As long as we're in the pedantic mode: "More than a billion" could mean from 1 billion up to 1.99 billion. You need at least 2 billions to be able to add the -s
The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.
To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.
Which is all rather not the point because that's not what I said. I said "Billions have been lifted out of poverty." The meaning of that statement is: "the count of people who have been lifted out of poverty is measured with the 'billion' unit." That even includes 1 billion, exactly. If I had said "it numbers in the thousands", then 1,000 would have been an acceptable value, as would 9,9999.
But see my other comment. The number of people in India and China who have been lifted out of poverty in the last ~50 years or so is much more than a billion.
> To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.
To be pedantic, “billions” is used without a specific number as a general measure of broad scale, but with any specific number, it is just “billion”, not “billions”. “billions of dollars” is fine, but “1.0000000001 billion” or “2 billion” or “999.999999999 billion”; none of the last three take an “s” at the end.
The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.