If someone is said to have the Midas touch, everything they take on seems to turn to profit. It is used of investors, entrepreneurs and businesspeople whose ventures keep succeeding, often with the implication that they can do little wrong commercially. Oxford’s learner’s dictionary defines it plainly as the ability to make a financial success of everything you do, and that is exactly how the phrase is used today: a compliment on someone’s knack for making money, sometimes tinged with envy at how consistently it happens.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘the Midas touch’?
The phrase comes from the Greek myth of King Midas, who was granted a wish by the god Dionysus and asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. The wish was granted, and Midas found it disastrous rather than delightful: his food and drink turned to metal in his hands, and in some versions of the story even his daughter was turned to gold when he embraced her. He had to beg Dionysus to take the gift back. The myth itself is ancient, but its point is that the golden touch was a curse as much as a blessing, since it destroyed the very things Midas needed and loved.
The modern idiom strips out that warning and keeps only the glittering surface: having “the Midas touch” now means succeeding at everything financially, with none of the original story’s irony intact. As an English expression for this kind of unfailing success, Dictionary.com dates its first recorded use to the period 1880 to 1885, which broadly matches the dating given by Etymonline of 1883. The website Wordsmith.org gives a markedly earlier date of 1652 for the phrase, but that claim has not been corroborated by any traceable citation and sits awkwardly with the later, better supported dating, so it should be treated with caution rather than taken as established.
So while the story behind the phrase is one of the oldest in Western mythology, the phrase itself as a fixed English idiom for business success appears to be a product of the late nineteenth century, when it settled into the straightforwardly admiring sense it still carries.