rich

It's something lottery ads often ask: what would life be like if you were rich?

They show ordinary people blowing their money on improbable amusements and we all dream and laugh along.

Yet when the real thing comes by -- real rich people blowing their money on improbable amusements -- we become King Tut-Tut.

This rather unhip hypocrisy comes to mind on considering Rich Kids of Instagram. Should you have missed this cultural icon, it depicts the excesses of the young, restless, and loaded as they sail through life on a hull made of $100 bills.

Some have described … Read more

With news this week that Denise Rich, ex-wife of a renowned tax-dodger, is renouncing her U.S. citizenship and thereby avoiding taxes, we decided to take a look at other successful citizens who became ex-pats in order to avoid filing a 1040. Apparently it's getting more common as the IRS cracks down on undeclared and untaxed foreign holdings.

Tax attorney Jim Duggan says it's not too difficult for an American to renounce U.S. citizenship. All it takes is an appearance at a U.S. embassy or consulate, some paperwork, and an exit … Read more

If you're a soon-to-be Facebook millionaire wondering how to spend your newfound wealth, perhaps you can add "subterranean garage accessible only by aircraft carrier elevator" to your wish list.

Making the rounds on the Internet is a video clip from the television show "Million Dollar Rooms" that highlights the engineering wonder that is Tom Gonzales' 6,000-square-foot underground garage. He's one of Silicon Valley's original high-flying tech titans who made his money when he, along with his late son Tom Gonzales Jr., founded Commerce One.

Gonzales sunk a large portion of the money he made riding the enterprise software wave of the late '90s into his custom Lake Tahoe house, Sierra Star, that's now on the market for $50 million. In addition to million-dollar views and a 30-car garage in the carriage house, the lakefront property also boasts a now-not-so-secret underground garage large enough to fit nine buses. … Read more

When Facebook goes public, an event we expect next month, it will make a lot of young employees very rich.

Billions of dollars of stock (back of napkin: $10 billion) will be distributed to thousands of employees. Some midlevel workers will find themselves sitting on windfalls of millions of dollars. What are they going to do with that money? At least three new Internet wealth management companies will be angling for the business of these newly rich -- not to mention every Wall Street brokerage firm and money manager in existence.

Even though most of the stock going to Facebook … Read more

Pandora's share price is down 50 percent from its high but is still "dramatically overvalued," says one of the leading Wall Street tech analysts.

The company's stock was trading at just under $13 this morning, down from a high of $26. But Rich Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG Research, writes that "our conviction level in our sell-rated investment thesis has increased."

In a blog post titled "Why we would continue to short Pandora stock--remains dramatically overvalued" Greenfield said the Web's top radio service is worth "at best" $5.50 per share.

Pandora enables users to choose their favorite artists and musical genres and based on those choices the company uses an algorithm to determine what music to play. That is the limit on the control Pandora users have on what they hear.

The company offers an ad-supported service that is free of charge to users but limits them to 40 hours of free listening per month. Another service, called Pandora One, costs $36 annually and offers unlimited commercial-free listening. Since most of the users choose the free-of-charge service, advertising is vital to Pandora and lately it seems that the company is selling more of them.

One problem with that is throwing too many ads into the listening experience means Pandora risks alienating users, especially when YouTube and Vevo enable visitors to listen to music free of charge as well as the ability to listen to the same song over and over again, fast forward or reverse, and do so often without being pestered by any ads at all.

Pandora's real problem though is that the business model doesn't appear to scale well. Pandora must pay SoundExchange, the company that collects royalties on behalf of music creators, each time someone listens to a song. The larger Pandora's audience gets, the higher its costs.

In June, a SoundExchange spokeswoman explained Pandora's position this way "Because the rate they pay is based on per-spin, more listeners doesn't make them more profitable. It doesn't solve their problems. They have to make each listener more profitable." … Read more

Netflix managers knew some customers would be unhappy with the company's decision to raise prices, and a day before announcing the fee increase they told customer-service personnel to be prepared for angry callers.

Some of Netflix's customer-service representatives told subscribers today that they added extra employees in the department to help handle the flood of calls, many of them emotional, the employees said. Hundreds of Netflix employees were answering phones today and that still wasn't enough to prevent some callers from experiencing extended delays before speaking to a Netflix employee, the reps told customers.

Starting in September, … Read more

I've been following the evolution of client-side computing off and on for over 20 years. Remember ASCII terminals? Green screens? Beehives? X terminals? If you do, they're most likely dimming memories.

The history of client side computing is filled with efforts to shift the balance of power between the server (ne host) and the client device. Which side is responsible for what, and how the sides communicate with each other, determine the cost, control, security, flexibility, and richness of the result. Some years it's "do everything meaningful on the server." Others, "do most work … Read more

Rich people are often unjustly maligned. They work hard just like the rest of us. They struggle just like the rest of us. They socially network just like the rest of us. Even more so, it seems.

However, a troubling new poll suggests that rich people, who are overly enthusiastic about giving to Facebook and other social networks, just aren't taking to them.

The poll, conducted by SEI Wealth Network, a company that advises the wealthy on how to survive their troubles, revealed that 70 percent of the moneyed had signed up for Facebook and other online homes of … Read more

Online real estate service Zillow.com on Tuesday announced a new CEO, Spencer Rascoff.

Rascoff was formerly Zillow's COO and vice president of marketing. Before joining the company, he was vice president of lodging at Expedia. And prior to that, Rascoff co-founded travel site Hotwire in 1999 and sold it to Expedia for $675 million in 2003.

Rascoff replaces Zillow co-founder Rich Barton, who will maintain his position as executive chairman of Zillow's board of directors. Co-founder Lloyd Frink will give up his role as president and become Zillow's chief strategy officer. The company said it's … Read more