Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the dilettante scion of a fading newspaper-family dynasty, obediently showed up to announce a trial in which his company will subsidize the $489 retail price of a Kindle DX for readers who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Times or the Boston Globe — assuming the latter is still publishing, since he's threatened to close it down.

The Kindle DX is a fair-looking device — homely in the way that every gadget not made by Apple inevitably is, but passably designed. But will it save newspapers? No. And Bezos is hedging his bets, even as he has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader. Today, he hawked the Kindle DX as a means for reading textbooks, sheet music, novels, and science journals. Newspapers are just one checkbox in a long list of features — and yet he's cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash.

And it's not like Amazon needs the money. It's a steady cash generator — especially for Bezos himself. On Friday, he sold $63 million in Amazon shares. On Monday, as news of the Kindle leaked, he sold another $16 million. If he's such a big believer in supporting journalism, why didn't Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription? He could afford it.

(Photo by Gizmodo)

Page, whose home address was accidentally revealed by a pro-privacy group last year, lives in Old Palo Alto. With homes more than a century old, it's what passes for historic in Silicon Valley, at any rate.

The new, 6,000-sq. ft. house observes all the green shibboleths: organic building materials, low-volatility paint, and so forth. (Never mind that lighting and heating such a large house will inevitably have more environmental impact than a more modest dwelling.)

Records for Santa Clara County show that 111 Waverley Oaks, a property adjoining Page's current residence at 111 Waverley Oaks, was transferred in September 2008. It was most recently assessed at a value of $3.3 million.

But the real environmental impact is on the neighbors, Palo Alto Weekly reports:

Ralph Britton, a retired electronic engineer and board member of Palo Alto Stanford Heritage, was walking the neighborhood when he noticed demolitions on four separate properties in Page's block.

"I noticed a house coming down, walked and saw another, and realized they were contiguous," Britton said. He described one house as elegant with a lot of land around it, a swimming pool in back and nice landscaping — much of which is still there. Another former home around the corner he called "imposing."

Britton's description of the property matches a satellite photo of the property available on Page's own Google Maps. Britton goes on to describe heavy construction on the block:

... neighbors are also concerned with the mess of construction, as well as possible damage to streets from heavy trucks.

"There's constant noise and confusion; when one finishes, the other starts," Britton said.

But fences are already up on the Page property, including mesh around protected trees, in preparation for construction. The work cannot begin until the city approves a permit.

A spokesman for Page told the Weekly that Page would seek a permit this week. Seems a bit late, with construction already underway. But since when have billionaires had to obey the law?

The house news came as an afterthought in a first-person New York Times profile of how Williams came to run the fast-growing Internet message-broadcasting service, which some 6 million people use to blurt out 140-character updates to anonymous strangers online.

Also shortchanged in the profile: His spouse, who has gone by the unduly drab name of Sara Williams since they wed in 2007. The two met at Google, and one could argue that she's been far more important to his subsequent success than the Google shares he got. All that we're told about her:

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We're building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge - that's why she's in charge.

The cliché is that opposites attract, and the Williamses certainly fit the part: Awkward Midwestern farm boy meets chic Mexican-Japanese-Chinese designer; scatterbrained nerd meets detail-oriented perfectionist.

Read how Williams describes his first company:

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn't want to work on other people's projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn't worked at a real company. I didn't know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I'd start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn't keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn't paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

His second company, Pyra Labs, which gave birth to Blogger, was no better. In the wake of the dotcom bust, Williams ended up running Blogger by himself, with a trail of exasperated employees left behind him. That he managed to rebuild it, hire more people, and sell the mess to Google was a miracle.

Twitter, too, suffered because of a bad management decision Williams made: Appointing bike-messenger fanboy Jack Dorsey as the service's CEO.

Not that we're convinced Williams, who fired Dorsey and took his post last year, is a better choice. The company still has no source of revenues. Investors wink and tell the business press that they know exactly how Twitter will make money. (What they really mean, but will never say: By selling itself to Facebook, Google, or some other sucker.)

We have a better idea for who should run Twitter, if it has any hopes of being a serious business: Sara Morishige Williams. Her sole public involvement with the company was an eight-month stint designing Twitter's new office. But her professional background is in human resources, an area where Twitter could obviously use help. (Remember the incident where a clueless Twitter employee broadcasted the names of 186 rejected job applicants?) As Williams himself admits, he can barely cope with email. Sara's LinkedIn profile details how she scheduled 45 interviews a week, and a former coworker gushes:

She is dedicated, commited, detail-oriented, pro-active and fun to work with. She easily commands the respect of peers and is able to communicate effectively senior management.

If not CEO, why not make her chief operating officer at least? Let her mind the details Williams is so obviously loathe to handle while he hobnobs with Ivanka Trump at the White House. In perfect seriousness, it makes no sense to have her spending time designing the couple's house when Williams's business so obviously — no, desperately — requires a ground-up rebuild.

(Photo by evhead)

The New York Observer treats her 1,000-person email subscriber list as if it amounted to a brilliant new startup. It isn't, of course. Daily Candy, the urban fashion email list, had 2.5 million subscribers when Comcast bought it. McGivney's Jauntsetter is as much a business venture as it is an outgrowth of the dilettantish hobby of travel.

The colleagues who joined Google at the same time as McGivney were worth an average of $7.8 million as of November 2007; even with the drop in Google's shares, their typical personal fortune would still exceed $3 million — and more if they sold at the peak. They may be about the only people who have enough money to set out on such jaunts. It's a perfectly fine venture for McGivney to write up trip tips for her ex-colleagues. There's just not 2.5 million of them.

Iglesias — whose private-performance fee is estimated at $1 million — was only the start of the bills for the wedding, held last weekend at the Marquis Cabo San Lucas hotel.

Kordestani's ex, Bita Daryabari, and her groom, vascular surgeon Reza Malek (pictured above, at a charity event in San Francisco), stayed in a $4,000/night presidential suite. Colin Cowie, the celebrity wedding planner who's seen Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Jennifer Lopez, and others to the altar, organized the nuptials. Some of the guests took chartered planes Daryabari and Malek paid for. A tequila party on the beach ended with fireworks; the last fusillade took the form of a heart. A chef was flown in from New York to cater the affair. Paparazzi, in town to lens Jennifer Aniston, stumbled across the event — which, in a way, only added to its gaudy glamour.

It is hard to imagine a worse time to throw an extravagant wedding. But Daryabari surely had other things on her mind.

What turned Daryabari, a telecom executive turned philanthropist, into a towering Bridezilla? Her husband, Kordestani, was Google's 12th employee and its first salesman. He struck a search-licensing deal with the now-forgotten Netscape, then an Internet powerhouse where he previously worked, that made Google viable. Google's IPO made Kordestani wealthy, and as Google's shares soared, his fortune grew into the billions of dollars.

But then Kordestani fell in love with a coworker, Gisel Hiscock (right, and yes, that's really her name, poor dear). A rumored reconciliation after the revelation of his affair never happened. The couple moved to London last summer. Somewhere along the line, Daryabari and Kordestani finalized their divorce.

Which, naturally, gave her a big chunk of Kordestani's Google fortune. And what better way to rub her ex-husband's face in her happiness than by spending his money, a million dollars at a time, on the most extravagant event imaginable? If it weren't a supremely arrogant Googler, the self-crowned king of the new advertising world, getting his comeuppance, we might say her wedding was in poor taste. But is there a sweeter taste than revenge?

(Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Such are the kind of details emerging from FriendFinder Networks's S-1 filing. The disclosure, a precursor to an initial public offering, shows a business far less sexy than its brands would suggest.

Penthouse Media Group bought Various Inc. from Conru last year for $500 million, and assumed the name of its best-known website. Dropping "Penthouse" makes financial sense; Internet revenues from Adult FriendFinder and other websites account for most of the combined company's revenues. The company, which borrowed heavily to buy Conru's company, owes $420 million; the IPO would raise $460 million, most of which would go to pay off that debt. It is possible FriendFinder's lenders might foreclose on the company before it manages to go public.

Conru, at least, seems well taken care of. FriendFinder even bought a car from him for $125,000. The business rationale for the purchase was never explained. The vehicle is now worth $95,000. Who will make up that loss? FriendFinder's prospective investors. A bizarre twist to a bizarre startup saga: Isn't the sale of a company the moment when a founder goes out and buys an expensive car?

The show features rich people lying to poor people and then giving them money, and it's now up on Hulu. All you need to see are the first 11 minutes. Watch Chahal give a tour of his $6.9 million nouveau gauche monstrosity of a penthouse, and fumble around trying to buy groceries. "Buying groceries, it's not that easy," he says. For Yahoo shareholders, watching him give away tiny portions of his fortune will be far too painful. As deserving as the recipients are, they'll wish Chahal was handing their money back to them.

It's not for lack of trying. Silicon Valley's stock-options millionaire make money by getting the right to buy shares at a low price and selling them for a higher one. Facebook's soaring valuation — Microsoft invested $240 million for a tiny stake, in a deal which valued all of Facebook at $15 billion — threatened to undo that equation. How is Facebook supposed to soar past $15 billion in value? So Zuckerberg & Co. turned to issuing restricted stock units, or RSUs, instead. (Restricted stock units are common at large companies like Google and Microsoft, but unusual for a company Facebook's size and age.)

The restricted-stock plan has created a new complication: Once it has more than 500 RSU holders, SEC regulations may require Facebook to start publishing its financials, even if it doesn't conduct an initial public offering. Facebook's revenues still aren't pretty enough for public exposure.

Facebook's lawyers have sought, and obtained, an exemption. Part of the argument they made is that issuing RSUs won't create a market in Facebook shares.

Facebook, unusually for most of Silicon Valley's private companies, has not had many restrictions on what employees and other shareholders could do with the shares they own. Most have rules that force shareholders to offer shares to the company first — a right of first refusal — or outright prohibitions on unauthorized sales.

But the letter Facebook sent to the SEC says that even when the stock units convert to common shares, they have limits on their sale: "... the Plan has been structured to preclude any trading of RSUs or any interest therein from developing." Even if Facebook permits an employee convert their stock units to shares and sell them, the company can then prevent the buyer from selling.

Employees at Facebook — especially the early ones, whose holdings are now substantial — have been agitating for some time to sell their shares, and there are still, even with the public markets taking a beating, interested buyers. Zuckerberg finally bowed to this pressure and set up a program, now underway, to let employees cash out up to $900,000 in shares. (Note the symbolism of the figure: No one will become a millionaire.)

But that may be it. If Facebook extends its stock-sale restrictions to common shares, not just the restricted-stock units, both employees and the investors so eager to snap up their shares will be stuck, until Facebook sells out or goes public. Zuckerberg has made it clear he thinks both of those events are far off — and the 24-year-old CEO still owns 27 percent of the company and more or less controls the board.

It's a dicey gamble. The prospect of selling Facebook shares privately must surely have attracted some employees who counted on a relatively quick cash-out. But shutting down the prospect of further stock sales will make sure the Facebookers who remain will be more committed to the company for the long haul.

Zuckerberg doesn't have much choice. As long as Facebook employees can find buyers for their shares, they'll be tempted to leave rather than stay at a company going through a tumultous adolescence.

Already, the company has had far more turnover, from bottom to top, than Google did. Not a single high-ranking exec left Google for the first six years of its existence. Facebook has lost three of its four cofounders, and numerous people underneath them, from former COO Owen Van Natta on down. No wonder Zuckerberg wants to slam the exit door closed.

Facebook's corporate charter has a relatively unusual provision for employee stock sales. The company has a right of first refusal over employees' shares, meaning that it has the right to match any price offered by a buyer; most companies have tighter restrictions.

Employees have been told that sales outside the program will have "career-limiting effects"; promotions, raises, and new stock-option grants may be taken away from those who sell anyway. But Facebook has no such hold on ex-employees.

And the offers in the market are tempting. Facebook's program will let shareholders sell at $8.90 a share, which represents a company valuation of $4 billion; some buyers are offering $11 a share. If too many transactions go through at the higher price, Facebook may have to revalue its shares, which will have untoward tax implications for the company and other employees.

It's not clear what Facebook can do, short of rewriting its corporate bylaws. But the company program does have one thing going for it: It will be formal, organized, and predictable. For geeks who'd rather optimize code than their own financial returns, letting their managers handle their money may seem easier.

Rose, whose stake in Digg was famously estimated by BusinessWeek as worth $60 million, may be a unique case. More driven entrepreneurs must be frustrated by Rose, the fun-loving rock climber, on-screen beer drinker, and legendary lothario. His company's rise has seemed effortlessly successful, driven more by the former TV host's fan following than Digg's innovations.

But Rose has gotten good business advice, chiefly from Digg CEO Jay Adelson, a longtime friend. Adelson feels he gave up too much control to investors at his previous company, Equinix; he strove to protect Rose from the same fate, an effort which Sarah Lacy chronicles in her recent book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. As a result, Rose still holds a substantial stake in Digg.

Rose is already believed to have taken $1 million in a previous financing. It's not clear how much he's taken in this round, if any — but it stretches credulity to think he hasn't cashed out to some extent.

Here's why: Normally, a company raising $28.7 million in a third round of financing, as Digg just did, would be giving up a substantial chunk to outside investors. But when the founder controls as much as Rose does, the math doesn't work. Former Digg engineer Owen Byrne, who complains that he hasn't had access to Digg's financials in some time, speculates that the round involved massive dilution — the reduction in value suffered by existing shareholders when new shares are issued.

But Byrne has this exactly wrong: Allowing the VCs to put in enough money to make the investment worth their time, at a high valuation, would require substantial dilution, which would disadvantage employees and early investors. Much simpler to transfer shares directly from one large shareholder — Rose — to another.

What's the effect? Already, employees at Facebook have been agitating to sell their shares, and the company is creating an internal market to let them do so. Rose, as another high-profile example, will put further pressure on startups' management to let their workers cash out. This seems dangerous: Digg, with its high traffic and Microsoft ad deal, has achieved some success — but it's hard to envision it lasting long as an independent concern. What will the boards of even less developed startups tell their founders, when they want to sell, too — that they're just not as cool as Kevin Rose?

The humility of billionaires! No, the real "nerd values" on display are the ones responsible for this wealth. Like the $16 million Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark got in brokering a deal to let eBay buy a 28 percent stake in their company. Yet they still make a point of posing as heroes of the ultraliberal working class, second-hand Prius and all. Worse yet, people continue to buy it.

And not just gullible reporters parachuting in from London, either. Larry from Minneapolis writes in a comment:

This is just about the finest article I have ever read about the craigslist phenomenom. My respect for Buckmaster and Newmark is increased 100 fold.

People don't understand that at it's core, craigslist is a revolution.

And no one can stop a revolution.
Larry, Minneapolis, USA

The real Craigslist phenomenon is that reporters keep writing up Newmark and Buckmaster as down-to-earth geeks — and Craigslist users eagerly buy the rhetoric. It's a masterwork of propaganda. But it's as true as Buckmaster's apartment is modest.

Because, at least in the short term, private equity fund managers and VCs compensation isn't directly tied performance. What's really fattening their wallets are management fees of 1.5 to 2 percent on the money they've been given to invest.

But don't grab a torch and pitchfork and zoom down 280 just quite yet. Headhunter Jonathan Goldstein told the Wall Street Journal that he doesn't expect the free ride to last:

When times are good and there’s ancillary revenue coming in, it’s not that difficult to carry somebody who hasn’t performed. Now that times are difficult, people are taking a hard look at who’s done what.

good story.

pure and simple at heart.

forums, adsense, and the rest is history - all done by a 15yr old for pennies.

to all the haters, shove it - and replicate it, if you're jealous

DeWolfe and his MySpace cohort, Tom Anderson, renewed their contracts last fall with News Corp. last year for $15 million apiece, spread over two years. Paying that amount has, FIM executives believe, left nothing for them. "They're pissed," says our tipster.

Then again, do these puffed-up Fox executives deserve much more than they're getting? Pop quiz: Name a Fox Interactive property other than MySpace.

The news is hardly bad news for the Winklevoss brothers and ConnectU's third cofounder, Divya Narendra. Court papers say the three will get "millions" of dollars in cash as well as stock in a startup too popular with mainstream America's millennial generation to fail. (The Winklevosses were fighting the settlement after they discovered that the Facebook common stock they would receive was worth less than they supposed.) Plus, there's still that shot at gold.

This much is true: Zuckerberg came close to selling his shares. But at the last minute, he backed out, and instead accepted a cash bonus of $900,000 from the company. Technically true that that wasn't a stock sale; but it did amount to a liquidity event for Zuckerberg — one that didn't quite make him a millionaire.

Hence the seemingly arbitrary limit on employee's stock sales. In November, employees will be allowed to sell either 20 percent of their shares, or $900,000 worth of stock — whichever is less. (The $900,000 limit, seemingly arbitrary, was based directly on the size of Zuckerberg's cash bonus.) Those shares must be sold at the common-stock valuation of $4 billion, not the $15 billion valuation Microsoft paid for in preferred shares. (Preferred stock, because it allows owners to be paid first in the case of a sale, among other rights, is more valuable than common stock, which carries no such privileges.)

Those are the rules, at any rate. Facebook will have a tough time enforcing them. There's nothing under the law preventing employees from selling more than $900,000 or more than 20 percent of their holdings, and there are plenty of willing buyers, some of whom may be glad to buy the shares at a valuation higher than the sanctioned $4 billion. (Facebook hopes to prevent sales at a higher valuation to avoid a revaluation of the company that could make it harder to recruit new employees.) What's likely to happen is that employees who break Facebook's rules will see promotions disappear and future stock grants dwindle — which will matter little to the company's earliest employees.

How much money is at stake? A startup typically allocates 20 percent of its shares to employee options. Even at the lower $4 billion common-stock valuation, that's $800 million waiting to bust loose from Facebook's coffers. Will Facebook's earliest employees be satisfied with a six-digit payout, knowing that some wealthy investor would be glad to make them multimillionaires?

(Photo by AP/Ruttle)

Page was granted the deed on the property on February 18, 2005 after the historic building had been on the market for years with an asking price of $7.95 million. The rich are always cheap: Page managed to get about $1 million knocked off the price, as the next year the property was assessed at just under $7 million. By this year, the assessment was back up to $7,216,214, with the nearly 3/4-acre property alone assessed at $5.1 million. How much are the taxes on the property? $78,550.96 over the last year.

Not to mention thousands more in relocation assistance such as covering the closing costs and paying mortgage interest on a new home near the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. No longer having to report to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer? Priceless. (Photo by AP/Elaine Thompson)

The Dennis Troper & Susan Wojcicki Children's Trust — Troper, Wojcicki's husband, also conveniently works at Google — filed in May to sell $1.2 million in Google shares. Which raises the question: Why do they need Google-subsidized, mommy-approved childcare? With that much in the bank, the kids could cut Mom out of the equation and hire their own nanny. It would be a lot cheaper than Google's gold-plated daycare, which reportedly costs the company$50,000 per kid per year.

Hot air balloon rides and circus performers. But then it would be difficult to fit either into 1015 Folsom, where the party is being held tomorrow night. As for the rest of Bebo's original employees? They've all left already.

• President Sue Decker, who has mostly instigated management upheaval to her Machiavellian advantage, is being paid in the "upper quartile" of comparable executives at Adobe, Apple, eBay, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Network Appliance, Oracle, and Time Warner.
• Raises handed out to Decker, CFO Blake Jorgensen, general counsel Michael Callahan, and top accountant Michael Murray:

  In connection with her promotion to the position of President, Ms. Decker's annual base salary was increased from $500,000 to $815,000, effective July 1, 2007. Mr. Jorgensen's annual base salary was set at $450,000 upon his joining the Company in June 2007. Mr. Callahan's annual base salary was increased effective April 1, 2007 from $325,000 to $360,000, and Mr. Murray's annual base salary was increased effective July 1, 2007 from $340,000 to $360,000. On March 3, 2008, the Compensation Committee increased the 2008 annual base salary levels of Messrs. Jorgensen, Callahan and Murray to $500,000, $420,000, and $375,000, respectively.

• Decker received 90 percent of her target bonus, or $1.1 million. Jorgensen received the same percentage for a bonus of $405,000, even though he hadn't worked at Yahoo a full year in 2007. (Jorgensen, though not previously CFO of a public company, did have this unique qualfication for his job: He was the best man at Decker's wedding. Decker is now divorcing.)
• Decker made a total of $14.8 million, including stock-based compensation, in 2007.