These should be heady times for Thiel, whose Clarium hedge fund sparked glowing press coverage (and more than a little envy). His strategy was different from most of the private pools of cash run out of places like Greenwich: Using relatively little debt, he sought to profit in times when governments meddle with markets. That should be now, right? Instead, he has been as hard hit by the credit crisis as most other hedge funds. He is down a mere 4.5 percent for the year — but that includes his phenomenal 58 percent rise from $4 billion in January 2008 to $7 billion six months later.

From July to December, Clarium's assets cratered. According to performance data obtained by Valleywag, Clarium's main fund returned negative 39 percent. Put simply, an investor who put in the fund's minimum of $1 million would have ended six months later with $600,00.

By the numbers, most did not wait around that long. Thiel's fund ended the year with only $2 billion under management, which suggests that investors took out another $2 billion, in addition to Clarium's $3 billion in investment losses. (Click to see the full document.)

No surprise there: Risk-averse investors have been pulling out of hedge funds everywhere. Thiel was right about the mortgage bubble, and right about the rising role of governments in markets. But was he right about how to make money off these developments? So far, the answer's no. And to investors, that's the only kind of vision that matters.

Ouch! That's almost as bad as the time someone asked Dell what he'd do if he ran Apple, and he said he'd shut it down and return the money to shareholders. Apple is now worth four times as much as Dell's company.

(Photo by AFP/Getty Images)

Yesterday, someone spat on Arrington at a conference in Munich. For the self-crowned king of startups — which is worth a Twitter follower list that numbers in the thousands and a bobblehead doll made in your likeness — that was an unforgivable act of lèse-majesté. So, he wants to abdicate. "In the past I've been grabbed, pulled, shoved and otherwise abused at events," he writes, "but never spat on. I think this is where I'm going to draw a line."

Arrington has encouraged a fantasy among his followers: Get written up in TechCrunch, and your startup will get funding and you will become rich. Arrington himself rather expected the same would happen to him — that one of his VC buddies would plow millions into TechCrunch, or one of the dealmakers he lionized would snap up TechCrunch for a large media company. His hoped-for exit never happened — and likely never will, now that the Web 2.0 bubble which TechCrunch was founded to chronicle has evaporated.

Instead, he's stuck with a dream deferred, and a nightmare realized. Over the summer, Arrington attracted a mentally unbalanced stalker who made violent threats, and he went into hiding at his parents' home in Washington state. He ended up paying $2,000 a day for private security on TechCrunch's office, which is also his home. Is there a better example of the costs of being famous, and how few benefits attach?

The only answer is to go into hiding, which Arrington is doing. But only after he attends the World Economic Forum in Davos.

(Photo by meattle)

The World Economic Forum, known as Davos for the Swiss mountain resort where it's held, is more notable for who's not going to the glitzy, star-studded affair. Only the organizers pretend that the purpose of the event is to hold lofty sessions about global economics, the intellectual fig leaf which covers the schmoozing and boozing.

Here's a list of the true elite — the people smart enough to drop out of Davos, via Portfolio:

• Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack
• Google cofounder Sergey Brin
• Chevron CEO David O'Reilly
• Ken Griffin of hedge fund Citadel Investments
• Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein
• Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit
• Sony CEO Howard Stringer

If they're not going, why is DeWolfe so determined? A tipster tells us he feuded with his ostensible boss, Fox Interactive Media chief Peter Levinsohn, over his Davos trip. Levinsohn reportedly thought it was a terrible idea; Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit which includes MySpace, just laid off 100 employees, and we hear MySpace is prepping 300 layoffs of its own, including the possible closure of its recently opened San Francisco office. (An engineer MySpace was recruiting in San Francisco was abruptly told in the middle of the process that the job he was interviewing had moved to the Los Angeles headquarters, not San Francisco.)

No matter! DeWolfe will get his photos taken with world leaders, celebrities, and the cluster of kooky hangers-on like Julia Allison and Nouriel Roubini who have wangled their way into the conference. It will certainly reinforce DeWolfe's image, though probably not in the way he anticipated.

(Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

The Forum has the world's elite meet and greet at the Swiss resort town of Davos every year. And every year, organizers pretend that it's a serious event for serious bankers to talk about serious economics. This year, the pretense is more serious than ever.

The evidence in their favor: Goldman Sachs has nixed its party, and John Thain, the ousted Merrill chief, will no longer host a Friday breakfast. The evidence against: The conquerors of Wall Street, like JPMorgan Chase and Barclays, will still host fizzy bashes.

The very theme of the event is denial. Klaus Schwab, the event's founder, has a neat semantic dodge for avoiding talk of current economic woes: He's entitled the event "Shaping the Post-Crisis World." Yes, we'd all rather think about when the unpleasantness will be over.

No chance of that with Roubini around. He will ruin Schwab's plan two different ways. The New York University economist made his bones by predicting the mortgage meltdown and the ensuing recession. He will surely not want to softpedal his doom-mongering for airy talk of the future. But at home in Manhattan, he's better known for the louche soirées he throws for young women in his vulva-studded TriBeCa loft. (Which, by the way, we applaud!) Roubini embodies the true spirit of Davos: wild partying in the face of the world's doom.

And once he's joined by Allison, the globetrotting stalker of married Internet executives, we must all dress up for the apocalypse.

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Why, Google did, according to Davos party correspondent Meghan Asha, the sometimes girlfriend of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who got her in. Google's affair included Norman Jay, a British house-music DJ. There you have it: Larry and Sergey are at fault for distracting the world's best and brightest from preventing the meltdown we now face. If Schwab is serious about keeping thing's serious at the next WEF, we recommend disinviting Page and Brin. And Arrington and Asha.

Arrington and Asha in Davos together: Look at those smiles. Don't you just know those two kept each warm in the chilly Swiss air?

Here's Meghan and Julia together in Vegas. Shouldn't Julia have warned Meghan off geeks?

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