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Comment by vincentmarle | Hacker News Reader

M is the Roman numeral for 1000, so MM is a thousand thousands, in other words a million.

That's not how roman numerals work 22 MM is... 44,000 - though it seems like some Oil & Gas execs never got the memo and were using it as thousand thousands this is... sadness.

I believe the M (in $100M) also isn't based in roman numerals but is a convenient dual meaning of Mega- (the metric 10^6 prefix) and the first letter of million.

But doesn't MM mean 2000 in roman numerals?

It is an awkward notation. Nobody says 100M for $100,000, they say 100K. So why should 100 million be 100MM? It forces people to pause, and think unnecessarily.

I'm the opposite. If I see "10M" in financial docs, then I have to pause think about context. If I see "10MM" I'm certain that the author meant "million" and keep on reading.

Only if by Nobody you mean every person in the oil & gas industry. I find it funny that people get so worked up about different units in different industries. I get that common units would be great for a variety of reasons, but look around - the world can’t even unite on standard units for such tangible things as distance/length. People who work with MM as million are familiar with the vernacular, and it seems unreasonable for them to upend a model that works so a lay audience doesn’t have to pause and think.

I've been in the oil & gas industry for 20 years (IT side of things). We never use MM, I'm looking at last years half year results, and it's "m" across the board.

@overcast Interesting! US-based? How would you denote 1000 bbl/day? kbbl vs mbbl

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