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Today’s Answers
The first question today is related to the date, 29 September. The remainder are not date-related but follow-on from number one.
One
On this day newspapers proclaimed the world’s first billionaire. Who was this billionaire and in what year were these stories published?
Answers: John D. Rockefeller; 1916.
In 1916, John D. Rockefeller was reported as the world’s first billionaire. Yet the claim remained uncertain. A sudden rise in the value of his oil holdings the day before seemed to push his wealth beyond $1 billion. Newspapers tracked his fortune like a baseball box score, though no exact count existed. Reporters had to estimate his assets and their value, making the billion-dollar figure an informed guess.
Two
Tech billionaire Bill Gates had a lakeside mansion built in Medina, Washington. A Wikipedia article about the house refers to it as follows:
Some news articles call the house Xanadu 2.0, a reference to the motion picture …, which was itself a reference to the opening lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem …
— Wikipedia
What 1941 movie and poem published in 1816 are missing from this quote?
Answers: Citizen Kane; Kubla Khan.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
— Kubla Khan. Poetry Foundation
Newsreel Narrator: [at beginning of newsreel on Charles Foster Kane’s death] In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.
— Citizen Kane. IMDb
Three
Which is the nearest planet to the Sun whose average orbital distance is more than one billion miles? This planet has only been explored by one spacecraft (in 1986): what spacecraft?
Answer: Uranus; Voyager 2.
Uranus is the third largest planet in our solar system. It’s about four times wider than Earth, and has an equatorial diameter of about 31,763 miles (51,118 kilometres). Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, orbiting at an average distance of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometres). It’s about 19 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The exploration of Uranus has been limited to telescopes and a single flyby by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1986. During this mission, the spacecraft discovered 10 new moons and two new rings, studied the planet’s atmosphere, and imaged its five largest moons.
Four
What now deceased billionaire bought the island of Skorpios in the Ionian Sea in 1963; and who did this billionaire marry on the island in 1968?
Answers: Aristotle Onassis; Jacqueline Kennedy.
Skorpios, a private Ionian island bought by Aristotle Onassis in 1963, hosts three residences and hosted his 1968 wedding to Jacqueline Kennedy, former First Lady of the United States. After Onassis’s death, ownership passed to Christina and then Athina Onassis.
Five
In January 2025, an American tech company saw the largest one-day loss in market capitalisation for a U.S. company in history. What company and how much was that loss?
Answers: Nvidia; $600 billion.
By 7 January 2025, Nvidia’s $3.66 trillion market cap exceeded double the combined value of AMD, ARM, Broadcom and Intel. That month, DeepSeek’s V3 model caused Nvidia’s record $600 billion one-day loss; its AI assistant overtook ChatGPT on Apple’s App Store.
