Mogul Style is less about conspicuous consumption than contemptuous consumption. It's the giddy spending of money — sometimes shareholders' money — and it results not in the pleasure of ownership, or connoisseurship, but in the succulent gratification of making other moguls quake in their Gucci loafers.

For example: imagine a birthday party calculated to impress on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, at a hillside loggia nestled between sea views and a golf course. The waiters wear togas, and fig trees rented for one night wave their fruited limbs over the tables.

From beyond the pool, lighted with floating candles, emerges a waiter. When guests ask him for a drink, he pours Stolichnaya vodka into a giant ice sculpture of Michelangelo's "David" that sluices the liquid magically around the icy torso, eventually spouting into a crystal glass.

Then Elvis — an Elvis impersonator, of course — sings "Happy Birthday," and fireworks boom over the golf course.

It's no fantasy. The birthday party, as outlined in a planning memo sent by a Tyco International staff member, Beth Pacitti, in April 2001, is just another item to add to the growing list of L. Dennis Kozlowski's apparent excesses while chief executive of the company. The total cost for the party on June 14, 2001, which celebrated the 40th birthday of his wife, Karen: $2.1 million. Tyco picked up half the tab.

America has been peeping into the wrong windows. Who cares where Charlize Theron buys scented candles when Mr. Kozlowski, at the tail end of the economic boom, spent $6,000 of his company's money on a shower curtain for his Fifth Avenue apartment, according to a 242-page report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Tyco last week. The report also said he spent $17,100 on an antique toilet kit, $15,000 on a poodle-shaped umbrella stand and $5,960 on two sets of sheets, sticking his hand deep into the Tyco cookie jar as if it were dispensing tollhouses in his own kitchen.

(Mr. Kozlowski was indicted on Sept. 12 on charges that he and the company's former chief financial officer reaped $600 million through a racketeering scheme involving stock fraud, unauthorized bonuses and falsified expense accounts.)

Mogul Style is more flamboyant and expensive than Hollywood Style, than anyone on "MTV Cribs" or in the pages of In Style magazine, no matter how many bottles of Cristal Champagne Puff Daddy's posse can drink in one night. Whereas celebs are trying to impress their fans, moguls are trying to impress each other.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Red-Faced: Die NYT (Registrierung erforderlich) über Mogul Style.

In diesem Kontext hätte mich interessiert, was Sie von unserer Feststellung halten, dass Reiche nur allzuoft einen verblüffend schlechten Geschmack an den Tag legen. Und Mutmassungen darüber anstellen, warum dem so sein könnte...