My God, it's full of stars! The Valley is crowded with big-league bigshots, and each deserves a testament to their lasting contributions to technology: in other words, a fake trading card.
Forbes milks its Billionaire List publicity with billionaire horoscopes, built from commentary by professional astrologists. (Yes, this is how Forbes spends its budget.) Their lead: lots of rich folks were born under the sign of the virgin. (All right, who else predicted that?)
Larry Ellison's startup NetSuite Inc. is finally prepping for its IPO. The software company expects to slide into the black later this year. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson is shooting for a $100 million valuation.
It came out this weekend that Steve Jobs sold 45 percent of his Apple stock for $415 million.
Idealab CEO Bill Gross scored board approval to make shareholders take over his $50 million personal loan. If shareholders approve, Bill will pay back the cash over the next four years (or find a new sucker to buy the loan). The jet's sold, the Ferrari's sold, but Bill must have some tchotchkes left to make a $50-mil yard sale.
Too golden — Stefan Eriksson (the Gizmondo exec who ripped his Ferrari apart in L.A.) might have taped the crash from inside the car. Who knows what it'd look like — cops haven't found the alleged video yet. But as a consolation prize, the L.A. Times (who's digging this story as much as I am) shares this simulation (opens in a media player) of the crash. Man, "crash the rare Enzo" would have made a great Gizmondo game — if Gizmondo's console hadn't been such a car wreck itself.
It's like a party with an open candy store: Forbes published its whopping 793-member billionaire list, with all the maps, photos, and self-congratulatory interviews such an event requires. Above is a map of billionaires in the U.S. (the world is viewable here but why do you care about anything outside the Valley), which shows San Francisco as third behind New York and L.A. That's no good.
The LA Times picks up a new twist to the Stevan Eriksson Ferrari crash story. The crooked ex-Gizmondo exec who totaled his car (to be crystal-clear: split his car in half while driving drunk) in L.A. flashed a business card at the cops.
In a perfect world, every true Valley celeb sighting would involve raccoons and crossbows. For now, this story about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, by the inimitable blogger Curt Hopkins, can feed your bizarre robber-baron fantasies.
By the way, whomever Fox bought, Kevin Burton swears it wasn't his aggregation site, Tailrank. But under an hour after he jokingly said "Okay, it was me," on TechCrunch, he got a solicitation (which he passed to me) for the management of his newfound wealth:
A plot thick as a Pynchon novel is congealing around former Gizmondo exec Stefan Eriksson's 162 mph Ferrari crash (covered here earlier). (Note: That's sucky handheld game maker Gizmondo, not Gawker blog Gizmodo.)
The mysterious Flickr user "Privateye" grabbed some AP photos from us and "repurposed" them for another snappy comic.
While some tech moguls make careful plans for the eventual transformation of life and thought as we know it, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is applying "mathematical and experimental analysis" to that grandest of human achievements: a really fast boat.
Steve Jobs: brilliant CEO, sharp presenter...not so snappy at real estate. The man who fought for (and lost) the right to a giant cube from a new Apple store has a more expensive battle: he wants to tear down his house.
Housing bubble, housing boom, whatever — I'm told the Valley real estate market hasn't begun to reach the levels of the dot-com 90s. So in a year, this house —
The Register scored a photo of Gizmondo Europe ex-exec Stefan Eriksson's wrecked Ferrari. The former member of the world's lamest handheld maker "walked away with cuts and bruises." The car, not so lucky.
Got a few million and looking for a CEO home to buy? Good luck getting these guys to sell their mansions, but Zillow at least lets you know the estimated values. And, well, either the estimations suck, or Larry Ellison is content with much less in Woodside than his old Atherton place.
You thought the two-minute drive from SF to Cupertino was thrilling? Apparently driving with Steve Jobs kicks that time-lapse's ass.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin got their credit card denied at an Ipanema restaurant this week. The Google boys had to pull out another card when their first choice couldn't pay a $50 meal charge. These guys just made over $2 billion from a stock sale, but they couldn't pay off the Visa? Maybe Larry Ellison's accountant could help them out or write them a note now and then.
Larry Ellison isn't the only one with multi-million-dollar real estate and a pleasure-dome on the sea. The billionaires of the tech industry have a proud tradition of ringing up ridiculous bills.
