Billionaire Egomaniacs Continue to Tag City With Their Names
America is facing a crisis: some of our most beautiful public spaces are being defaced by the “tags” of selfish, narcissistic individuals. Most of them are billionaires.
David Geffen Gives More Money to the Charity of Glorifying David Geffen
Billionaire Hollywood mogul David Geffen, whose ability to use charity donations to embody the principle of selfishness is truly astounding, made—spoiler alert!!!—another gaudy, wasteful, self-aggrandizing charity donation today.
I Have No Idea What This Startup Does and Nobody Will Tell Me
Last week, I received a PDF presentation about “Helena,” a new startup boasting a 20-year-old Yale student CEO and connections—so they claim—to some of the most powerful and influential people in the world, from Stanley McChrystal to, uh, Selena Gomez. I spent the better part of last week trying to figure out what the…
College Legally Prohibited From Changing Name to Appease Billionaire Philanthropists Won't Receive Critical Donation
Wall Street billionaire Sandy Weill and his wife Joan were going to donate $20 million to the struggling Paul Smith’s College upstate—seriously, they were!—but some silly judge had to go and ruin the whole thing by ruling that the school could not be renamed Joan Weill-Paul Smith’s College.
"Thank the Rich" For Their Generosity, Says Guy Who Was Born Rich
Steve Forbes, the wealthy Forbes family heir, has accomplished little of note in his life except presiding over the decline of the Forbes media empire, and losing badly in a run for President. We'll give him this, though: he is an amazing troll.
"...We are an organization that conducts our charitable activity directly, and we fund our own work. We are not a grant-maker that funds the work of other charities, and were never intended to be." - Lady Gaga's mom, Cynthia Germanotta, hitting back at criticism on the allocation of Born This Way Foundation's funds
Lady Gaga's Charity Donated Just $5,000 of Its $2.1 Million
News has emerged that Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation could be a mere vanity project. Have you ever? Can you even? (No, you can't. You either already tweeted or are just about to tweet, "I can't with this," about this.) We all can collectively gasp while secretly saying, "Yaaaaaas," in our heads regarding Gaga's…
Rupert Murdoch Gave Tony Blair $100,000, Then Blair Fucked His Wife
Last week, we learned that former British prime minister Tony Blair emailed called disgraced News Corp. executive Rebekah Brooks in 2011 to offer his "unofficial" consulting services as she faced arrest over the company's metastasizing phone hacking scandal. And last year, we learned that Blair had also been allegedly
Bill Gates wants to offer the world a better, thinner condom. You know, for the ladies: "We're a big funder of innovation in that area, as well."
Desperate New York City Opera Seeking Money From Famous Scam Artist
The New York City Opera, which is on the verge of completely shutting down due to lack of funding, is making a last-ditch effort to keep itself alive by reaching out to high-profile donors and even launching its own Kickstarter. It's also possibly reaching out to a very prominent crook.
A billionaire real estate developer has given $200 million to the University of Michigan—with the mandate that all of the money goes to the business school and the athletic department. Congrats on some shitty philanthropy, asshole.
Terminally Ill Simpsons Co-Creator Donating His Fortune To Charity
Television writer/producer Sam Simon, a co-developer of the Simpsons, has amassed a literal fortune. Since leaving the cultural touchstone in 1993, the nine-time Emmy winner has kept an executive producer title that earns him "tens of millions" annually. Plus, the former Taxi showrunner has continued working…
Meet John Arnold, the Role Model for Billionaires
Often, when we hear of some finance wizard accumulating a vast fortune at a young age just by moving money around, we grumble, "That rich asshole should just retire and give all his money away to charity." To our amazement, one richie is doing exactly that! Meet James Arnold, the billionaire who acts how you wish…
Do 'The Good Rich' Exist?
We live in a world in which wealth is distributed in a wildly unequal way. A tiny few have billions of dollars, while many more have nothing. Though the reactions to this persistent and growing state of inequality span the ideological spectrum, it's fair to say that most people consider it a problem. For the very…
How Apple Is Burying Its Scrooge Image
There is pain and turmoil in Steve Jobs's death, but for the departed tech executive's company Apple, real opportunity, too. That's why, near the height of the holiday shopping season, Apple is giving precious space on its homepage and in its stores to a charity promotion. It's the sort of philanthropic gesture Jobs…
Wyclef Jean's Corrupt Charity Is Still Very, Very Corrupt
Remember how Wyclef Jean promised to clean up his sham charity last year after it started raising $1 million a day in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti? Guess what.
The Single Largest Benefactor of Occupy Wall Street Is a Mitt Romney Donor
Meet Robert Halper, a retired trader and former vice chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Like a lot of wealthy Wall Street-connected 52-year-olds, Halper gave the maximum contribution of $2,500 to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. But this guy also wrote a $20,000 check to help launch Occupy Wall Street.
Wal-Mart Offers a Payoff to All of Womankind
Just months ago, dying trinket warehouse Wal-Mart escaped the largest sex discrimination suit in history. I don't even know why I brought that up, because it has nothing to do with the massive Wal-Mart woman-payoff PR campaign announced today. Nothing!
Comcast Exec Cut Off Funding to Charity Over Twitter Post
If you run a charity helping teen girls, and you get $18,000 in funding from Comcast, and you don't like it when FCC commissioners approve massive media mergers only to almost immediately take a high-paying job with the merged company, you are apparently not allowed to say so on Twitter. Word to the wise.
Billionaires Want You to Give Your Money Away
Warren Buffett, Melinda Gates, and some other middle-class Americans got together in Arizona to talk about giving some of their hard-earned dollars away to less successful, less ambitious Americans, and also "meet each other, compare notes, eat and laugh." They hope you'll follow their example.
