On Sept. 29, 1916, a front-page story in The New York Times declared John D. Rockefeller the world’s first billionaire. Before 1900, there wasn’t even a consistent English definition of the word “billionaire.” Romaine Bostick explains how the internet boom of the 1990s opened the floodgates for a new breed of ultrawealthy, turning billionaires from a rare curiosity into their own identifiable class.

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