And so the book is populated by financial, technological and emerging-market entrepreneurs peering down from their mountaintops, as well as the closest cousins of the fortunate few: the elite artists, artisans and thinkers who cater to, study or simply swim in the slipstream of the extremely rich.

The operative word is extremely. Ms. Freeland, global editor at large for Reuters, takes readers to the 60th birthday party of private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman, at which Rod Stewart was reportedly paid $1 million to perform; to a lunch over Long Island-sourced striped bass with 20 bigwig investors at George Soros’s Southampton estate; and to visits with assorted billionaires, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Viktor Vekselberg, and the son of Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in India.

Carlos Slim, not just the wealthiest man in the world, Ms. Freeland tells us, but by one measure the wealthiest man in the history of the world, makes numerous appearances. Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett show up, naturally, as does Bo Xilai, the Chinese elite whose fortunes reversed when his wife was implicated in the murder of a British businessman.

It sounds titillating, but it isn’t. That’s also by design. Plutocrats isn’t a book about the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy, but rather the global trends the book’s titular class surfed to success. Ms. Freeland isn’t interested here in the “original sins” that allowed men like Mr. Vekselberg to seize control of the Russian economy in the days of privatization (she told some of those stories in a previous book, Sale of the Century) but in locating the plutocrats’ winning instincts in economic, political and cultural contexts.

The result is something resembling a cocktail party at Davos or the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival or any of the other stops on the circuit of the mega-rich. The guests are long on intelligence, determination and self-confidence. The affect, as anyone who’s ever watched a TED Talk might surmise, is empirical and dry.

Plutocrats grew out of an article Ms. Freeland published in The Atlantic in January 2011, which postulated the rise of a new global elite and rested on two ideas that at the time I found thrilling. First, that a French banker working in Hong Kong, a Russian mogul decamped to London and an American tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley have more in common with each other than any has with his own countrymen. Second, when masters of the universe identify along class lines rather than nationality, we’re one step closer to the kind of global egalitarianism that Karl Marx might have idealized. A factory closes in the Rust Belt, taking a bite out of the American middle class; a factory opens in Guangzhou, buoying Chinese standards of living. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to say that’s a bad thing.

Plutocrats doesn’t deliver any such strikes of lightning, but it’s rife with impressive analysis. In a chapter on the so-called superstar effect—“the tendency of both technological change and globalization to create winner-take-all economic tournaments”—Ms. Freeland glides from the writings of Soviet intellectuals, MIT and Princeton economists and the apostle Matthew to the careers of 18th century diva Elizabeth Billington, Lady Gaga, white-shoe lawyer David Boies, Yves St. Laurent, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and Albert Einstein.

The phenomena she describes are often self-apparent. Mario Batali maximizes earnings by selling lunch to Wall Street and cookbooks to everyone else. File-sharing extended pop stars’ reach, but undercut wealth for all but the select few who can use their massive popularity to fuel concert tours. These are not surprising concepts, but the thoroughness with which Ms. Freeland surrounds the ideas is satisfying.

The superstars, of course, are a side order. What we really want to know about is the billionaires who seem to remake the world with every new venture, a group that Ms. Freeland sorts into two overlapping chapters. By and large, she says, the plutocrats seized their fortunes by perceiving opportunities created by revolutionary change. But like the 19th century robber barons, they’ve also been enriched by the reallocation of public resources—rent-seeking, in economic parlance—and sought to influence government policy in service of their bulging bank accounts.

On the subject of revolution: Mr. Soros fled a comfortable childhood in his native Budapest after the arrival of the Nazis, a formative disruption that the hedge fund billionaire associates with his ability to intuit instability in markets others view as robust. Mr. Hoffman sensed that the changes being wrought in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s were an opportunity too great to ignore. Mr. Vekselberg collected privatization vouchers in the early days of the new Russia, while a less-prescient business partner cashed in his chips for a mere $100,000. Aditya Mittal, son of Lakshmi, spent years buying up Eastern European steel mills without much competition.

On rent-seeking: Mr. Slim made his fortune by winning a contract for the Mexican telecom concession that was so favorable it preserved a near-monopoly for close to 30 years. The American and British bankers who rose to wealth and power on the revolution in securitization are inextricably tied to a decades-long movement in banking deregulation.

Just because a plutocrat has made his way by disruption, Ms. Freeland is careful to point out, doesn’t preclude him from eating at government’s hand. Mr. Soros, to name but one example, is the beneficiary of the U.S. tax code, which privileges investment income by levying it at a 15 percent. Nor is a rent-seeker a purely self-interested being. Mexican telephone service improved throughout Mr. Slim’s ascension. Mortgage bonds made home ownership affordable for many more Americans (if ultimately too affordable for too many). Even the do-gooding tech evangelists come in for second-guessing. It’s nice to think that disrupting an old industry will create opportunities (read: jobs) in the new new thing that replaces it, but that much has yet to be proven.

Midway through Plutocrats, many readers will light upon an unpleasant notion: That, to invoke F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous formulation on a far greater scale, we are not like the doers at the helm of the new world order. Ms. Freeland describes her own archetype in thinking about billionaires-by-disruption: public-school-educated students who go on to attend elite universities, thus equipped with the brains and the outsider status that come in handy if you’re looking to change the world. (It helps explain Ms. Freeland’s comfort with these people to know that she was born in Alberta, Canada, and matriculated to Harvard.) Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia until he bucked the government too hard and wound up imprisoned for tax evasion, draws a sharper distinction: “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him.”

