[foobarian]

I hope people don't confuse the English billion (10^9) with the billion in some other countries (10^12) where they use "milliard" or similar for 10^9.

[profstasiak]

I think everyone with English as Second Language got used to that difference. Especially in startup world, or country economics billion is an often mentioned quantity of money

[ferrocarraiges]

I often wonder why people don't use SI prefixes for money.

We could say that they've spent on the order of 10 gigadollars.

[selfmodruntime]

I really like the idea of using gigadollars in daily conversations.

[brutusborn]

I've never seen anything but 10^9 used for billions in the modern era, although it is in some >100 y.o. text books. Have you seen 10^12 in the wild lately?

[mendigou]

Everywhere in Europe. Every European language other than English (that I know of) uses "billions" for 10^12 and something like "milliards" or "thousands of millions" for 10^9.

[foobarian]

And to make things worse all the names after million are offset. Trillion, quadrillion, etc.