 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. It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si. 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. An editor at Allure says that "working lunches" there are limited to 10 a month. Si pays. Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Finally, after a Random House book party at Le Cirque 2000 (estimated cost to Si: $35,000), your car ferries you home. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth.
 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.