It’s also worth noting that amid a presidential campaign heavy on the rhetoric of the 99 and 47 percents, either candidate fits into the smart outsider formulation. Mitt Romney may be the son of a wealthy man, but he’s an outsider by religion and geography, and recognized a pregnant moment—the rise of the private equity industry—to make his fortune. President Barack Obama, with his two Ivy League degrees and millions in book royalties, fits in with Ms. Freeland’s superstars. “Like the rest of the rising intellectual class to which he belongs, the president is an empiricist,” she writes.

Along with the realization that we are not like them comes another idea, which is that Ms. Freeland is going rather easy on the new masters of the universe. Indeed, when it comes time for her to make a prescription for right behavior, she draws it from the remote location of 14th century Venice. That city ascended to wealth and global dominance because access to fortune remained open. Specifically, she says, because investors in trade expeditions shared profits generously with the merchants they backed, a system which allowed new entrants into the class of the elite. When the city’s rulers locked in their status by placing formal limits on social mobility, Venice calcified and crumbled. Along those lines, Ms. Freeland closes on a piece of advice parroted from former Goldman Sachs senior partner Gus Levy, who described his philosophy as one of “long-term greed.”

That Ms. Freeland’s final words emit from an institution that is above all others symbolic of the global elite may be dispiriting to the 99 percent, but that is probably beside the point. An abiding lesson from Occupy Wall Street is that it’s far from easy to affect change by popular movement alone. In a world in which the very rich drive the biggest changes, there’s really only one thing for a superstar student of disparity to do: Speak to the rich—er, affluent—in a language they understand.

pclark@observer.com

Mr. Cooperman, child of the Bronx, alumnus of Goldman Sachs, founder of the hedge fund Omega Advisors, voted for John McCain in 2008 but didn't become an impassioned critic of the president until viewing an Obama ad chiding millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes.

“The divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them,” Mr. Cooperman wrote in a widely circulated letter to the president.

Having gotten that much off of his chest, Mr. Cooperman went on to compare Mr. Obama to Adolf Hitler, first during a conference hosted by CNBC, then in an interview with Ms. Freeland:

“You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world,” Cooperman said. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obama’s not Hitler. I don’t even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.”

Mr. Cooperman wasn't the only one to scratch that itch. Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama tax proposal to Hitler's invasion of Poland. Dan Loeb, the founder of Third Point Capital and an erstwhile supporter of the president, compared Mr. Obama to an abusive spouse: “He really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it; he just gets a little angry,” Loeb wrote in 2010 in an email to his peers.

Anthony Scaramucci, not one to be left out when it comes to zinging off one-liners, described a meeting in which Mr. Cooperman expressed his sentiments towards Mr. Obama as the “activation” of a “sleeper cell” of hedge-fund managers against Obama, according to Ms. Freeland.

None of this is so hard to understand: Mr. Obama has himself endorsed such intemperate statements as to compare Bain Capital to a vampire. What's less clear is whether anyone actually believes any of this. Mr. Obama, of course, is in a heated political campaign against the private equity firm's founder. Sure the president has called for increased financial regulation; He's also presided, in part, over a massive bailout of U.S. financial firms.

When Mr. Cooperman, meanwhile, takes a conversation with a reporter as an opportunity to mention Mr. Obama and Adolf Hitler in the same breath, it's hard to take him particularly seriously. What we wonder, though, is whether he speaks as a businessman wounded by anti-business rhetoric, or a hedge fund manager campaigning for a former titan of finance?

Stephen Schwarzman

We've been pondering that question after Reuters reported this morning that when Blackstone Group named Joe Baratta its new global head of private equity last month, it also added the 41-year-old deal maker to the firm's succession plan. As such, Mr. Baratta joins five other Blackstone executives tapped as potential successors to founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman.

A dozen or so paragraphs into the story:

Were Schwarzman to step down in the next few years, President and Chief Operating Officer Tony James, 61, would likely take the reins at the firm. "Steve will never retire; he will die at his desk. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that Tony (James) is leaving anytime soon. He is a workaholic and he has got enormous energy," one senior Blackstone executive said.

Which is to say that no matter Mr. Baratta's role in the company's planning, he's not likely to step into the top job any time soon. So what gives? Sure, Blackstone might assuage investors concerns about key man risk by letting word of a succession plan slip—on the other hand, who cares? Steve Schwarzman is giving us to believe that he's going to work until he dies, and does it really take six people to replace the guy?

Perhaps more usefully, Mr. Baratta got mentioned at the top of a Reuters story, in which he was described in flattering terms and as a member of Blackstone's management elite. That's nice for his ego, no doubt; And it's nice for clients investing with the firm's private equity funds to believe that the guy running the business is in the inner circle.

All that to say, naming a  potential successor is probably about more than the eventual succeeding—an idea The Times was onto in April when it an article about the respective longevities of private equity leaders such as Mr. Schwarzman, KKR's Henry Kravis, Carlyle Group's David Rubinstein and Apollo's Leon Black.

A nagging problem facing the big private equity companies is how to retain their top talent when the leaders show no signs of moving on. Some companies, like Warburg Pincus and Advent International, have already made a leadership transition to the younger generation, but the largest ones have not.

“I think a number of these firms do not feel the pressure of having to identify successors,” said Mr. James of Blackstone. “Their founders expect to be in their seats a long time. And that has implications for your up-and-coming talent because there isn’t enough succession at the moment. If the brass ring is too far away, your best people will leave.”

