Who Cares about Millionaires?

The word millionaire is a marker for status. That some person has attained so much more than those around them.

But does it really mean anything – anymore?

A recent article about Bhad Bhabie seems to make it an achievement for her to be a multi-millionaire as an 18-year-old.¹

Money is not static. The price of a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas goes up year after year. Even the minimum wage goes up over time (albeit only when Congress passes a bill inching it upward).

Let’s take a look at iconic moments in the word’s history to get a better picture of what it really means.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

The show debuted in 1999 as a cultural phenomenon. It was the first U.S. television game show where the top prize was one million dollars and people were eager to see that first winner be crowned.

But, it was based on a British show of the same name that had a top prize of £1 million and started in 1998. The 2008 motion picture Slumdog Millionaire is about a contestant on the Indian version of the game show.

For the American show, John Carpenter won the top prize in 1999. By 2000, the prize format changed so every time there was no winner, the jackpot increased by $10,000 and one contestant won $1,860,000 in 2001.²

For this article, my best friend is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has a calculator available to anybody to find out how inflation of the Consumer Price Index changes the value of money over time from any point to any other point going back to 1913.³

The original prize of $1 million from 1999 would be $1,622,121.21 today and the top prize from 2001 would now be $2,870,466.82.

For the British prize of £1 million in 1998, that would be converted at the time to $1,650,000 and that value today would be worth $2,746,676.52.⁴

James Bond & Austin Powers

In an infamous scene from the movie Austin Powers, Dr. Evil announces his plan to set off a nuclear bomb in the center of the earth that will cause all the volcanoes in the world to erupt — unless the world pays a ransom of One Million Dollars!!!!⁵

Austin Powers was a parody of the James Bond franchise and this part of the story was a play on the movie Thunderball, where the evil organization SPECTRE steals two nuclear weapons and demands a ransom or a major city in the United States or United Kingdom would be destroyed. But the ransom in this 1965 movie was £100 million.⁶

It was a really clever joke to make where $1 million back in 1967 seemed like a lot of money, but was laughable in 1997 (when the movie was released and set).

So, here we have 3 values to figure out:

• What was $1 million from 1967 worth in 1997?
• What is $1 million from 1967 worth today?
• What is £100 million from 1965 worth today?

The first two come out to be Dr. Evil’s one million dollars ransom demand converted to $4,805,389.22 back in 1997 and would be equivalant to $8,173,742.51 today.

The other value needs an extra step of converting from Great Britain Pound Sterling to United States Dollars. But, it should be converted using not the current exchange rate, but the rate at the time. According to fxtop.com (a historical foreign exchange rate website), the exchange rate for GBP to USD was about 2.8 throughout the 1950s until about 1968. So, we can convert $280 million from 1965 to today’s value of $2,419,013,924

Mr. Burns from The Simpsons

In The Simpsons, Mr. Burns is the town’s ultra-rich nuclear power baron. And in one of the most iconic episodes, Homer at the Bat from 1992, he is eating at a restaurant called The Millionaire’s Club and makes a bet with another wealthy businessman for $1 million over who will win a softball game.⁷

That bet today would be worth $1,969,718.61.

TV Land Classic Rich Guys

There are two theme songs that pop into my brain that include a millionaire in the song. From the wonderfully titled theme song, The Ballad of Jed Clampett, we learn that the oil reserve our main character discovers on his property means that now, “Ole Jed’s a millionaire.” And in the similarly-titled theme song – but somehow seemingly bland – The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island, the cast is listed off including Thurston Howell the Third as “A Millionaire” (and his wife).

The first episode of The Beverly Hillbillies aired in 1962, so the Clampett fortune in today’s value would be somewhere between $220 million and $8.9 billion. Gilligan’s Island first aired in 1964, and there also isn’t a specific value to calculate for Thurston Howell III, but it would be almost certainly slightly less than the values for Jed Clampett.

The Millionaire

In the 1950s, there was a show on CBS called The Millionaire where a wealthy benefactor gave away $1 million to a chosen stranger each episode. Some guest stars on the show were Betty White, Mary Tyler Moore, Dennis Hopper, and Charles Bronson.¹⁰

$1 million from the first episode in January 1955 would be worth $10,224,831.46 today.

Peak Millionaire

So, it seems like the end of the millennium and the 1950-60s were big cultural points for the word “millionaire”. But were either of those the cultural apex for the word?

Google has a nifty tool that lets you track words or phrases they have scanned into their Google Books platform, called the Ngram Viewer.¹¹

As you can see, 1905 was actually the most popular point in time for the word “millionaire” to be used in print. Since this is before the data began from the BLS, I had to turn to another data source for the decade before the CPI started being tracked.

Using this data, $1 million from the peak point of the word “millionaire” in 1905 would be worth $31,023,068.18 today.

And that makes sense as a measure of real wealth. Many financial planners have said you need to save more than $1 million in order to retire comfortably. And if $1 million is just a signal that you can retire comfortably – it really is not a measure of wealth or status. But $30 million does get up to that elite status. That kind of buying power would let you have more than one luxury house, be able to travel the world often, and still have money free to put in investments to keep you living comfortably into the future.

Sources

1. Variety- Bhad Bharbie Multi-Millionaire Article
2. Wikipedia – Who Wants to be a Millionaire
3. BLS – CPI Calculator
4. FXTop- Historical Foreign Exchange Rates
5. Wikipedia- Austin Powers Movie
6. Wikipedia- James Bond Thunderball Movie
7. The Simpsons- Homer at the Bat
8. Beverly Hillbillies 1st Episode Plot Summary
9. Wikipedia- Thurston Howell III 10. Wikipedia- The Millionaire (TV Show)
11. Google Books Ngram Viewer