the reaction to Musk, a public obsession with wealth – driven both by a desire for it and a loathing of its excesses – led to a fascination with Rockefeller’s new status, according to Prof Nichols, who noted that there were rankings of the rich at the time akin to the famed list maintained by Forbes.

“People really were thinking in the way that we do now as contemporaries about, ‘Oh, wow, now he’ll have 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, much the way many people today may find it hard to conceptualise a trillionaire.

“I think a billionaire then is like a trillionaire now,” Prof Nichols said. “You simply can’t fathom that many zeros.”

The average person on the street in 1916, he said, would not have been pleased that a billionaire had suddenly materialised on the national stage, he said, particularly during a political moment – the Progressive Era – in which the federal government was supposed to rein in extremes of wealth.

(Prof 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, which became quite valuable in the ensuing years.)

Roughly 100 years before Rockefeller, John Astor, who had made his fortune in New York City real estate, became America’s first millionaire.

When exactly he reached this milestone is a bit fuzzy, but Prof Nichols said it was most likely in the middle of his life, or roughly the 1820s.

By the time 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, Prof Nichols said, and Astor’s riches were not sensationalised like Rockefeller’s or Musk’s.

Few everyday people would have even known about the extent of Astor’s wealth.

Astor, of course, was not the last millionaire, and we have seen hundreds of Rockefellers in the US – at least in terms of their riches – since his death in 1937.

So when will we see another trillionaire?

Prof Nichols said that he thinks it will be soon and that AI will be the reason.

“I would suspect in the very near term we will see, through AI IPOs, another trillionaire,” he said. NYTIMES