To that, we'd add an interesting tidbit suggested to us by Michael Robinson, who heads the corporate and public affairs practice at Levick. In addition to comforting investors on one side and retaining talent on the other, the existence of potential leaders waiting in the wings might create the impression of a company that nurtures talent. "There are companies, and Blackstone may evolve into one of them, that are generally thought of as incubators," Mr. Robinson told The Observer—General Electric, traditionally, or more recently, Google. A public succession process might get the next wave of talent thinking, "'sure I want to go work there, I want to be mentored, I want to be trained,'" he said.

It may just be a tertiary motivation, but it's a less obvious and more interesting to think about then the succession plan as a possibly excessive reassurance to investors or a crude carrot for senior execs.

Batali.

There's a lot of fuss at the moment about Mario Batali, who told Forbes that "the ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed and taken most of it into their hands is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys." But Mr. Batali is not the only man to bring Hitler into the debate about wealth inequality. Remember last year, when Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire, struck out against raising capital gains taxes? What was it that he said? Oh, that's right, he compared Obama to Hitler. Don't these people ever learn?

"It's a war," Mr. Schwarzman was reported as saying in Newsweek about Obama's attempt to eke out some more tax revenue from the country's wealthiest investors. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." And this guy has a library named after him.

For now, bankers have loudly proclaimed they will boycott Mr. Batali's truffles, Mr. Batali claims Forbes twisted his words, and the whole thing is likely to blow over in a matter of days.

It’s not clear what Mr. Paulson was angling for when he decided to publish a 477-page autobiography. If he wanted to burnish a legacy, to get himself removed from the list of the crisis’ great villains (he’s No. 6 on Time’s), it didn’t work. The phrase “we had little choice” is actually the best he can come up with to justify the bailouts.

And he couldn’t have wanted to simply provide a good inside look at his life and times, because On the Brink is a portrait of the bureaucrat as a nauseous and drowsy man. He solemnly describes how he dry-heaved in front of an American flag, in a bathroom stall and in front of Senator Judd Gregg. Other hour-by-hour details (especially a chronicle of his work-related sleeplessness) would be autobiographical triumphs if they didn’t contrast so grimly with the book’s void of thoughtful analysis. With the exception of a short and intensely dry afterword, it lacks any dissection of the intricacies of the crisis, its causes or its aftermath.

What’s much worse is the sense he gives that there wasn’t much fussing over detail as the crisis unfolded, either. He and his colleagues flew by the seat of their pants, Mr. Paulson concedes, “making it up as we went along.” He says he realized on Sept. 12, 2008, that AIG was “one more institution to put on our watch.” The government spent $85 billion to bail it out on Sept. 16.

His memoir is like Tolstoy. It gives the spectacularly unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it. Only, unlike in Tolstoy, there’s a lot of nausea.

THE GOOD NEWS HERE is that Mr. Paulson is not shy about his personal eccentricities. He concedes a fondness for locking himself “in the bathroom with Sports Illustrated to relax in quiet.” He used to speed through his children’s bedtime stories because of his work schedule; one night, his wife, who likes to call him Pea, forced him to read with expression. “No, no!” the kids objected. “Read like a daddy, not a mommy.”

During his own childhood, he bailed hay, turned butter, fostered pet raccoons and took Canadian canoe trips “with difficult portages.” Dad used to cut his hair: “He did such a bad job that he left bare patches on our scalps, then he filled in the bald spots with pencil and said no one would notice.” He didn’t mind, though it traumatized his little brother, whose fragility ensured he’d become a mere Lehman Brothers bond salesman and not a Goldman Sachs CEO or Treasury secretary.

After leaving one job for the other in 2006, Mr. Paulson says his “number one concern was the likelihood of a financial crisis,” and that he told George Bush, in a wood-paneled Camp David conference room, all about credit default swaps, systemic risk and the growth of unregulated hedge funds. If that’s true, it’s Wall Street’s version of the “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” presidential brief.

Then again, Mr. Paulson doesn’t explain why his first sleepless night didn’t come until Bear Stearns began to collapse two years later. Instead, he offers that he could kick himself for saying in an April 2007 speech that the subprime problem was “largely contained,” then points out that plenty of other people were wrong, too.

But he should have known better. At a dinner with top bankers at the Fed a few months later, as he tells it, the most powerful chief executives on Wall Street were mournful addicts begging to be forced to quit their opiates. “Isn’t there something you can do to order us not take all of these risks?” Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince asked; Blackstone’s chief, Stephen Schwarzman, said he couldn’t resist taking easy money. What does it mean that these kingpins knew what they were doing and were begging to be stopped? Mr. Paulson won’t say.

About the problem of rococo Wall Street greed, he admits that he “pushed back hard” against TARP’s pay restrictions, adds that he “was as appalled as anyone at Wall Street’s pay practices” and then jogs away from the mess. Eventually, he shuffles back to describe a conversation with a Democratic senator—“once again my ear was being chewed off about compensation.” He doesn’t mention that he sold half a billion dollars’ worth of Goldman stock when he came to the Treasury, reportedly saving more than $100 million in taxes thanks to new I.R.S. rules about federal service.

Except for whiffs of his ire for politicians (Nancy Pelosi makes him pour his Diet Coke into a glass), the book flatters widely and passionately. The Watergate villain John Ehrlichman, a boss during Mr. Paulson’s early days at Nixon’s Domestic Council, is “dedicated”; Bob Rubin “put the public interest ahead”; the Chinese are old friends of his; AIG’s Bob Willumstad is “an incredible gentleman”; and Lehman’s Dick Fuld is “direct and personable.” Never mind that Mr. Paulson reportedly considered the latter to be a thuggish glutton.

