Forget the wives who can no longer afford to go wild at Barneys with their husbands' AmEx Platinum cards. The women who are really going to suffer in these turbulent economic times are the mistresses of cheating husbands. According to a new survey of men worth at least $20 million and who have had an extra-marital…
Steve Schwarzman's 60th birthday party last year may go down as the last, great party before the fall. Days after closing on what was then the biggest leveraged buyout in history, the $39 billion purchase of Equity Office Properties, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group invited 500 people to the Armory…
Feeling a little poor now that your 401K is in ruins? How about a change in scenery? US News helpfully has done the math and calculated just how much money you have to make to be considered rich in various cities across the country. As you probably suspected, New Yorkers need a good deal more to keep up: A family of…
While the merely superrich have been unable to sell or buy homes in the Hamptons for some time now, the mega-rich have continued purchasing giant estates for absurd prices. But as Vanity Fair explains, no more! Now there is precisely one man rich enough to buy a Southhampton property for an insanely inflated price,…
Here's a good argument for marrying rich: buildings named after you! If you are rich you can get big libraries and stuff, but the spouses of billionaires have to settle for century-old class buildings on Ivy League campuses. Ronald Perelman, recently in the news for his bitter divorce from Ellen Barkin, was once…
Good news for Yahoo shareholders! It turns out that people who make less than $20,000 per year spend more than a third of their life in passive leisure, while those earning more than $100,000 a year, spend less than a fifth of their time relaxing. In fact, according to Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel…
So—the years of tax returns the Clintons just released? They'll be feeding crazy news stories throughout the weekend. (Friday afternoon news dump! Good work, Clintons!) We'll try to limit ourselves to this: Bill Clinton has made millions of dollars just for being friends with Ron Burkle. Back in 2001, Burkle, the…
Right in the heart of the Xmas-to-New Year's News Dead Zone, Mayor Bloomberg announced a sweeping change in the way New York City will measure poverty. The national standard remains tied, more or less, to the price of milk. Income and "annual cost of buying basic groceries" have determined who is poor in the US for…
The New York Post likes to run "blind items" — a gossip-column tradition where just enough details are given to help readers guess who's being talked about. Here's the latest:
Jonathan Clements says wealth is overrated and rich people are all contemptible morons and that money will not make you happy! Also he's the Wall Street Journal personal-finance columnist. So don't go around making so much money, guys! You'll end up empty and depressed, because every time you eat dinner at the nicest…
An Associated Press article, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, has named San Jose as the "wealthiest urban center in the nation." San Francisco and San Diego round out the top three. The wealthiest county? Haughty Marin, across the Golden Gate Bridge, finishes first, while Silicon…
After selling off $8.9 million worth of shares this month, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff retains a mere $637 million worth of holdings in his company. Did we mention that he is much, much richer than you are? [Docu-Drama]
Okay, okay. We don't know if Microsoft cofounder and tech-investing dilettante Paul Allen has actually moved into it. But the Dubai Luxury blog reports that he's shelled out $12 million on a yellow submarine. A 40-foot-long yellow submarine. You're a Beatles fan, Paul; we get it. But Paulie, baby, want to know why…
RU Sirius interviews sci-fi writer, futurist, and Electronic Frontier Foundationer Cory Doctorow on a variety of subjects, ending with Doctorow's riff on Second Life wealth:
