Forbes magazine has announced that Tiger Woods is the first athlete to surpass $1 billion in earnings and endorsement money.

The magazine estimates that golf’s top-ranked player crested the plateau when he earned $10 million for winning the FedEx Cup on Sunday.

Woods has been the world’s highest-paid athlete since 2002 when he surpassed Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher.

Forbes says that the most expensive zip code for 2009 is 07620, Alpine, New Jersey.

The tiny New Jersey town ranked No. 1 with a median price of $4.14 million for one of its luxurious mansions.

The affluent borough, with a median household income of $128,287, topped Forbes’ list despite housing prices falling 23 percent over the past year.

Tokyo is the world’s most expensive city, according to Mercer’s 2009 Worldwide Cost of Living survey released today, with the cost of living up 13.1% from 2008.

Japan’s capital is followed by Osaka and Moscow, which held the top spot in last year’s rankings. Geneva comes in fourth.

The significant changes from last year are due to massive swings in exchange rates, with many currencies at their weakest in years against the U.S. dollar, during the March 2009 survey period.

Forbes reports that Sotheby’s is offering a 1,500-year-old biblical document that includes layers of text and meaning–in three languages.

Known as the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, the piece was written over the span of three centuries and stowed in a sacred monastery until landing in the hands of a pair of British twins by way of local Egyptian dealers.

Now an English college is cannibalizing its library and cashing out, to pay for some building renovations.

No. 1 on Forbes’ list, for the second year in a row, is Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

He is worth $30 billion, $5 billion less than last year, as a result of double-digit declines in real estate and stocks owned via the Crown Property Bureau, the state investment vehicle of which he is a trustee.

Rising political tensions have also destabilized the country, dampening even the important tourism sector.

For most of the decade, Russian billionaires spent hundreds of millions of dollars on boats, jets, expensive art and the occasional football team.

But, despite strained bank accounts and public outrage, the tycoons have been loath to part with their expensive trinkets, choosing instead to hunker down and wait for better days.

To be sure, these are not happy days for the country’s superrich.

In Forbes magazine‘s latest ranking of the world’s wealthiest people, Russia’s billionaires had an estimated collective loss of $369 billion last year, and two-thirds fell from the list altogether.