What’s much worse is that the book makes the circumstances of Lehman’s fall even more convoluted. Mr. Paulson says that he and Tim Geithner, despite their public stance against more bailouts, agreed just a few days before the bankruptcy that “a Lehman failure would be more expensive for the taxpayers.” He writes that he would have helped the firm by supporting a takeover, as he did with Bear Stearns, but that the government’s “hands were tied” because no suitors wanted Lehman. That makes no sense: Bank of America and Barclay’s were both interested, and both shrank away when the government said it couldn’t help.

AS TARP WAS BEING DEVELOPED, his own chief of staff and a White House deputy both took Mr. Paulson aside to complain he was moving too fast. The steps needed to be analyzed more carefully, and they felt his approach discouraged dissent. “I told them that if I had waffled one bit,” he writes, “we wouldn’t have a program to debate.”

Last weekend, two days before the release of the book, TARP’s inspector general released a report to Congress outlining the program’s neon-colored shortcomings: “It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.” Most of TARP’s goals have simply not been met: Home foreclosures remain at record levels, unemployment is the highest it has been in decades and lending to American businesses and consumers continues to fall.

As far as that last point goes, the only thing he says on the matter is, “I didn’t think I could tell the banks how much to lend or to whom.” That’s because his message, which he can’t help but eventually make explicit, is, “I make no apology.”

Bear Stearns was rescued but Lehman wasn’t. Citigroup was going to buy Wachovia until Wells Fargo swooped instead. Cancerous Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were given clean bills of health by their regulator just before nationalization. AIG was given a gruesome amount of money that will almost never be returned. And that’s just the way it is, On the Brink says.

Not only did Mr. Paulson “not have time for regret, recriminations, or second-guessing,” but he doesn’t use the newfound power of hindsight. He even calls it a pandering “political approach” to criticize the rating agencies, which were essentially paid to say all was well with a diseased system.

Surely he has more sophisticated and subtle insights into the ugliness of American finance, but he keeps them to himself. “I don’t mean to minimize our troubles,” the book’s finale declares, “but every major country has more-significant problems.”

mabelson@observer.com

So TV crews covering Blackstone’s highly ballyhooed initial public offering of $4 billion in stock had to point their cameras at someone else.

Hey, you in the white suit!

Strolling the trading floor that fateful morning, the writer Tom Wolfe, author of such dense economic texts as A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons, happily responded to a CNBC reporter’s query.

So, Mr. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what do you think of the Blackstone I.P.O.?

“We may be witnessing the end of capitalism as we know it,” Mr. Wolfe reportedly said.

The bold remark, aimed at the biggest U.S. I.P.O. since 2002, seemed poignant enough to be reprinted in such esteemed publications as Business Week and London’s Financial Times.

Yet no one, it seemed, bothered to ask the 76-year-old novelist why he felt that Blackstone’s crafty fund-raising strategy had suddenly put the nation’s entire economic system in peril. Challenged on Monday by The Observer to back up his now-famous remark, the widely quoted economist quickly back-pedaled.

“I was just saying something off the cuff,” Mr. Wolfe said. “I didn’t think he’d ever take me seriously.”

The reluctant doomsayer denied even paying much attention to the Blackstone matter. “I’ve vaguely followed the Blackstone I.P.O.,” he said.

So what was Mr. Wolfe doing at the NYSE?

“All the years I’ve been in New York, I’ve never been on the floor of the Stock Exchange,” the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities explained. “So, a friend of mine, who knows a member, got me invited. I’m walking around and I see these television cameras. Somebody in the television crew spots me. I don’t even know where he was from. So, he says to me, ‘What do you think of this Blackstone I.P.O.?’ I’m joking, I say, ‘I think it’s the end of capitalism as we know it.’

“But now that I’ve said it,” Mr. Wolfe continued, “I’ve come up with an ex post facto rationalization.

“Joseph Schumpeter, the economist, once said that stocks and bonds are evaporated property, meaning you’re pretty soon going to lose sight of the underlying assets. You’re dealing in pieces of paper. Now, these people are selling shares in evaporated evaporation to millions of people. And this is now evaporation cubed. And nobody knows what they’re investing in. It’s E to the third power equals … insanity?”

He added, “God! I’m a quoted economist!”

The 60-year-old chairman and C.E.O. of global corporate buyout behemoth Blackstone Group had stopped the business before a standing-room-only crowd gathered last Thursday at the Pierre Hotel to hear “Wall Street’s Man of the Moment” (so dubbed recently by Fortune) lay out Blackstone’s public offering of more than $4 billion in stock, a proposal that would propel Mr. Schwarzman’s own net worth over the $7 billion mark.

So who answers a cell phone at an I.P.O. announcement in front of hundreds of investors? And why?

And who was this Zibby?

That was the easy part: The call was from his daughter, 30-year-old Elizabeth, a.k.a. “Zibby.” And the news was good, in a week of generally extraordinary news for Mr. Schwarzman—the patriarch of private equity informed the audience: He was a grandpa! And talk about multiples: twins!

Mr. Schwarzman immediately exited from the stage, leaving Blackstone’s president, Tony James, to carry on with the firm’s all-important stock-shill fest, leaving many in the crowd to wonder: Was this staged? If it was, it accomplished two things immediately: It replaced the ambitious, grasping Stephen Schwarzman with a warm, caring grandfatherly Stephen Schwarzman.

