Feisty pop group, Girls Aloud made a fast £125,000 ($250,000) for a 1 hour performance at British Billionaire, Eddie Healey’s 70th birthday party.

By all accounts, Mr Healey went to town with the rest of his bash by spending a further £300,000 ($600,000) on hiring a ballroom and entertaining 300 guests at London’s Dorchester Hotel. 

Who said anything about a recession? Sometime between the government bailout of Bear Stearns and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March, Lee Tachman spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for himself and three close friends.

The trip was an exercise in luxuriant male bonding. Mr. Tachman, who is 38, and his friends got around by private jet, helicopter, Hummer limousine, Ferraris and Lamborghinis; stayed in V.I.P. rooms at Casa Casuarina, the South Beach hotel that was formerly Gianni Versace’s mansion; and played “extreme adventure paintball” with former agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Mr. Tachman, a manager for a company that executes trades for hedge funds and the owner of “a handful” of buildings in New York, said he has not felt the need to cut back.

“I always feel like there’s a sword of Damocles over my head, like it could all come crashing down at any time,” he said. “But there’s always going to be people who are trading, and there’s always going to be a demand for real estate in New York.”

He is hardly alone in his eagerness to keep spending. Some businesses that cater to the superrich report that clients — many of them traders and private equity investors whose work is tied to Wall Street — are still splurging on multimillion-dollar Manhattan apartments, custom-built yachts, contemporary art and lavish parties.

Buyers this year have already closed on 71 Manhattan apartments that each cost more than $10 million, compared with 17 apartments in that price range during all of 2007. Last week, a New York art dealer paid a record $1.6 million for an Edward Weston photograph at Sotheby’s. And the GoldBar, a downtown lounge, reports that bankers continue to order $3,000 bottles of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac.

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Read this “Ultra” interesting article on nytimes

When the middle-class millionaire wants to wow her, he buys a diamond. Only the millionaire buys the rarest stone, one no one else will have.

On his travels, the millionaire goes where no one can find him–to an exclusive island resort featuring $185,000 fractional memberships in luxury vacation homes.

And at home, he relaxes not before the plasma TV but in his $150,000 yoga room where he receives massages while gazing at a Japanese-inspired garden outside.

Bill Gates is now only the third richest man with a net worth of $58 billion. Mexican telecom mogul, Carlos Slim Helú, trumps Gates by $2 billion.

Had Microsoft not made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo!, Gates would have kept the number one spot, which is now filled by Warren Buffet.

Naturally, the list had no shortage of Andrei’s, Sergei’s or Dimitri’s. However, it only places three Russian billionaires in the top 20.

Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich, and Alexei Mordashov all share the title of “self-made” and each have made their fortune in aluminum.

For nearly seven years Melina Salazar did her best to put on a smile and tend to the every need of her most loyal and cantankerous customer.

She made sure his food was as hot as he wanted, even if it meant he burned his mouth. And she smiled through his demands and curses.

The 89-year-old Walter “Buck” Swords obviously appreciated it, leaving the waitress $50,000 and a 2000 Buick when he died.

It is official that China has become the country with the second largest population of billionaires in the world, just behind the US.

Revealed by the World Entrepreneur magazine, a list of 2007′s top 500 Chinese magnates determined their combined wealth more than 587 billion dollars.

Though the list included many from Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, the Kwok brothers of Sun Hung Kai Properties in Hong Kong topped the list.