Greed at a Glance
A weekly update on avarice in America and beyond

October 30, 2006

Don’t pick up that menu. You might get sticker shock. Upscale restaurants the nation over, a news report noted last week, are now routinely charging over $40 for single entrees. Add extra, on top of that, if you want vegetables with your hunk of steak or fish. Overall, prices at San Francisco’s top 200 restaurants have slid up 14 percent over the past two years, with the same boost evident in New York, where an “ostrich scramble” at davidburke & donatella currently goes for $44. That’s still a bargain, of course, compared to a meal at the Guy Savoy in Las Vegas, “where desserts alone are $22 each and a meal for two can easily run $500.”

Just how much did last year’s top-paid CEO make? More than originally thought. Initial pay reports for 2005, released last spring, listed the $280.1 million take-home of Capital One Financial’s Richard Fairbank as the year's top windfall. But the spring reports only covered firms that filed their required disclosures early in the year. Subsequent reports gave top pay honors to Barry Diller from home-shopping giant IAC/Interactive. Diller’s take-home: $295 million. But Diller actually “ran” two companies last year. From the second, Expedia, an IAC/Interactive spinoff, Diller pocketed $173 million in option earnings, bringing his total CEO pay for 2005, with base salary, to $469.7 million. And that total doesn’t count the 7.6 million new stock options Diller also collected. The reason for these additional options? To “motivate Mr. Diller for the future,” noted the IAC/Interactive official explanation . . .

Fortune magazine's Matt Miller is now predicting, with tongue only half in cheek, a political revolt against the ultra rich led by the “fairly rich,” a group that includes doctors, lawyers, and other highly educated professionals who “can’t help but notice how many folks with credentials like theirs are living in Gatsby-esque splendor they'll never enjoy.” Agrees pollster Doug Schoen, an adviser for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “If you look at the lower part of the upper class or the upper part of the upper middle class, there's a great deal of frustration.” One example: A Los Angeles doctor with two kids charges that ultras, with their effortless ability to shell out vast sums for tuition and donations, “have raised the ante for private school slots to the point where he can’t get his kids enrolled.”

Was Jesus rich? The “Prosperity Gospel,” a once marginal credo that challenges the “traditional image of Jesus as a poor, itinerant preacher,” is gaining considerable steam, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Prosperity preachers now range from televangelist Oral Roberts and Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of Atlanta’s largest church, to Rev. Creflo Dollar, the Rolls-Royce-driving senior pastor of the 23,000-member World Changers Church International. Their contention that God rewards the faithful with wealth, notes ethicist Sondra Ely Wheeler of the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., offers “people divine sanctification to be greedy.” Adds Wheeler: “You tell them what they want to hear: The reason you have a Mercedes is because God loves you.”

Move over, Imelda. Meet Khunying Shinawatra, the wife of the Thai telecom tycoon-turned-prime minister punted out of office last month in a bloodless coup. A special National Counter Corruption Commission reports that Khunying and her husband Thaksin left office worth a combined $397 million. Khunying personally owns 18 luxury watches, 11 cars, and four homes. Not counted by the commission: the $3 billion cleared last January when Thaksin sold his telecom empire, after transferring title to it to relatives. Thailand’s new prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, seems intent on charting a different course. He has announced his admiration for the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and its innovative Gross National Happiness index, a development yardstick that seeks to uncouple social progress from a single-minded preoccupation with increasing consumption.

Greed at a Glance appears each week in the Too Much online newsletter. Learn more about Too Much and then sign up here for a free subscription!