In an era of CEO pay gone wild, Jim Sinegal is the steal of the century. The co-founder and chief executive of Costco earns a salary of just $350,000 , richly refuting the boardroom notion that CEOs of billion-dollar corporations require pay packets to match. Costco is one of the U.S.'s largest companies, with 118,800 workers, 473 warehouse-club stores and sales of $51.9 billion in its most recent fiscal year. Costco's stock has trounced archrival Wal-Mart's in recent years. Perhaps ...

In Thailand it's often referred to, usually in hushed tones, as "the institution." In a land where the holy trinity consists of nation, religion and king, talking about the monarchy, except in terms of adulation, can be risky business. Political activists, university professors, webmasters and now even a U.S. Citizen have found that out the hard way — arrested and charged with lse majest: insulting the King, Queen or heir to the throne. Last Friday, Thai police announced ...

Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co., the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels. When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight in 1903, they made the world a ...

A week after former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn posted a $1 million cash bail and a $5 million bond, he was moved from temporary lodgings on lower Broadway to a large townhouse in Tribeca. Unlike a large apartment building, a townhouse has no doorman, but for DSK, there is no need. Keeping watch over him will be multiple "armed monitors" courtesy of security firm Stroz Friedberg. By the terms of Strauss-Kahn's bail order, filed with the New ...

As the founder and owner of ComputerLand, William Millard, 53, built a billion-dollar business on an old-fashioned notion: it is better to be feared than loved. Since the firm's start in 1976, Millard has ruled his 1,100 employees and more than 800 franchisees with an autocrat's hand, making unilateral decisions and railing against anyone who challenged his judgment. Until recently, that style worked wonders. ComputerLand is the world's largest chain of computer stores, with 820 outlets in 24 countries, ...

With a title like L'Amour Fou, Pierre Thoretton's documentary about fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his life partner Pierre Berge promises a wild ride, a story of mad love. They had a relationship that endured through 50 years of glamorous living, business failures and triumphs, infidelities and Saint Laurent's drug and alcohol abuse as well as his chronic, often crippling depression. Arrows first flew, Berge tells us, at a fashion dinner in 1958; they soon moved ...

Like some malefactor being grilled by Mike Wallace in his 60 Minutes prime, Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, gets hot under the third-degree light of Charles Ferguson's questioning in Inside Job. Hubbard, who helped design George W. Bush's tax cuts on investment gains and stock dividends, finally snaps, "You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot." But he has already shot himself in the foot. Frederic Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve Board governor and for now ...

Although Chicago has 100,000 fewer Negroes than New York, it is the centre of U. S. Negro business; last census figures showed Chicago's Negro establishments had annual net sales of $4,826,897, New York's were only $3,322,274. Chicago's Negroes all hail from the South, work generally as laborers in packing plants and steel mills, have a community feeling; New York's are less homogenous, work mostly in hotels and apartments. Great majority of Chicago's Negroes live in a south side section known ...

How would you like to pay only a quarter of the real estate taxes you owe on your home? And buy everything for the next 10 years without spending a single penny in sales tax? Keep a chunk of your paycheck free of income taxes? Have the city in which you live lend you money at rates cheaper than any bank charges? Then have the same city install free water and sewer lines to your house, offer you a perpetual ...

The ballroom on the third floor of San Francisco's Moscone West convention center doesn't look like special. But in recent years this nondescript hall has become the epicenter of major news about smartphones, tablets, and other cutting-edge mobile gizmos. Both Apple and Google use it for the keynote addresses that are the signature events at their developer conferences. As the two most significant companies in the mobile software business, they're doing much of the heavy lifting of ...