Who Spent $43.7 Million On 200 One Dollar Bills?

Author:
Bess Levin
Updated:
Jan 14, 2019
Original:
Nov 16, 2009

According to Marc Porter, president of Christie's in the Americas, last year people were "distracted" by the shit that was hitting the fan and focused on "assessing their own net worth" (rapidly dwindling by the hour!), and not on buying art. Now that the "worst of the financial crisis seems to be over people are once again focusing on collecting," which is nice. In what must please Tim Geithner and the stripper community to no end, Warhol's "200 One Dollar Bills" just sold for $43.7 million (more than three times its $12 million high estimate).

Despite his name being floated, we're told Stevie-boy was not the buyer, and that it was most likely Philip Niarchos or possibly Bernard Arnault. As for why the big guy would pass this up, we're going to assume he wasn't vying for the piece (nobody outbids the BG) and go with one of the more likely explanations that he's either saving his pennies for a new series of house cats suspended in formaldehyde or considered the fact that the bills were silk-screened rather than real an insult to the pole-dancing denizens of the world that he wouldn't stand for. Or the SEC froze his assets. (Obviously I'm kidding here because as has been stated many times by us and SAC, there's nothing funky going down up in Stamford.)

Awkward.

Are your pants getting a little tight? Have you become convinced mirrors have a personal vendetta against you? Are you too distracted by the rolls spilling over your pants to trade? Do you find yourself veering off course in your letters to investors to talk about your love handles? Is it only a matter of time before you lose your firm billions and/or take down the entire market because your fingers are so big they span four keys each on the keyboard? Do you want to do something about it but are repulsed by the idea of healthy eating and exercise and also know yourself well enough to realize that there is no way you're going to be able to stay strong if everyone around you is eating delicious fried food at lunch and sooner or later you, a usually pretty mild-mannered guy, will be leaping across a row of Bloomberg terminals and threatening to kill a coworker (and meaning it) unless he hands over Ho Ho now? Then round up your tubbiest colleagues and tell them they're in for a real treat. Eric Helms, who founded the four-year-old Cooler Cleanse company with the actress Salma Hayek, says office cleansers now make up 30 percent of his business, and in the last year he has hired three customer-service employees just to handle the details of them. He said there has been a “huge increase in popularity” of cleansing with co-workers in the last year, which he credits to juice diets being more mainstream. “Everyone knows someone who’s done one, and they realize they’re a lot easier to do with colleagues during the workweek,” he said. “People want to indulge” — not sip celery — “on weekends.” Recent six-juice-a-day-dieters include employees at Merrill Lynch and the Carlyle Group, she said. In May, Citigroup began offering BluePrintCleanse in some of its Manhattan cafeterias, a spokeswoman said...About two-thirds of cleanse clients over all are women, but corporate cleanses “commonly skew toward men, especially traders, investment bankers and lawyers,” said Jina Wye, director of sales and marketing for BluePrintCleanse, founded in 2007 by two former Hudson Hotel bartenders looking to swap their poisons. (Mr. Helms said 90 percent of his male customers are part of groups.) Ms. Wye said: “These Type-A men have an all-or-none perspective. If they’re going to commit, they do it whole hog.” Most popular among male en masse cleansers: the Excavation cleanse, described on the Web site as “the most intense.” And if you want to really crank things up a notch, consider gauging interest in a group colonic to top things off. Cleansing From Cubicle To Cubicle [NYT] Related: I’m afraid I might tell her to buy a gun and just shoot me before the fat and the cellulite strike again.

getty images

Teddy-loving Paul Greenwood will be home sooner than he and his beloved stuffed animals thought.

Let this be a lesson to anyone hoping to avoid a couple centuries in prison-- nobody fucks with Jimmy Cayne's roach clip and gets away with it!

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