And it established Mr. James as Mr. Schwarzman’s capable stand-in and partner, rather than the almost invisible subordinate he had been.

It was Tony Blair and Gordon Brown!

Spectators wondered: Who had planned this amazing piece of staging? And what did the new Stephen Schwarzman do with the calculating Stephen Schwarzman who’d been profiled a day earlier in The Wall Street Journal?

Almost overnight, it seemed, the shrewd takeover titan known for referencing Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko “lunch is for wimps” remark from Wall Street had remark been replaced with Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

“It was important from a perceptional standpoint to get him out of the action quickly,” said Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who’s been closely following the chief executive’s recent drama.

A day earlier, The Journal had come out with a front-page story portraying Mr. Schwarzman as a greedy “little man” with cold-blooded business instincts, who devoured $40 crab claws for lunch and whined about his poolside servant’s squeaky shoes. The author quoted Mr. Schwarzman’s own mother saying that money is “what drives him”; it was, she said, his “measuring stick.”

But then his cell phone rang.

“Luck smiled on him,” Mr. Sheinkopf said, “and had his daughter give birth in the middle of all this, so at least he would have a human moment. But, even that kind of humanizing gets lost in the larger story, which is that he’s this very distant, very successful capitalist who certainly doesn’t worry about what little people think about anything.”

Many seem to think that moving from the private-equity business to the chairmanship of a public company means honing a slightly more democratic political instinct. Then again, some investors actually prefer having the Old Schwarzman in charge, not Grampy Stevie.

“If I’m a potential investor in Blackstone,” said Ryan Toohey, principal and corporate communications co-manager for Global Strategy Group, “do I want a lion or a lamb? I want a lion.”

Blackstone’s proposed I.P.O. represents a significant shift in policy, perhaps as much as persona, for Mr. Schwarzman. This is, after all, the same man who, barely four months ago, told Reuters that “public markets are overrated.” Now, he has to sell the opposite idea.

And so the pricey crustacean image-softening campaign soldiered on that same Thursday afternoon. Re-emerging at the New York Stock Exchange, the proud new grandfather was honored by friends and colleagues with the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, some of whom tried their darnedest to counter The Journal’s harsh profile.

And guess what happened?

Once more, Mr. Schwarzman got up to speak. And once more, the cell phone! But this time, it wasn’t Zibby. And no new twins.

It was bad news, he informed the crowd. The United States Congress was now trying to rain on his parade—plotting to eliminate a tax-law loophole from which Blackstone had reaped millions.

“It was quite a bit coming together at once,” said the Yale institute’s president, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, of the day’s breaking news.”

“While they’re tattooing him with the new tax law, they’re congratulating him on the birth of his grandchildren,” said Mr. Sheinkopf. “The facts are that we may try to deny the value of print media, but once it’s in print, it’s real. And everything that people now know about him will be colored by the $40 crab claws. That’s enough to get people who make a lot less a lot angry and a lot jealous.”

Until the next time the cell phone rings. Hey, Zibby!

By those standards, Mr. Bush’s war has been a success for some New Yorkers. E. Stanley O’Neal, Merrill Lynch’s chief executive, did his best, in conformity with the President’s wishes, to put more money on the table by having been paid $48 million last year, up from $37 million the year before, a sum so small it might have caused the President distress.

Another man who will be able to report to the President that he has been able to make enough of a living to put more money on the table and pay any college tuition which might be owing is Lloyd C. Blankfein of the Goldman Sachs Group, who brought home $53 million last year. All together, Wall Street’s five biggest outfits were able to relieve President Bush’s mind by telling him that their top people were paid $60 billion in 2006. Doubtless the President, as soon as he was apprised of the news, flashed the joyful tidings to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. No piece of news could be better calculated to stimulate our soldiers and Marines to fight harder and make greater sacrifices for the cause for which they and Messrs. O’Neal and Blankfein, each in their own way, struggle in common.

In accordance with Mr. Bush’s wish that most of us move on from the war and give it as little thought as possible, even as a few of us fight it, a man named Stephen A. Schwarzman will celebrate his 60th birthday on Feb. 13. Mr. Schwarzman is a billionaire who, in deference to the President’s urgings, has been spending the years since the two airplanes were driven into the World Trade Center making money hand over fist. If you are going to sacrifice for your country, there are few more deeply satisfying ways of doing it.

To mark his six lucrative decades on earth, Mr. Schwarzman is renting the Park Avenue society armory, where he and some 1,500 guests will do what rich people do on such occasions. The featured entertainer performing for the occasion will, it is said, be paid $1 million for his night’s work. If the other expenditures are commensurate, Mr. Schwarzman will have laid out $15 million before his head hits the pillow that night, content that, as his President wishes, his “life’s moving on”—and right nicely, one cannot forbear to add.

The big money has no reason to see this war come to an end. The war profiteers, of course, have a direct interest in its continuing for as close to forever as they can make it last. Whether or not the birthday boy is adding to his already uncountable hoard by skimming off the top of the war is not known. The Blackstone Group, the private-equity and hedge-fund operation that the happy celebrant runs, keeps its affairs to itself. Answerable to no public body, no one, outside of its closed doors, can say if it is directly in the merchant-of-death business, or if it is the indirect beneficiary of the “fantastic economy” which the President brags of having given the country as he has fumbled away lives and limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 9/11, it is estimated that Mr. Schwarzman has enriched himself by some $2 billion.

Others saw what the President calls “the terrible images of violence on TV every night” and, though it may be unpatriotic, their response was not to “put more money on the table,” but to protest. On Jan. 27, tens of thousands of non-money-makers rallied in front of the national Capitol to object to the war.

