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.
Having a billion dollars seems pretty good, but losing billions of dollars and still having billions of dollars left over is still preferable.
This morning, Forbes made a big announcement. Tech darling Elizabeth Holmes—the founder of the disgraced blood-testing firm Theranos—is no longer a multi-billionaire. Instead, Forbes estimates, she’s now worth “nothing.” This is a delicious scoop of schadenfreude, but it’s one that nonetheless obscures that Holmes was always actually worth, to use Forbes’ term, nothing.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton had come to believe that a wealthy individual has been funding a steady stream of lawsuits, including three different ones filed by Hulk Hogan alone, against his company. Two journalists at Forbes magazine, Ryan Mac and Matt Drange, are lending credence to Denton’s theory. On Tuesday evening, the pair revealed that the powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has been secretly underwriting Hulk Hogan’s litigation against Gawker:
Today, another very rich man has given an enormous amount of money to a very rich university that doesn’t really need it. This gift is supposed to make the world better. But it is a very big waste.
As cartoon plutocrat and sentient overripe pear Donald Trump officially entered the Republican presidential race Tuesday, he pointedly brandished a financial disclosure statement that asserts his net worth to be in the neighborhood of 9 billion dollars. How much is Trump really worth? If history is any guide, the safe answer is: much less than he says he does.
Law enforcement officers are investigating after Andrew Rork Getty, an heir to the Getty Oil fortune, was reported dead Tuesday by a former girlfriend against whom he had recently obtained a restraining order.
The New York Times real estate section is always a window into the deranged material conditions under which we live. But this weekend's edition presented a particularly neat, quasi-intentional summing up of conditions in the city's current Gilded Age.
It's been three months since Fox media mogul Rupert Murdoch slipped the surly bonds of matrimonial discord with Wendi Deng, ceding her custody of their two children and Fifth Avenue triplex. Lesser men might buckle under the ennui now. Murdoch bought a sick fucking condo.
