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We are in the throes of a revolution. The power paradigm is shifting before our very eyes. Got a sharp voice and a point of view? Your Snapchat account could [...]

On TV these days, working moms are in startlingly short supply--one more reason why Bkick-ish, ABCs sitcom about an upper-middle-class black family, is easily one of the most important (and [...]

WHAT'S THE ULTIMATE STATUS SYMBOL OF AN ENTREPRENEUR? A BUYOUT OFFER. MEET THREE FOUNDERS WHO MADE SERIOUS BANK AFTER SELLING THEIR STARTUPS FOR MILLIONS JESS LEE CEO, POLYVORE Sold to [...]

The old rules of power are dead. Back in the day, you could spot the VIPs in the back of their chauffeured town cars, these suit-and-tie money men presiding over [...]

AVANITY SHINGLE, for the uninitiated, is a production company overseen by a famous actor that gives a studio first dibs on whatever crazy ideas he or she happens to conjure [...]

THERE'S AN AWKWARD MOMENT just as Jessica Chastain and I make our way over to an empty table at a bustling midtown Manhattan cafe: She catches the eye of a [...]

A: Because it belongs to a woman. over the course of your lifetime, you'll pay more than a man for everything from health insurance to haircuts, dry cleaning to deodorant. [...]

Anna Faris isn't naturally funny. That's not just my observation after sitting opposite her for two hours while nursing sweaty pints of Guinness in a bar roughly the size of [...]

A side from the slow-rolling hot dogs at concession stands and the sideline billboards for Hubba Bubba bubble gum, you'd be hard-pressed to find a hint of pink at any [...]

Joanna Wozniak, 26 Chicago, Illinois Occupation: Dancer for the Joffrey Ballet Annual income: $39,000 Average income in Chicago: $43,727 * Home, sweet home: 'I rent a one - bedroom apartment [...]

* Two stone-faced waiters at the Beverly Hills Hotel, balancing trays atop their sturdy shoulders, pause mid-stride to oh-so-discreetly steal a glimpse of Kate Hudson's ass. Who can blame them, [...]

Racheal Jama, 28, Soroti, Uganda Occupation: Assistant accountant Annual income: $7,200 (converted from Ugandan shilling) Average income for a woman In Uganda: $1,216 Home, sweet home: 'I live in a [...]

Kerry O'Brien, 39 CEO, HER LOOK ENTERPRISES O'Brien presides over a Burlington, Vermont-based undergarments empire that includes seamless 'Commando' panties and silicone-filled bra inserts ('Takeouts'). Her line is sold in [...]

MARIA HOUSDEN, 47, NEW JERSEY, BECAME A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR During her 15-year marriage, Maria Housden played the role of suburban mom. She shuttled her three kids to playdates and made [...]

* Here's a stark news flash: The pink slip is back, big time. Call it the latest grim reminder of these hard times, alongside gas prices inching to $4 a [...]

1 Score face time with the office big shot. 'Don't underestimate flattery,' says Ivanka Trump, the Celebrity Apprentice star and executive vice president of The Trump Organization. Attend speeches or [...]

JUST EIGHT HOURS into my marriage and I was already faking it. Debilitated by exhaustion, I peeled off my wedding dress and mustered the energy to change into a wickedly [...]

MARIE CLAIRE: YOU GRADUATED FROM BROWN WITH AN ART HISTORY DEGREE. WHAT WAS YOUR PLAN? JILL FURMAN: I grew up in Manhattan, going to the movies and theater, and I [...]

The article presents a list of billionaires in the world along with where they are from and what they are worth including John Abele of Vermont, Juan Abelló of Spain, and Reji Abraham of India.

The article profiles the top 20 billionaires in the world as of March 26, 2007. Topping the list is William Gates, founder of Microsoft Corp., followed by financial guru Warren Buffett, who is giving away a sizable portion of his $52 billion fortune to charity, and Carlos Slim Helu, who owns a telecom company in Mexico.

