 What is the significance of including all the costs and price tags in the article?
Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.
 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.