You’ll Feel Like a Thousand Million Bucks Drinking the Swanky Billionaire Cocktail

Sunday Cocktail Corner is a series dedicated to finding just the right libation for the situation.

It’s now been two weeks since I opened Memorial Day weekend writing about how the definitive end of the Trump administration’s Iran War seemed to finally be in sight, toasting with a humble boilermaker, and yet here we are, half a month later, still very much at war, even if the country’s top administrators are desperate to avoid acknowledging this. In fact, our President taught us a whole new meaning to the term “ceasefire” this week when he revealed that in his mind, the word “ceasefire” actually implied still shooting at each other, but “shooting in a moderate manner,” a quote destined to join the wall of fame for the most purely absurd things that have come out of Trump’s mouth in the course of his presidencies.

The core holdup in actually bringing a real end to the war about? That would apparently be a mere dollar figure, albeit quite a large one: $24 billion. That’s the figure of frozen Iranian assets that negotiators are insisting must be returned to the country in order to secure any long-term peace deal, lest the United States “enter into a dark corridor” and resume more widespread, less “moderate” shooting. Military advisor Mohsen Rezaei reportedly told CNN that “the ball is in Trump’s court,” and Iran is waiting for the President to acquiesce to the return of their funds.

When talks are deadlocked over $24 billion and senior Iranian figures are warning of a wider war, you’re no longer watching diplomacy. You’re watching a high-stakes game where one bad calculation can redraw the entire region. Guess who has mastered bad calculations. Yeah. That guy.

— Jack Hopkins-The Original (@therealjackhopkins.bsky.social) 12:48 PM · Jun 5, 2026

The only issue, of course, is that as a billionaire Donald Trump has never paid anyone a dollar in his life if he can help it, and he’s also acutely aware of the bad optics of handing over $24 billion to Iran, even if it is simply unfreezing their own assets. After all, Trump spent more than a decade haranguing and criticizing President Barack Obama for the previous U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, which involved turning over $1.7 billion to the country as a settlement of a decades-old dispute over an unfulfilled pre-1979 arms deal between the two countries. Trump has for many years referred to this transaction as the U.S. and Obama delivering Iran “pallets of cash,” and now he’s trying to come to terms with the fact that he’s almost certainly about to agree to transfer 14 times more wealth to the same American enemy, minting a bunch of new Iranian billionaires in the process.

So obviously, there’s only one drink to mix up, in honor of this sticky monetary situation: The Billionaire Cocktail, created by Greenwich Village bar Employees Only.

The Billionaire, fittingly, is an evolution of a prior Prohibition-era cocktail called The Millionaire, itself created at a time when the idea of a single person possessing a billion dollars probably would have seemed impossible to the point of hyperbole. This being cocktail apocrypha, though, things obviously have to get a bit more complicated–there were in fact two Millionaire cocktails, known as the #1 and the #2. The #1 is an interesting sort of daiquiri mashup, featuring funky rum and lime juice, but also fruity sloe gin, apricot liqueur and grenadine. The more common Millionaire #2, on the other hand, is essentially a pleasantly pink and velvety smooth whiskey sour/fizz riff, combining bourbon with lemon juice, orange liqueur, grenadine, egg white and the piquant anise intensity of absinthe.

The Billionaire, meanwhile, simplifies the Millionaire #2 outline a little bit: It removes the orange liqueur and doubles down on the fresh citrus and grenadine combo, while using the absinthe to create a signature secondary flavor. The egg white is gone as well, making the drink less fluffy, and more fresh and bright. You’re left with something that is one part whiskey sour, one part pink, anise-infused whiskey daiquiri.

Billionaire Cocktail Recipe

— 2 oz bourbon (100 proof)
— 1 oz lemon juice
— .5 oz grenadine
— .5 oz simple syrup
— 2 dashes or 1 barspoon absinthe

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker/tin with plenty of ice. Shake well and strain into a cocktail coupe, martini glass or Nick & Nora. Alternatively, the drink could be served over a large ice cube. Garnish with a lemon wheel.

A note on absinthe: It’s an ingredient that few Americans, even cocktail enthusiasts know particularly well, beyond a salacious reputation and association with France’s Belle Epoque. Suffice to say, it’s not going to make you hallucinate–that’s ethanol’s job. Nor does absinthe tend to be cheap, but the thing is, you use it in cocktails in such tiny quantities–many bartenders put it in a bitters dasher for this reason–that a single bottle of it lasts effectively forever, unless you develop a taste for it on its own. A barspoon at a time in your zombie or Billionaire cocktail recipe? A bottle of this stuff could easily last a decade and be little worse for the wear, given that most are 120 proof or more. Absinthe is an investment worth making for the home bar, in other words.

Whether $24 billion is an investment worth making in Iranian peace, on the other hand, is a decision for Donald Trump to make, although it’s fitting that number is in the same ballpark as what the Pentagon readily admits we’ve already spent on the war. At least you don’t have to be a billionaire to get a little taste of the lifestyle via the Billionaire cocktail.