This article focuses on rap music artist and actor Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. Jackson grew up hard in a violent, crack-wracked neighborhood in the Borough of Queens, his drug-dealing mother murdered when he was 8. By age 11 he was reselling cocaine, by 19 he had three convictions and in 2000 got shot nine times, as he recounts in several of his songs. INSET: 50's Dollar Man.

This article presents a list of the top 100 celebrities as well as their respective earnings including actor Tom Cruise, rock music group the Rolling Stones, television talk show host Oprah Winfrey, rock music group U2, golfer Tiger Woods, director/producer Steven Spielberg, radio talk show host Howard Stern and rap music artist 50 Cent.

The article presents a chart of billionaires in the United States.

The article presents a chart of billionaires in Europe.

The article presents a photo chart of the world's top 20 billionaires.

The article looks at how successful investors sometimes make bad decisions with big financial repercussions. What makes smart investors so dumb? Greed, of course. They wouldn't be in this game if they didn't hope to rake it in. But we're talking about sophisticated investors who rarely take people--or balance sheets--at face value. Avarice alone can't explain why so many of them fall for flimflammery, from hedge funds and secretive offshore commodities pools to ordinary Ponzi schemes. How, for example, could a buyout artist like Thomas H. Lee be taken in by Phillip Bennett, the Refco chairman eventually caught hiding (so say prosecutors; Bennett denies the charge) $430 million in bad debt? A certain predisposition to folly is hard-wired into the human species. Decision making means processing an immense amount of data, and so the brain takes shortcuts. "Authority, scarcity, consensus, social proof--these are relatively primitive decision-making strategies we deploy," says Robert B. Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and author of Influence: Science and Practice (Allyn & Bacon, 2000). In other words, we're all susceptible to suggestions by influential people; we gravitate to something if it seems to be unavailable to everyone else, and we trust strangers who appear to be like us.

The article looks at problems with church finance within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. On a household basis, Catholics donate less than half as much to their parishes as Protestants. The pool of almost-free labor--priests and nuns taking poverty-level salaries--is drying up, forcing the hiring of more salaried lay workers. In the view of many, the Church's inept supervision of the pedophilia cases exemplifies problems throughout the dioceses: arrogance, secrecy, poor judgment bordering on corruption, lack of accountability and oversight. A group of Catholic businesspeople led by Geoffrey T. Boisi are asking for a reorganization of how the Church is run, from requiring annual reports and five-year strategic plans in each parish to teams of lay accountants, lawyers, psychologists and consultants to deal with crises and other management problems. For an organization as hierarchical as the Church, run by a man who is infallible, the talk about "customers" borders on heresy. INSET: ONE CHURCH, TWO VISION.

This article focuses on Richard Sands and how through his many acquisitions he now sells wine in several markets, including expensive and inexpensive wines. It's from here, in a nondescript exurb of Rochester, that the chief executive of Constellation Brands has constructed, piece by piece, a $3.8 billion (sales) wine-and-spirits Godzilla. The plan lay idle until September, when Mondavi announced a draconian recapitalization project to raise $850 million by selling off the storied premium labels. In a flurry of calls Sands convened his brother Robert (Constellation's chief operating officer), Merrill investment bankers and takeover lawyers from Wachtell, Lipton to come up with the money (mostly bank debt through a syndicated loan) and execute the bid. Though the company owned the hugely popular table-wine labels Paul Masson and Taylor California Cellar, it had scaled back advertising and promotion, falling out of favor with distributors, with a resulting drop in sales. So in August 1994 the company picked off a significant, if lower-end, stake in varietal and nonvarietal categories, buying the mid-tier Inglenook and Almaden brands, respectively, the fifth-and sixth-largest-selling jug wines in the U.S. That $120 million purchase did more than cement Constellation's presence in California: It transformed the company into the nation's second-largest wine supplier, behind Ernest & Julio Gallo, boosting its sale of table wines to 68.4 million gallons from 10.4 million gallons just two years earlier. INSET: By the Numbers.

