I've been meaning to put together a guessing game every week, where reality show contestants and current accused criminals are presented side by side. Because it's a little hard to tell them apart these days, ya know?
While we're waiting for the Tyco jury to come back from deliberations — yeah, anyone remember that scandal? The executives who allegedly stole $600 million from their company, nearly bankrupting Tyco? No?
Eyebeam has just launched Fundrace, a searchable database with political contributions searchable by either name or address.
A reader — a man, or as my mother used to call them, "a penis-burdened person" — writes in about Martha Stewart:
Congratulations to all of us for the addition of six New York City billionaires on the Forbes annual list: last year, we only had 25. (Technically, we've got more than 31: for instance, George Soros's current use of his upstate address excludes him from the list somewhat inaccurately.) More skewing: three on this billionaires list are the Ziff boys. (Daniel Ziff: still single!)
It's true: Disney has raided the Jim Henson puppet closet, a luckily-timed scheme by Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who's been rumored to be in danger of losing his job. Disney and the Henson Company, as was reported in the press yesterday and according to the memos below, "have signed a binding purchase agreement and expect the transaction to close within two months, subject to receiving the necessary regulatory clearances." Sadly, Disney doesn't get Big Bird and Elmo.
Here's some insider stock trading advice: ImClone's tanking! Sell! Sell! Quick, call all your friends' personal assistants and tell them to sell too! And then send them a figgy pudding or a homemade fruitcake or something!
ImClone started trading this morning at 47, up around 30% from yesterday's dip (at which point, trading was halted — false rumors of ImClone's cancer drug being disapproved by the FDA were running rampant. The price rebounded in afterhours trading.) It's moving at a pretty massive volume.
Henry Blodget is getting a little nutsy down at Martha Stewart's trial:
Fast Company sets the not-so-wayback machine to 1999 with some fun facts from Nina Munk's new book on AOL Time Warner: "By 1999 more than two thousand (stock option) millionaires were working at AOL. The company's HR department organized seminars with topics like 'How Do You Handle Employees Who Are Already Millionaires?'"
It's hard not to speculate about what's on the jury duty questionnaire for the Martha Stewart trial. Aaron Bailey's suggestions: "Do you know how to make "lemon sugar? What's the proper way to roll a candle? Do you properly store your seeds during the winter months so that they'll bloom well in the spring?"
We're just doing a little light reading around Gawker HQ today: a little book called Big Deal: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Digital Age, by one new owner of New York magazine, Mr. Bruce Wasserstein. Mmm:
