Editor's Letter

Billionaires' Row

If your taste runs to impossibly rich middle-aged men in pressed, stonewashed jeans and spankingwhite cross-trainers, Sun Valley in July is your kind of place. It is here, a faint whiff of Gulfstream fuel mingling with the high mountain air, that the New Establishment—the barons and baronesses of the Information Age—gathers at investment banker Herbert Allen's annual swap meet. (Think of a Bohemian Grove for billionaires with laptops and Palm Pilots.) And it is here that they divvy up the vast spoils of the information-andtechnology revolution.

Since 1994, Vanity Fair, which first identified and named this new breed of wired capitalist, has dispatched Annie Leibovitz to shoot a group portrait of Allen's campers. A lot has happened since then. There was the Ovitz thing. The fall and rise of Gerald Levin. Yahoo! Amazon.com. The Eisner-Katzenberg fiasco.

And a lot hasn't changed over the years. (For evidence, check

out this year's class shot, on page 195.) DreamWorks shaman David Geffen and Universal Studios president Ron Meyer still dress like lifeguards on their day off. John Malone still looks like the high-school science teacher who doubles as the football coach. As for Bill Gates—well, he should know that the Caesar cut really only looked good on George Clooney and on Caesar himself.

Amazingly, every one of those photographed over the past five years is still alive. Like most things to do with money, everything's still pretty much in the tight grip of a few white males. And everybody pictured is a whole lot richer.

So, as you squint to pick out your favorite billionaire in the group photos below, cast your mind back to those rosy, simpler days of 1994, when Michael Ovitz ruled Hollywood, nobody could quite figure out what Howard Stringer did for a living, and Bill Gates was worth a paltry $9.3 billion.

GRAYDON CARTER

1994

1997

1998

The 10 New Establishment titans who appear in all of the three group portraits on this page—from 1994, 1997, and 1998—have had more reason to smile each year. Since the first photograph, their combined wealth has soared by 471 percent, from approximately $25 billion in 1994 to $142.8 billion, according to the upcoming 1999 Forbes Four Hundred list, with Bill Gates accounting for 64 percent of the current total. Gates has seen his fortune grow by 921 percent since 1994, from $9.3 billion to $95 billion, and has kept his status as the richest of the group. Warren Buffett is not doing badly, though: his worth rose from $9.2 billion to $31 billion over the same period. John Malone had the second-largest increase (502 percent), from $565 million to $3.4 billion. Herbert Allen went from $600 million to $1.7 billion; Barry Diller, from an estimated $300 million to $1 billion; David Geffen, from $1 billion to $2.7 billion; and Rupert Murdoch, from $4 billion to $7 billion. Gerald Levin and Edgar Bronfman Jr. are now worth roughly $300 million and $40 million, respectively, while Jeffrey Katzenberg's court battle with Disney left him with an estimated net worth of $725 million.