History Main / ZillionDollarBill

* During the 2008 financial crisis, Mitsubishi agreed to bail out Morgan Stanley with a capital infusion of $9 billion; such an amount would ordinarily have been wire-transferred, but banks were closed on Columbus Day and Morgan Stanley was literally hours away from collapse, so Mitsubishi sent a courier ''with a physical check'' for the amount. According to Andrew Sorkin's ''Film/TooBigToFail'', the Morgan Stanley executive who accepted the check nearly had a nervous breakdown (despite being fully briefed in advance on what he was receiving), and had to walk ''very'' carefully into the firm's Wall Street offices to deposit the check in the firm's secure vault. This example might have been listed under GiantNoveltyCheck, except that the check was neither oversized nor a gag.

* In ''Film/TheMightyQuinn'', a local beach bum comes across a suitcase filled with 10,000 bills, part of a bigger murder mystery the police chief Quinn is investigating.

* ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck''

* ''Series/GilligansIsland'': In "the Sweepstakes", Gilligan wins a million-dollar sweepstakes and is invited to the Howell's country club. After feeling lonely he issues [=IOUs=] to the others so they may also attend. He quickly misplaces the wining ticket and they all get evicted.

-> ''" It was a strange collection, like Billy Bones’s hoard for the diversity of coinage, but so much larger and so much more varied that I think I never had more pleasure than in sorting them. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that my back ached with stooping and my fingers with sorting them out."''

* [[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/trillion-dollar-coin-solution_n_2426333.html The trillion dollar coin idea,]] a proposal to solve an impended debt ceiling crisis by minting a $1 trillion platinum coin, exploiting the fact that by law the US Mint can make platinum coins (and ''only'' platinum coins) with any face value it sees fit and without regard to the bullion value of the platinum. All other types of coins are strictly regulated by acts of Congress, but for whatever reason the Mint was given carte blanche to do as it pleases with regard to platinum. Ultimately, Congress backed down from its threat to let the debt ceiling be breached (and thereby cause the United States to go into default for the first time in history), and nothing more has been heard of the hypothetical $1 trillion coin.

* The British treasury printed nine £1 million banknotes after WWII. They served as aid payments to Europe after the war. According to OldMoney (and Website/TheOtherWiki), they still do print notes of values £1 million (giants) and £100 million (titans) - but they serve to [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21145103 guarantee]] banknotes issued by Scottish and Northern Irish commercial banks, and never enter consumer circulation.

* During the Tokugawa era in Japan, there existed a large gold coin called ''Ōban'' with a weight of 165 grams of ~85% gold, equivalent to ten ''Ryo'' — a monetary unit corresponding to the cost of one ''Koku'' (or ~220 liters/200 kg) of rice, an amount consumed by a person in a year. Thus, ''Ōban'' was basically the equivalent of 2 tons of rice. Today its worth in the gold alone would be ~$7,000, or, given the current bulk price of quality Japanese rice of ~$5 per kilo, $10,000.

* In the ancient times, there was the [[https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(measurement) talent.]] Its actual value depends on interpretation; one time it was the amount of silver needed to pay the entire crew of a warship for a month, or 33kg or more of gold. Either way, the message is clear: it's a boatload of money.

* In ''VideoGame/EarthBound'', you are at one point given ten thousand dollars in cash and later an extremely valuable diamond, both of which you must use shortly afterwards to get the band known as the Runaway Five out of a bum contract. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson the first time.

* William Pene Dubois' ''The Twenty-One Balloons'' takes place in a balloon-mad society located on an island containing a large number of sizable diamonds. They sell the smaller ones in limited numbers to fund everything without collapsing the market. Too bad the island in question is Krakatoa and it's right before the eruption... (in the introduction Dubois mentions several similarities between the book and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and his conclusion that there are very few sensible things to do with a very large diamond).

[[folder:Radio]]
* Parodied in ''Radio/TheGoonShow'' episode "The Million Pound Penny", in which Neddy Seagoon owns a penny that has been left a million pounds in a relative's will. Not surprisingly this ends in disaster.