 What is the significance of including all the costs and price tags in the article?
Let Si Get This During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. S.I. "Si" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. Si pays.
 To show the carelessness for money demonstrated by the New York elite.
 To show the carelessness for money demonstrated by the New York elite.  To eventually calculate and justify the net worth of people like Si.  To demonstrate how such large sums of money are spent so generously.  To show how people like Si keep track of their budget.