The march was big. It could have been as large as 100,000 people. In fun-loving America, the land where people are urged not to think about the war being waged in their name, 100,000 is not so many. More than that will turn out on a Saturday afternoon to watch an Ohio State football game.

The turnout was much smaller than the huge throngs that marched through the streets last autumn demanding that illegal immigrants be immunized and the entry barriers to the United States be lowered. There was big corporate money, Schwarzman-type money, behind that less-than-spontaneous outpouring of low-wage, non-union, Spanish-speaking workers. Putting a million people on the streets costs money, a lot of money for buses and signs and organizers, gasoline money and compensation for taking the day off, and yet more money for telephones, office space and backup staff.

The numbers taking part in the anti-war rally didn’t come close to the illegal-immigrant marchers, nor was it anything like the size of the gigantic anti–Vietnam War rallies of a generation ago. They had the organizational apparatus of the civil-rights movement behind them, as well as union and religious backing—sources that have either shriveled or vanished entirely.

Today’s peace marchers have little but themselves to rely on, even though doing so means ignoring the President’s enjoinder to fight terrorism by emulating Mr. Schwarzman. Until this last march, it seemed as though most anti-war protesters were gray-headed veterans of the last attempt to stop the war machine. In contrast, observers at this rally say that as many as half of the protesters were young people.

Besides revulsion for what has been done to Iraq and its people, it’s possible that the talk of reinstituting conscription or starting up some kind of universal, compulsory national-service program is motivating some young people. If they don’t have reason enough to take to the streets yet, Mr. Bush may soon provide them with another reason for marching around the White House: As the threats and growls directed toward Iran grow, the possibility also grows that Mr. Bush is thinking of becoming the first President to lose three wars at the same time.

Put such thoughts aside. Through shot and shell, death and disfigurement, there is the birthday boy and, with him, the promise of more money to be gotten and more parties to be thrown. If at the end of his days Mr. Schwarzman is not laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery with our nation’s other heroes, patriotism no longer knows its own name.

The co-op building is considered one of the four or five most exclusive addresses in New York. There is only one apartment on each of the building's 12 stories, and each unit has a 44-foot-long gallery, five bedrooms, six-and-a-half bathrooms, seven servants' rooms, five fireplaces and large entertainment areas. In 1984, Mr. Niarchos hired famed Italian interior designer Renzo Mongiardino to lay out the apartment.

After two failed marriages, the 56-year-old Mr. Niarchos married Charlotte Ford, the 24-year-old daughter of Henry Ford II. That union dissolved after two years. The next year, Mr. Onassis was declared the unconditional victor in the marriage race by marrying Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of John F. Kennedy. Mr. Niarchos answered back by marrying one of Mr. Onassis' previous wives, Tina Livanos, who was herself the daughter of another Greek shipping magnate.

When Ms. Livanos died in 1974 from an overdose of sleeping pills, her daughter created a scandal by implying that Mr. Niarchos had something to do with the death. A subsequent investigation cleared him of wrongdoing.

Vacancies are rare in Mr. Niarchos' old building, and brokers estimate that potential buyers at 820 Fifth would need to have at least $100 million to even be considered by the co-op's notoriously fussy board.

Current residents include socialite and board president Jayne Wrightsman, gallery owner William Acquavella, Yahoo chief Terry Semel, and Lily Safra, widow of slain international banker Edmond Safra. Ms. Safra lives in the penthouse, but she is currently listing for $30 million the fourth-floor unit that she bought from Tommy Hilfiger, who flipped it in 2000.

The apartment's listing broker at Sotheby's International Realty declined to comment, and Ms. Niarchos was unavailable for comment.

Noho Eats Crow: Rocker Drops $2.4 M.

When Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz told his fans at the Hammerstein Ballroom in October that he had just decided to buy an apartment in Manhattan, the crowd let out a roar of approval. Last week, the throaty, dreadlocked crooner-who for years has used Manhattan as a backdrop for many of his songs-made it official, closing on a $2.4 million, 4,952-square-foot condo loft near Cooper Union.

Mr. Duritz bought the space raw, but the building's developers say that it could easily accommodate up to five bedrooms.

"It's L-shaped," said one of the unit's exclusive brokers, Robert McCain, of Stribling Marketing Associates. "So it would really work well if [Mr. Duritz] wanted to put any sort of music-related recording equipment on one side, and have the other side for living space."

Although the 38-year-old Mr. Duritz grew up in Baltimore and California, he has apparently always had a soft spot for New York-as evidenced by the song "Sullivan Street," and the album Across a Wire: Live in New York City .

He'll certainly be getting an eyeful of the city from his fifth-floor condo. The sprawling, almost-trapezoidal-shaped apartment has east, south and west exposures, all of which have unencumbered open city views.

Neither Mr. Duritz nor his broker at the Corcoran Group could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Duritz is perhaps as well known for the "friends" he keeps as his music: At different times in the 1990's, he was reportedly involved with Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox.

New York Observer 15th Anniversary

It's The Observer's 15th anniversary, so this week, in addition to "recent transactions in the real estate market," Manhattan Transfers offers some of its accumulated wisdom about the buildings you'll never qualify to live in, and the sale of the century, as well as a sampling of the deals that have made Manhattan Transfers headlines over the years.

1996

April – Bette Midler buys a 12-room triplex co-op at 1125 Fifth for $3.5 million.

