1990 — Art Davidson, In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez: The Devastating Impact of the Alaska Oil Spill, Sierra Club Books (1990), →ISBN, page xv:
To some, the spill becomes another gold rush: the spillionaires, as they come[sic] to be called, find they can make big money from Exxon's cleanup efforts.
1993 — Janet Trowbridge Bohlen, For the Wild Places: Profiles in Conservation, Island Press (1993), →ISBN, page 149:
"Spillionaires" made as much as half a million dollars that spring operating cleanup boats.
1994 — Christopher L. Dyer & James R. McGoodwin, Folk Management in the World's Fisheries: Lessons for Modern Fisheries Management, University Press of Colorado (1994), →ISBN, page 225:
People were cast as being greedy or labelled as "Exxon whores" or "spillionaires" as a result of their participation in the cleanup effort.
1999 — John Keeble, Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, Eastern Washington University Press (1999), →ISBN, page 180:
The quick, the rapacious, and the well-equipped had the advantage and became what were known as spillionaires. Outsiders arrived.
1999 — Harold A. Linstone, Decision Making for Technology Executives: Using Multiple Perspectives to Improve Performance, Artech House (1999), →ISBN, page 178:
The lavish clean-up effort poured large sums of money into the fishing villages, for example, $53 million worth of purchases and salaries into Valdez, a town of 3500 population. Local "spillionaires" were created while the influx of transients created problems ranging from crime to sewage.
2010 — Charles Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth, Thomas Dunne Books (2010), →ISBN, page 289:
As boats stayed out for weeks and months, often with hardly anything to do, life-changing sums of money accumulated; owners of big boats, or of more than one, became spillionaires.
The marina's manager, Chris Calloway, says that the only obvious evidence of the oil spill now are the new trucks and boats owned by the "spillionaires" — people who struck it rich by renting out their boats and land and services for BP's cleanup operation that lasted months.
2011 — David Gessner, The Tarball Chronicles: A Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill, Milkweed Editions (2011), →ISBN, page 20:
A few of the boat owners have managed to get rich by earning a couple grand or so a day to have their boats sit idle, as backups, giving birth to another new local term: "spillionaire."
2011 — Sara Wheeler, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011), →ISBN, pages 68:
Private contractors working on the cleanup became known as spillionaires.