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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

James O’Keefe tweeted a response:

> Hitting export on hidden camera footage into Washington Post shortly. Project Veritas vs Bezos 100mm monopoly. Fasten your seatbelts.

https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/935266973176487936

EDIT: He posted the video, which is not a denial of the accusations in the WaPo article.

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100mm? The man doesn't understand units very well.

MM is commonly used in banking/finance for Million, and M is sometimes used for thousands (but sometimes millions, depending on the person). It's a mess in other words.

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182072

Yeah, but Bezos is worth 100 billion.

British English, MM means million.

Then he should've used capital letters. mm means millimeters.

Edit: you guys really will downvote anything, won't you?

In my experience it is pretty common to see it used both ways.

I'm not from the UK though, and why they would eschew the simple-and-obvious m and b suffixes in favor of alternatives, especially when Europeans love to lecture us about how metric is so neat and intuitive.

Probably has something to do with the root words -- mil means 'thousand' in a lot of latin languages, and a thousand is M in roman numerals, and I heard somewhere that "MM" stands for "mil mil" or "million million" which, in the context of M equaling 1,000, woudl make sense.

> why they would eschew the simple-and-obvious m and b suffixes in favor of alternatives

Because not everyone is an American. Those suffixes are not used in other countries.

Yes but in all English hundred means 100, thousand means 1000, million means 1000000. 'MM' means... what exactly? Without prior training, can you tell just by looking at it?

In accounting, M has long been used as 'thousand'. Therefore, MM was used for million, as it's a thousand thousand.

This is something that I didn't think would be this contentious. It's an old standard.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us...

This clarifies exactly... thanks for the link!

More troubling is 'm' being used to refer to thousands, when the rest of the English-speaking financial world uses 'k' (which also makes little sense to me)

> English-speaking financial world uses 'k' (which also makes little sense to me)

It likely comes from SI prefixes. While there's not a standard base unit for currency, the fact they work for so many other units lends them towards easily inferred usage when applied to others.

1: http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/measurement-units/si-prefixes...

k = kilo - prefix for one thousand.

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