no really, billion has different meaning around the world. personally I’m a fan of gigabucks, way shorter to say than “billions of dollars”

Amusingly I think he'd understand your request at least...

Have you genuinely never seen people refer to, say, $10k to mean ten thousand dollars? It's very common.

Is a billion a million million, or one followed by twelve noughts (1,000,000,000,000) or is a billion a thousand million?

Same thing for a trillion. I think the first is or maybe was a UK'ism. Maybe the rest of the world does that too?

"billion" in the US means 10^9, but in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, etc means 10^12.

Trillion means 10^12 in the US but means 10^18 in the above places.