“Money can’t buy you happiness,” rocker David Lee Roth once noted, “but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.” Which is all well and good until another, bigger yacht pulls up next to yours, then poaches your captain and half the crew. In a more-is-more world, the billionaires obviously come out ahead—or do they? As we’ve seen with a few high-profile meltdowns from extremely high-net-worth public figures, a Scrooge McDuck–size vault of cash doesn’t exactly guarantee bliss (or perspective). The tension between the two groups was perfectly summed up by another music legend, the Notorious B.I.G., in the title of his 1997 banger: “Mo Money Mo Problems.”
Millionaires | Billionaires |
STACKING PAPER In dollar bills, a million bucks would reach 358 feet into the air—nearly as tall as the Miami-Dade County Courthouse. | STACKING PAPER In singles, $1 billion gets you to 68 miles above the Earth. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin flights don’t even go that high. |
There are 59.4 million millionaires around the world—slightly more than the population of Italy. | SQUAD SIZE 2,781. Spinal Tap has had more drummers. |
New York City has 349,500 millionaire residents, the highest number of any municipality in the world—and one for every 24 people in the Big Apple. | WHERE DO THEY LIVE? Over two percent of the world’s billionaires live in the Bay Area, which explains those Bi-Rite prices. |
Some estimates clock global millionaires’ combined wealth at $208 trillion. | AVAILABLE BALANCES According to the 2024 Forbes World’s Billionaires List, the whole group is only worth around $14.2 trillion. |
COULD BLOW THE WHOLE WAD ON A Jacob & Co. Mystery Tourbillon watch. The reference set with diamonds and yellow sapphires costs exactly $1 million before taxes. | COULD BLOW THE WHOLE WAD ON A pro-sports franchise.* *If you consider the Ottawa Senators a “prosports franchise.” |
“The first million is the hardest.” – Drake, via Twitter (now X), 6:14 a.m., May 30, 2012 | ON THE SOCIALS “The first billion is a helluva lot harder.” – T. Boone Pickens, via Twitter (now x), 8 p.m., May 30, 2012 |
HOBBIES Golf, wine collecting, competing for the right private schools, around-the-world air cruises, crypto speculation, snagging reservations at Dorsia. | HOBBIES Polo, biohacking, competing for the America’s Cup, space exploration, stress-testing democracy. |
