This essay originally published in the Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
Just how rich is “Super Rich”? In 1968, Fortune declared that the goalpost had moved from a person being worth $50 million—its previous standard, set in a 1957 article—to being a “centimillionaire,” with a net worth of more than $100 million. Writer Arthur M. Louis noted: “The very word ‘millionaire’ is seldom used nowadays; indeed, it has an almost quaint sound.”
Louis cataloged a number of the newly minted centimillionaires of the 1960s, including the HP founders and tech legends William R. Hewlett and David Packard. Their origin story—”The pair’s capital investment at the start was only $538, including a drill press, which they operated in Packard’s one-car garage”—has become a sort of archetype for today’s tech-startup founders.
But those seminal Big Tech figures were not cultivating the kind of celebrity status that comes with being super rich in the 2020s. Today, the centibillionaire Elon Musk (worth an estimated $470 billion) is projected to become the first trillionaire within two years. In the age of the influencer, business big shots such as Musk, Mark Cuban, and, yes, Donald Trump have become celebrities on the strength of their acquisition of wealth.
But back in 1968 Fortune quoted centimillionaire Albert Buehler of the calculator maker Victor Comptometer, as scoffing, “The really wealthy…are quiet, and don’t flash their money around.” Even using clout to get a table at an in-demand restaurant seemed excessive to Buehler: “I’m content…to sit over in the corner and wait my turn,” he explained. By contrast, a few years ago, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (current net worth: upwards of $200 billion) had a historic bridge in the Netherlands temporarily dismantled so that his $500 million superyacht could set sail.
The days when the super rich thought demanding restaurant tables was an overreach now seem, well, quaint.
