On Sat, 9 Nov 2019 03:27:23 -0600, Roscoe
wrote:

Bernie or Liz I think asked that and it got me thinking. A billion
is a thousand thousands. Does anyone really need to be a billionaire?
A thousand thousands is a MILLION.
It is a thousand MILLION that makes a billion, no?
1,000 is a thousand
1,000,000 is a MILLION
1,000,000,000 is a BILLION - at least in North America, today.
The following is gleaned from Wikipedia

1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the
twelfth power) is the historic definition of a billion in British
English.

Other countries such as the United States use the word billion (or
words cognate to it) to denote the billions as 1,000,000,000. For
details, see Long and short scales – Current usage.

Milliard, another term for one thousand million, is still found
occasionally in English, and is very common in most other European
languages.[1][2] For example, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian,
Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak,
Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian — use milliard (or a
related word) for the short scale billion, and billion (or a related
word) for the long scale billion. Thus for these languages billion is
thousand times larger than the modern English billion. However, in
Russian, while milliard (????????) is used for the short scale
billion, trillion (????????) is used for the long scale billion.

Also, under HISTORY:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word billion was
formed in the 16th century (from million and the prefix bi-, "two"),
meaning the second power of a million (1,000,0002 = 1012). This long
scale definition was similarly applied to trillion, quadrillion and so
on. The words were originally French, and entered English around the
end of the 17th century. Later, French arithmeticians changed the
words' meanings, adopting the short scale definition whereby three
zeros rather than six were added at each step, so a billion came to
denote a thousand million (109), a trillion (1012), and so on. This
new convention was adopted in the United States in the 19th century,
but Britain retained the original long scale use. France, in turn,
reverted to the long scale in 1948.[3] In Britain, however, under the
influence of American usage, the short scale came to be increasingly
used. In 1974, Prime Minister Harold Wilson confirmed that the
government would use the word billion only in its short scale meaning
(one thousand million). In a written answer to Robin Maxwell-Hyslop
MP, who asked whether official usage would conform to the traditional
British meaning of a million million, Wilson stated: "No. The word
'billion' is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it
would be confusing if British Ministers were to use it in any other
sense. I accept that it could still be interpreted in this country as
1 million million and I shall ask my colleagues to ensure that, if
they do use it, there should be no ambiguity as to its meaning