Tom Wolfe‘s “The Pirate Pose,” a Conde Nast Portfolio piece about the coarse (and in some cases appalling) social profiles of hedge-fund multi-millionaires, the 21st Century masters of the universe, is an amusing, well-composed read. It was clear two years ago that the hedge-funders were the eager-beavers one needed to talk to about independent movie financing, website-purchasing and any other mode of financial entertainment-industry investment, but I wonder what the very latest tea-leaf reading may be in this realm.

“The collision of new money and old money or, to be more accurate in our American context, slightly older money, has been a recurring drama,” Wolfe notes early on. “At the turn of the 20th century, Edith Wharton established herself as perhaps America’s greatest female novelist by focusing on precisely that. But the current new breed stands apart from all the rest for two reasons.
“First, they have more money, infinitely more, than any of the various waves of new money that preceded them, with the possible exception of robber barons on the order of John D. Rockefeller, who, incidentally, was regarded as a rude Pocantico hillbilly Baptist by society in New York a hundred years ago. Second, hedge fund managers are possessed by a previously unheard-of status fixation.”
And I love this graph about a certain coloration of hedge-fund multi-millionaire trophy wives, whom Wolfe describes in aggregate terms as “Twinkies”:
“The twinkies who have their eggs fertilized by their husbands’ sperm in a laboratory, creating embryos for implantation in the wombs of surrogate mothers who are paid to manufacture children for delivery in nine months, since why on earth should any wife whose husband is worth a billion or even $500 million have to endure the distended belly, bilious mornings, back cramps, not to mention a cramped social life, to end up with her perfect personal-trainer-sculpted boy-with-breasts body she has spent thousands of sweaty hours attaining, ruined… tempting her husband to survey all the little man-eaters out there, including those former wives who used to meet regularly at the Boxing Cat Grill until it burned down, whereas the current wives leave their husbands catatonic before the plasma TV and meet three or four times a week at one local bar or another and drive home in their Hummers and bobtail Mercedes S.U.V.’s, bombed out of their minds, while waiting for the baby to come from the factory…”
I’m now searching around for two or three easy-reading columnists who’ve been keeping tabs on hedge-fund investment activity in the entertainment industry and reporting about it in layman’s terms, and if anyone has any tips…