Wealthy People

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

From the living room of his luxurious 10,000-square-foot midtown Manhattan apartment, Francesco Galesi built an empire that earned him a winter villa near Jamaica's Montego Bay, a 12-bedroom oceanfront castle on Long Island and a net worth of more than $400 million that once ranked him halfway up the Forbes 400 list of America's wealthiest. Galesi made his millions in real estate.

Our Republican friends have once again made it clear: Rich people shouldn't pay more taxes. The so-called Buffett rule collapsed in the Senate as Democrats failed to convince enough of their GOP colleagues to cross the aisle and end a filibuster. Only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted in favor of bringing the legislation to a vote. It would have required people making more than $1 million a year to pay a tax rate of at least 30%.  The rule is named for billionaire Warren Buffett, who has repeatedly pointed out that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.

Comic actor John Ritter died on his daughter's 5th birthday in September 2003. The next day, his widow, actress Amy Yasbeck, told the girl that her dad's death was unavoidable. Since then, Yasbeck has come to believe the story she told their daughter Stella was wrong. "The doctors told it to me like I was 5 and I told it to her like she was 5," Yasbeck said in an interview with The Times. "The truth is, it's a lot more complicated and it's a lot more sad."

In case you're wondering, there was no pre-nup. "It would have turned the marriage into a business arrangement," said Henry T. Segerstrom, back in Orange County with his bride on Wednesday after a courtship and wedding that give new meaning to the term "whirlwind." Segerstrom quietly married Elizabeth Macavoy on July 29 at the St. Regis hotel in New York, three weeks after they met. He's: 77; arts philanthropist; managing partner of C.J.

The marble walkway leading into the California Club echoes with the ghostly footsteps of land barons, railroad tycoons and political kingmakers. So does the ostentatious front lobby of the Jonathan Club nearby. Private business clubs once were centers of power in downtown Los Angeles. You might have found rail magnate Henry E. Huntington playing dominoes and plotting his next expansion beneath the high, oak-paneled walls. Or William May Garland, the real estate developer, scheming to bring the 1932 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles.

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in error rather than give it back.

In the worst economic storm in decades, a Beverly Hills company has an ambitious plan to build a $1.1-billion cruise ship, set to cast off in 2013. But instead of offering four- or five-day excursions as typical cruise lines do, the business plans to sell half the cabins as floating homes. Opulent cabins aboard the ship Utopia now range in price from about $3.7 million to $26 million. But even at these prices, a key draw will be location. During the Cannes Film Festival, the ship is slated to drop anchor near the south of France in the Mediterranean sea. During the carnival celebration in Rio de Janeiro, the ship plans to dock off the coast of the Brazilian city.

The rich may indeed be like the rest of us. Prices of their homes are now falling too. Gated mansions and hillside estates have held their own through most of the real estate slump, but data released Monday showed big drops in the region's most exclusive neighborhoods. Median sale prices fell by 13% in Beverly Hills in April, compared with the same month last year.

The presidential race is about to get nasty. American Crossroads, the “super PAC” in Mitt Romney's corner, is about to unleash a campaign that aims to unseat President Obama. If money truly buys power, the super PAC may end up being more persuasive over voter opinion than Romney himself.   “American Crossroads, the biggest of the Republican 'super PACs,' is planning to begin its first major anti-Obama advertising blitz of the year, a moment the Obama re-election campaign has been girding for and another sign that the general election is starting in earnest,” reports the New York Times . In February, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez described super PACs like this: On the national scene, already more than $322 million has been raised in support of candidates for president, with $56 million of that going into “super PACs.” Do you know what a Super Political Action Committee is?

Starters A Novel Lissa Price Random House Children's Books: 352 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and up It's often been said that youth is wasted on the young. In "Starters," the outstanding young-adult novel from debut author Lissa Price, that premise is pushed to an apocryphal limit that's only possible in sci-fi as wealthy geriatrics rent the bodies of nubile teens. In this clever and creepy tale with faint echoes of "The Stepford Wives" and "The Hunger Games," 16-year-old Callie Woodland is desperate.

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in error rather than give it back.

Stanford University alum Ezra Callahan likes hockey and has 722 Facebook friends. Among them are Sean Parker, Dustin Moskovitz and a college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg. Those friendships are about to pay off handsomely. That's because Callahan is one of a small cadre of people with substantial equity stakes in Facebook Inc. He earned it working at the Menlo Park company as product manager and head of internal communications from late 2004 until mid-2010, helping run events like a 2008 New Hampshire presidential debate sponsored by Facebook.

Clarifying a statement that quickly went viral on the Internet on Wednesday morning, Mitt Romney said he was concerned about poor Americans but was focused on the problems of the middle class in his quest for the White House. On CNN on Wednesday morning after his 14-point win in Florida Tuesday night , Romney said he was “not concerned about the very poor” because they have “a safety net there” and “if it needs repair, I'll fix it.” ( Watch video below. ) “You've got to take the whole sentence, all right?

President Obama opened his reelection campaign with a combative State of the Union speech, proposing to require that millionaires pay at least 30% of their income in taxes and to eliminate deductions that save companies money if they move jobs overseas. He also proposed rewarding businesses that manufacture and create jobs in the U.S. with lower corporate tax rates. Heavy in emphasis on income inequality and its causes, the president's speech included several ideas already snubbed by House Republicans, including a program to upgrade roads and bridges and a fee on banks to help "responsible" homeowners refinance their mortgages.

Ignacio E. Lozano Jr., former publisher of the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, is among the 50 wealthiest Latinos in the United States, according to the first such listing by Hispanic Business Magazine. Lozano, 65, who turned over the reins of Los Angeles-based La Opinion Newspapers to his son, Jose, in 1986, is president of Lozano Enterprises Inc., the parent corporation of La Opinion. He lives in Lido Isle.

A dispute between South African President Thabo Mbeki and Nobel laureate Desmond M. Tutu has opened up divisions over a key government policy meant to redistribute wealth to blacks. Under the Black Economic Empowerment strategy, aimed at redressing apartheid-era inequities, companies with substantial black ownership and management get preference in government contracts.

On Bravo's "Real Housewives" franchise, a main character is affluence. It takes many forms: private planes, posh mansions, thousand-dollar shopping sprees. And it seemed Russell Armstrong and his wife, Taylor, who appeared on "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," had been living up to the lifestyle. Last season, Taylor threw a $60,000 party for their then-4-year-old daughter, frequently conferred with a private stylist and devoted much of her free time to philanthropy. On Monday night, Russell Armstrong, 47, was found dead in an apparent suicide, and facts began to emerge Tuesday that raise questions about how the program presented the couple and whether the resulting glare of publicity played any role in his death.

The marble walkway leading into the California Club echoes with the ghostly footsteps of land barons, railroad tycoons and political kingmakers. So does the ostentatious front lobby of the Jonathan Club nearby. Private business clubs once were centers of power in downtown Los Angeles. You might have found rail magnate Henry E. Huntington playing dominoes and plotting his next expansion beneath the high, oak-paneled walls. Or William May Garland, the real estate developer, scheming to bring the 1932 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles.