Near the start of the financial crisis, Perkins began trying to sell his epic yacht, the Maltese Falcon, seen in the attached 60 Minutes clip. He also put his palatial, $20 million Belvedere home on the market.

Things are now looking decidedly up. The uber venture capitalist, who co-founded top-tier VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is now said to have yanked the Belvedere house off the market. And he's scooped up yet another pad: Perkins bought a $9 million, 4,800-square-foot penthouse atop the brand new, 60-story Millennium Tower in San Francisco. The story, first reported by the blog Front Steps, was confirmed by Bloomberg, to whom Perkins said, "It's a good time to buy things other than paper."

Perkins had reasons to be so optimistic: His condo buy was reportedly financed by the sale of that yacht, which had languished on the market for more than a year. Billionaires, it seems, are finally spending again. Hallelujah.

Business Insider has some nice pictures of the building, inside and out.

(Pic: One of Millennium Tower's "Grand Residences," via Millennium Tower.)

Two words: Homeless shelter. With homeowners failing to make mortgage payments, and the Bay Area known for a seemingly intractable homeless problem, the Falcon could provide part of the solution. And Perkins has admitted to being embarrassed by its expense. After all, it shares a name with a book by noted socialist (and alcoholic) Dashiell Hammett. The onboard "hotel" only accommodates twelve guests, so it would only be a symbolic gesture — at least 5,000 homeless live in San Francisco alone. But as it stands, it's a symbol of unrepentant greed, which at the moment is about as trendy as mortgage-backed securities. (Photo by AP/Lionel Cironneau)

• The Falcon at sunset.
• The Falcon turning, chased by a smaller boat.
• Perkins built this yacht to wake one morning off the coast of France and hear, amid the puttering noises of the dock, a man with a thick accent say: "This is the Maltese Falcon, the biggest sailing yacht."
• Ha ha. Your Rolex boat looks tiny.
• "I just wanted the biggest boat. Do I have an ego? Yes. Is it big? Yes."

Of course, in Silicon Valley, an obsession with yachts isn't unusual, either. Though for Shaw to catch sharks like Oracle's Larry Ellison, his boss of six years in the '90s, he's going to need a bigger boat

What does the board do? You meet at 8:30 a.m. and planes have to be caught around 1 p.m. An audit committee meeting can take an hour and you've got all the other committees. And then it's almost time for lunch and you have a few minutes to talk about competition, strategy, growth rate, succession, the future, fundamentally important stuff. And it tends to get scrunched into a very limited amount of time.

When I joined the board, the company was spending $5 billion a year on R&D and the board was oblivious. So we established this committee. It met the day before the board meetings and got into the strategic aspect of HP. Made it possible for Carly [Fiorina] and Mark [Hurd] to take risks. HP had had a very liberal technology licensing policy, actually paying out $100 million a year in royalties. At the first meeting of the technology committee we changed that. I insisted that every single license had to be signed by Fiorina. The second thing we did was get serious against Dell Direct. But the most important thing was we encouraged the company to redirect a lot of purchases of microprocessors to AMD from Intel.

"Will the credit crunch affect Silicon Valley earnings? Anything to worry about there?" Spencer Ante asked Perkins in an interview. His response:

No. There's far more than adequate capital, as we've said earlier. It's always a good time to be in venture capital. If the markets come off a bit, the prices come down. You can't look at the stock market and decide whether or not to invest in a startup venture. You have to totally ignore that. You have to assume sooner or later there will be a market for liquidity. After all, the growth of technology has been just about the only constant in our economy for a very long time.

I almost forgot about this. Last saturday (22nd) I saw Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) walking towards Kepler's bookstore b/w 2:00 - 3:00 PM in Menlo Park. 20 mins later he emerged out with Mine's Bigger (Tom Perkins) book and another book. He also had a muffin and coffee in hand (from Barrone's). Drove away in a Mercedes Benz - couldn't figure out the model. It could be a CLS or CL and his license plate had bunch of 5s' in it along with few letters.

Heather was nude upon the bed and Kim, above her, was also nude, but wearing some sort of complicated black leather harness. Through numerous buckles and D-rings, the straps crossed her shoulders, spanned her full breasts, encircled her waist, and passed between her legs to rise again over her firm buttocks to rejoin the other straps at the waist. She held a long, black whip in her right hand. It had a leather handle, and numerous strands whirling in the air as she manipulated it over the prone girl on the bed. Heather's body was glistening with perspiration as she moaned in anticipation of the whiplash, which seemed always to be withheld.

First up is testimony from ex-chairwoman Patricia Dunn, who says she didn't even know what pretexting was until former board member Tom Perkins told her about it this June.

Pretexting, as Dunn now knows, is calling a company impersonating a customer so the caller can get that customer's account information. In this case, investigators under Dunn's command pretexted AT&T to get call records for Perkins's personal phone.

Dunn's former lawyers could back up her story, as they claim they felt the whole investigation was legal. The Congressional panel clearly doesn't think so, as they've asked everyone today how lying to get people's personal records, planting spies at news offices, and planting e-mail-tracking software on a reporter's computer seemed legal.

Dunn expresses 'deep regret' over leak probe [CNNMoney.com]

H-P is now charting the right course, with Mark Hurd firmly at the helm. There is no better indication of his commitment to doing the right thing than the appointment of Bart Schwartz as counsel to review and revamp H-P's security processes. "Bart is an outstanding lawyer and investigator with excellent judgment and immense integrity," former FBI director Louie Freeh told me. "He will act independently and provide to H-P a 'best practices' architecture for investigations and procedures which is thorough, fair and sensitive to privacy requirements."

The lawyer, Viet D. Dinh, says Hurd's role in the scandal was mitigated, HP lawyer Larry Sonsini acted ethically in the protection of his client (though others accuse him of knowingly green-lighting an illegal investigation), and reveals that Perkins sent Hurd an e-mail blaming now-ex-chairwoman Patricia Dunn for the whole thing and fearing that she'd pack the board with supporters when he left. Looks like Dinh agrees with everyone else's take: Dunn's the bad guy, and as her replacement, Hurd can save HP.

Dunn and Dusted [Wall Street Journal, sub required]

Pretexting is lying. Wikipedia says: "Pretexting is the act of pretending to be someone who you are not by telling an untruth, or creating deception. The practice of pretexting typically involves tricking a telecom carrier into disclosing personal information of a customer, with the scammer pretending to be the customer."

It's common. The Washington Post says: "A security specialist said it has been a 'tradition for decades' for chief executives of big companies to hire private investigators to spy on colleagues, calling it a 'common power play.'"

It's easy. "All you need is the last four digits of a Social Security number and a correct ZIP code," a repossession investigator told the New York Times, and "you can view the bill."

It works. Hewlett-Packard's probe outed board member George Keyworth as the leaker who shared important business information with CNET.

It's unethical. At least according to a former president of a trade group, the National Council of Investigation and Security Services, quoted in the Times.

It's illegal. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act outlaws unauthorized attempts to gain personal nonpublic financial information. (Lawyers disagree on whether the ban applies to phone records.) Phone providers view pretexting as illegal and sue those who attempt it. This is why many investigators say they've stopped the practice. A bill in the California State Senate could make the offense a state crime punishable by up to a year in jail.

It got Patricia Dunn and superstar lawyer Larry Sonsini in trouble. As chairwoman of HP, Dunn authorized the leak investigation that included pretexting for phone records. Dunn now says she did not know of or authorize any pretexting. Also, the San Jose Mercury News obtained e-mails in which Larry Sonsini (outside counsel to HP) told former board member Tom Perkins that this investigation was legal.

The phone companies are fighting back. Most notably, Verizon is pushing against pretexters and other dealers in personal phone records. For example, the company settled with a records vendor who agreed to stop selling phone records and to share how they obtained those records.

This isn't the last scandal we'll hear. The president of one security company says that heads of Fortune 500 Companies hire "fly-by-night organizations" to do their dirty investigative work all the time. Now that a pretexting scandal is front-page news, expect investigative journalists to hunt down similar stories.

Pretexting [Wikipedia]
When a Stranger Calls, Beware of The Pretext [Washington Post]
An Industry Is Based on a Simple Masquerade [New York Times]