June – Universal co-chairman Terry Semel buys a 7,000-square-foot co-op at 820 Fifth Avenue from Ann and Gordon Getty. He almost doesn't make it into the building when board member Jayne Wrightsman voices reservations about the deal.

July – Jann Wenner buys a five-story townhouse at 57 West 69th Street. It listed for $4.25 million.

1997

June – Graydon Carter leaves the Dakota-where it's rumored that Si Newhouse had eased the way financially-for a four-story townhouse on Bank Street that listed for $2.5 million.

November – Harvey Weinstein buys a 7,000-square-foot, six-bedroom townhouse on the Upper East Side, near Central Park. He pays the asking price of $3.95 million.

1998

January – Jerry Seinfeld buys a 3,400-square-foot duplex co-op at the Beresford from Isaac Stern. It listed at $4.35 million. He later pays about $1.4 million to build a 20-car parking garage nearby to house his Porsches.

March – Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs buys a $2.7 million beach house on Hedges Banks Drive in East Hampton, complete with pool and hot tub.

June – Richard Gere pays $2 million for a 5,000-square-foot townhouse that is part of the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District. He is later fined for erecting a meditation temple on the roof without a permit. According to a local broker, Mr. Gere, a Buddhist, built the temple to give the Dalai Lama a place to pray when he came into town.

July – Spike Lee makes a final break with his home neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and buys a 32-foot-wide townhouse at East 63rd Street, between Lexington and Third avenues. He buys the 9,000-square-foot mansion from Jasper Johns for $7.2 million.

August – Gwyneth Paltrow purchases a landmark three-story townhouse in the West Village for $1.6 million.

1999

February – Karenna Gore Schiff and her husband, Andrew Schiff, buy a $2.5 million East 66th Street duplex co-op; Anne Bancroft and her husband, Mel Brooks, longtime Hamptons fixtures, finally put down roots of their own. They pay W magazine editor Etta Froio $900,000 for a cottage on East Hampton's Meadow Lane.

March – Jerry Seinfeld gets outbid by designer Helmut Lang for an East Hampton beach house. Mr. Seinfeld bid $14.5 million on the three-acre Tyson Lane home, but Mr. Lang takes the deed with a bid of $15.5 million. "Business is business," a Seinfeld rep says.

July – No Central Park West co-op board is going to stand between Mariah Carey and a penthouse triplex. Weeks after being rejected by the board of the Ardsley, where she offered to buy Barbra Streisand's three-tiered penthouse for $8 million, Ms. Carey is throwing $9 million at a new condominium development at 90 Franklin Street, where she is fashioning a downtown version.

August – Woody Allen sells his longtime home-a duplex penthouse at 930 Fifth Avenue-and pays $17.7 million for a five-story, double-wide townhouse on East 92nd Street, near Madison Avenue. He decided to sell his old place when he realized that the one-bedroom space was inadequate for his young wife, 28-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, and new baby, Bechet Dumaine Allen.

September – Just a few months before rehearsals begin for Wiseguys , a new Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim, star Nathan Lane buys a $1.7 million, 3,000-square-foot condo on N. Moore Street in Tribeca, on the block where John F. Kennedy Jr. lived. The condo had been rented out for the last two years by Marc Weill, the 42-year-old son of Citigroup Inc. chairman Sanford Weill.

October – At long last, media baron Rupert Murdoch buys a new home for his new wife. The News Corporation chief, who in June married girlfriend Wendy Deng, a former executive with his Asian satellite-television conglomerate, pays $6.5 million for a triplex penthouse loft at 141 Prince Street near West Broadway.

2000

January – MTV chairman Tom Freston buys the former mansion of Andy Warhol. The celebrated painter lived at the townhouse, located at 57 East 66th Street, from 1974 until his death in 1987. The 8,000-square-foot building, for which Mr. Freston paid around $6.5 million, has a secret trap door in the master bedroom.

March – Stephen Schwarzman buys Saul Steinberg's triplex at 740 Park Avenue. (See box.) Also, Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski beats out Adam Dell to buy Stephen Schwarzman's 12-room apartment at 950 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Kozlowski pays $18 million for the 10th- and 11th-floor duplex. Later, when Mr. Kozlowski gets indicted for fleecing his company out of $650 million, questions arise as to whether Mr. Kozlowski or Tyco actually owns the apartment.

April – Three years after they were secretly married at a Lower East Side synagogue, New York darlings Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker buy a quintessential West Village townhouse. They pay around $3 million for the three-story, 20-foot-wide building.

November – Libbet Johnson, an heir of the Johnson & Johnson family, puts a price tag of $62 million on the five contiguous apartments she owns at Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West. It's the highest-ever asking price for a piece of residential Manhattan real estate. Ms. Johnson was in the middle of combining the apartments, more than 20,000 square feet spread over the 49th, 50th and 51st floors, when she fell in love with celebrity hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai, who convinced her to seek out more modest-or cozy-dwellings.

Reversal of Fortune Steinberg Woes Yield Manhattan's Record $37 M. Sale

In March of 2000, financier Stephen Schwarzman paid $37 million for the 34-room triplex penthouse at 740 Park Avenue that was originally built for John D. Rockefeller Jr. Mr. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group L.P., one of the world's largest private-equity groups, bought the 20,000-square-foot mansion from Saul Steinberg, chairman of the Reliance Insurance Company. Mr. Steinberg and his wife Gayfryd had held court in the Rosario Candela–designed mansion since 1971, when they reportedly bought the place for $285,000. But by the time Mr. Schwarzman took over the deed, Mr. Steinberg's Reliance was nearly insolvent, and he was under assault by creditors, in dire need of cash. The Park Avenue spread includes a 60-foot-long entrance gallery; a library with 1760 English pine paneling; a dining room that seats 48; an enormous kitchen; a drawing room leading onto a terrace guarded by a Romanesque lion; five master bedrooms; a study; two sitting rooms; a governess' suite with two bedrooms and a small kitchen; servants' quarters that include a dining room, three bedrooms and two bathrooms; a steam room; a gym; a sauna; and a billiards room and screening room.