This article previews the 2004 Forbes, a list which ranks the 400 wealthiest Americans. The economy's recovery may be a little shaky, but you wouldn't know it from looking at this year's Forbes 400. The combined net worth of the nation's wealthiest climbed to $1 trillion, up $45 billion in 12 months. But while the creation of wealth marches on, the preservation of it is a chancy affair. Disney boss Michael Eisner is gone from the list, capping a bad year of shareholder revolts and lackluster releases.Also gone: long-time Forbes 400 member and buyout king Theodore Forstmann, who took large stakes in XO Communications and McLeodUSA before they went bust. Those left behind made room for 45 new names, 10 of them members of Chicago's Pritzker clan, whose intergenerational squabble resulted in the carving up of the family's $17 billion hotel and manufacturing fortune. But not all the new names are family money: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page prove a good idea can still make a bundle; bond guru William Gross' steady hand on volatile markets created his $1 billion fortune; and Kenneth Hendricks shows a guy can still make a buck in the unsexy trade of building supplies. Those left behind made room for 45 new names, 10 of them members of Chicago's Pritzker clan, whose intergenerational squabble resulted in the carving up of the family's$ 17 billion hotel and manufacturing fortune. But not all the new names are family money: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page prove a good idea can still make a bundle; bond guru William Gross' steady hand on volatile markets created his $1 billion fortune; and Kenneth Hendricks shows a guy can still make a buck in the unsexy trade of building supplies. High oil and gas prices also helped: T. Boone Pickens, a perennial suspect for two decades, finally makes an appearance on the list, but his $750 million pile is dwarfed by the $4.2 billion net worth of Houston pipeline maven Daniel Duncan.

Presents an alphabetical listing of the 2004 Forbes 400, a ranking of the wealthiest Americans.

The article discusses phishing, an e-mail scam. Zachary Keith Hill killed time by surfing the Net. He hooked up with "Mike," a 16-year-old with a penchant for slamming chat room blowhards. Mike helped Hill design a flashy Web site and their friendship evolved into a partners-in-crime spree. The duo blitzed what Hill calls "thousands and thousands and thousands" of bogus e-mails supposedly from AOL's billing center to subscribers, urging them to provide sensitive financial information before their accounts were canceled. A link embedded in the e-mails sent recipients to a stunningly realistic but phony AOL billing page. These new scammers are average students, bored stay-at-homes and low-end criminals who have discovered how easy it is to pick the locks on the Web. Their specialty is phishing, creating fake sites that sucker people into giving up account numbers and other sensitive information online. They get technical help from any of 50 or more gangs of professional criminals, operating mostly in Russia and eastern Europe, where legions of unemployed programmers have found steady work as freelance hackers. There are a lot of things you can do to prevent identity theft; the most basic is to navigate to an e-commerce site only by using your own bookmark or carefully typing in the address. INSETS: Private Patrol;Anatomy of a Phish;Smells Like a Phish;Don't Get Snared

The article focuses on Mirek Klabal whose three-decade career in art appreciation--spanning Toronto, Minneapolis, Naples, Greenwich and now New York City--has been pockmarked by allegations of fraud. Klabal has been named in at least a dozen suits brought by affluent clients who claim he offered them a low-risk, high-return investment. In case after case Klabal is accused of selling works by modern masters at supposedly deep discounts and guaranteeing that either the pieces could be resold at a profit or he would buy some back at a premium. Klabal insists he made no such guarantees. Even with low transaction costs, a collection of modern art prints is hardly a compelling investment. According to University of Toronto economics professor James Pesando, the real return on a diversified print portfolio is at most 2% a year. Klabal has survived. He now operates as a low-profile private dealer in Manhattan, nowhere to be found in Art in America's annual guide to 4,000 galleries, museums and private dealers in the U.S. Nor is Klabal among the Art Dealers Association of America's invitation-only, 164-member list.