2001

March – Jean-Marie Messier, the chairman of Vivendi Universal, buys a $17.5 million condo at 515 Park Avenue, proving that he's officially become a player in New York. The 5,300-square-foot duplex was previously owned by Sidney Kimmel, chairman of the Jones Apparel Group, who sold the apartment-for a $2.5 million profit-without ever moving in.

August – Alexandra von Furstenberg joins her sisters, Pia Getty and Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, as the owner of an Upper East Side townhouse. Ms. von Furstenberg and her husband, Alexander von Furstenberg, pay $12 million deal for an 8,500-square-foot former headquarters of the New York Board of Rabbis at 10 East 73rd Street, right off Fifth Avenue.

2002

January – Harrison Ford, who says he's most comfortable on his ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo., buys a 5,000-square-foot penthouse near Sixth Avenue in Chelsea (it was asking $6.25 million) and files plans to add a 3,500-square-foot roof deck.

April – A busy month! After years of frustration, Barbra Streisand finally unloads her duplex penthouse at the Ardsley, 320 Central Park West, to the tune of $4 million. It was originally asking $10 million, but after the co-op board turned down several interested buyers-most memorably, Mariah Carey-Ms. Streisand reportedly got so fed up that she considered donating the property to charity. That same month, Sopranos stars James Gandolfini and Edie Falco both buy property in the far West Village. Mr. Gandolfini pays just over $1 million for a 1,367-square-foot condo at 99 Jane Street, just three days before he filed for divorce from his wife, Marcy. Ms. Falco buys a townhouse at 97 Barrow Street, between Hudson and Greenwich streets, for $2.55 million. Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols buy Robert Redford's eight-room apartment at 1030 Fifth Avenue. No moving trucks are required; Mr. Redford lives a few floors away from Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Nichols in the same building. They pay a bit under $10 million for the duplex penthouse. The reason for their move: They like Mr. Redford's terrace.

June – Mike Tyson puts in a bid on one of the Upper East Side's most lavishly decorated townhouses. The rococo-style residence on East 64th Street belongs to an Austrian developer who spent seven years transforming it into what one broker called "a little Versailles." The townhouse has an eight-person Jacuzzi surrounded by a tile mosaic reminiscent of the Pompeian baths. Mr. Tyson, who is deeply in debt, subsequently backs out of the bidding when he loses his title fight to Lennox Lewis.

September – Edison School founder Chris Whittle puts his legendary East Hampton estate on Georgica Pond on the market for $46 million. The announcement of the sale comes less than a week after Nasdaq threatened to de-list the embattled Edison School stock. Late in September, two years after selling his East Hampton beachfront home to Jerry Seinfeld for a record $32 million, Billy Joel completes his well-publicized house hunt with the purchase of a $12 million waterfront home in his hometown of Oyster Bay, Long Island. "Billy Joel's real estate-I need a separate career just for that," Mr. Joel's publicist jokes.

November – Sony music chief Tommy Mottola buys the East 85th Street duplex penthouse that belongs to Mark Swartz, Tyco's ex–chief financial officer, whom the government previously indicted for conspiring with Tyco's ex–chief executive, Dennis Kozlowski, to fleece the company for over $650 million. With his assets frozen by the Manhattan D.A.'s office, Mr. Swartz can liquidate the apartment, but he can't pocket the proceeds-somewhere around $15.9 million. As is also the case with Mr. Kozlowski's place at 950 Fifth Avenue, Tyco claims ownership of the apartment.

The Nine-Figure 'Middle Class'

"If you had less than $100 million, you'd be considered poor," said Larry Kaiser, president of Key Ventures Realty, of the rarefied air of 960 Fifth Avenue, which wins the Manhattan Transfers award for most exclusive co-op building in the city. Mr. Kaiser, who has sold several apartments in the building, mused: "You'd have to be the sun, the moon and the stars to get in."

Built in 1927 by celebrated luxury-apartment architect Rosario Candela, 960 Fifth Avenue occupies that stratospheric niche of the so-called "A-plus level," über -exclusive Upper East Side co-ops. It's probably impossible to get a consensus on the issue, but most brokers agree that 960 Fifth just barely nudges out peer buildings like 820 and 834 Fifth, and 720 and 740 Park, as the city's most exclusive address. The 19 apartments at 960 Fifth-most of which have different layouts-are basically mansions stacked atop one another. The unit belonging to socialite Anne Bass, for example, approaches 10,000 square feet.

"Some of the apartments have ballroom-sized proportions," said Kirk Henckels, director of Stribling Private Brokerage.

Between 77th and 78th streets along a leafy park block, the co-op has a private restaurant open only to tenants-and the chef trains in Paris each summer to pick up the latest culinary trends.

"You add in an exercise room that boasts a terrace with Central Park views-how could you possibly top that?" Mr. Henckels said.

Sales in the building, which are rare, have in recent years topped $10,000,000. Current and past residents include Edgar Bronfman Sr., George Cisneros, Bob Elsworth and Richard Feigen, and Claus von Bülow.