After two years of declining values, the rich finally got richer. On this, "Forbes" magazine's 21st annual edition of "The Forbes 400," the aggregate net worth of the nation's wealthiest 400 citizens leapt 10% in the past year, to $955 billion -- just one Bill Gates away from $1 trillion. Leading the charge: Internet stocks. A rising price of admission -- $600 million -- pushed 20 members off the list, including wrestling's Vince McMahon and Global Crossing's Gary Winnick. Their places were filled by newcomers like hedge fund managers Steve Cohen and Ken Griffin, both of whom would prefer we keep them out of our club.

The article presents facts about diamonds. Some diamonds are more than 3 billion years old, two-thirds the age of the Earth. The majority of diamonds were formed more than 100 miles below the surface of the Earth, some as deep as 400 miles down. A law in 13th century France decreed that only royalty could wear diamonds. Diamonds can withstand extremely high temperatures and that makes them ideal for use in windows, in industry and in space probes, including the 1978 Pioneer space probe to the surface of Venus.

The article focuses on Lev Leviev, a billionaire with an intense hatred of DeBeers SA, which is the miner and marketer of diamonds known as the "Syndicate." Leviev has taken significant business away from DeBeers in Russia and Angola, two of the world's largest producers of rough diamonds in terms of value. Leviev has not humbled the once-mighty Syndicate alone. But his defiance has inspired others, like Rio Tinto, owner of Australia's Argyle mine, which bypassed De Beers for the first time in 1996 to sell its 42 million carats directly to polishers in Antwerp.

This section presents a list of the world's billionaires differentiated by regions like Europe, Asia and United States.

The article presents information about J. Clifford Hudson, CEO of Sonic Corp., a fast-food chain based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Sonic has not changed its formula; it has just gotten better at standardizing it. Hardly gloating, Cliff Hudson can not forget what it took to get Sonic's sizzle back. In 1986 he joined a group of Sonic executives that took the company private for $10 million, a combination of cash from insiders, venture funding and a loan from Heller Financial Inc. That turned out to be the easy part. Hudson was executing new contracts for franchisees that raised their royalty rates. He got an earful from them and the four franchisee groups on Sonic's executive board.

Profiles Israeli billionaire Gil Shwed, cofounder of Check Point Software Technologies, a seller of firewall software. Rivals to his company, including Microsoft's Windows XP and Cisco; Thoughts on his fortune; Hopes to expand his business.

Profiles several billionaires and states how they obtained their wealth. Aviation industry pioneer Serge Dassault; Nicky Oppenheimer, one of Africa's richest men because of his diamonds fortune; AIC owner Michael Lee-Chin; Others.

Discusses 'Forbes' ranking of the world's richest people. Previous list-makers who failed to make the 2002 rankings; Regions with the most billionaires; Net worth of the billionaires and how they accumulated their fortunes.

Presents the 15th annual Forbes' list of the world's richest people ranked by net worth and information on 538 billionaires. Profiles of Roberto Hernandez of Banamex, Masayoshi Son of Softbank, Italian Prime MInister Silvio Berlusconi, Liliane Bettencourt of L'Oreal, and others.

The article discusses the practice of vulture investors to invest in companies that file bankruptcy and in risky stocks. Topics covered include the experiences of ICO Global Communications and Iridium leading up to their bankruptcy, the re-entry of banker Leon Black into the mutual fund market, and the precarious situation of vulture investors in investing in bank debt. Also mentioned is the practice of Credit Suisse First Boston manager David Matlin of investing in many junior unsecured bonds.

Presents a list of billionaires in countries of the Middle East, including Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Executives including Onsi Sawiris, Sammy and Yuli Ofer, Shari Arison Dorsman, and Nasser Al-Kharafi; Amount and source of their wealth.

Presents a list of billionaires in Europe. Examples of such billionaires, including Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, and Bernard Arnault; Details regarding amount and source of wealth.