The cushioned exit of Stan O’Neal as CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co. this week was proof again that nothing succeeds at the top levels of business like not succeeding.

O’Neal is to receive a reported $161.5 million in stock options and retirement benefits. He was ushered out because he had lost favor with his board after announcing that the company had a $2.24 billion quarterly loss.

While $161.5 million seems like enough to get by on, it doesn’t equal amounts received by other dismissed executives.

Despite losing to Microsoft in its bid for a piece of Facebook, Google isn’t giving up on social networks.

The behemoth of search is partnering with other tech companies and social networks to develop a competing approach called OpenSocial. The open-source technology will enable developers to write applications that can be used on many sites, including partners in the project, such as LinkedInand Friendster.

When Forbes published its list of the year’s top-earning dead celebrities, we set ourselves a challenge.

If everyone is separated by six degrees (or less), shouldn’t it be possible to link every name on the list in a single map?

The ranking, topped by Elvis Presley, includes 13 people - musicians, actors, a cartoonist, a children’s author, an artist and a Nobel Prize winner. Their birth years span nearly a century, from 1879 to 1971.

In the early 1970s you couldn’t have a better opponent than Richard Nixon.

Indeed, when the embattled president’s
Enemies List became public, there was no complaining from those who made the cut.

Newsman Daniel Schorr and actor/activist Paul Newman treated their inclusion like a badge of honor. To have Nixon against you was to have the world for you.

These days, the best possible seal of disapproval might come from Christopher Hitchens, the erudite, outrageous, provocative, witty and indefatigable contrarian.

English football teams are the latest craze for U.S. sports tycoons.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, in the United Kingdom for the NFL game in London last weekend between the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins, says he is interested in buying a Premier League soccer – oops, football – team. He already owns Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution.

“We looked seriously at Liverpool,” he told Sky Sports News on Thursday, unwilling to disclose which team he wants to buy. “We still do have an interest in playing in the Premier League. We’d like to close our deal and then talk about it.”

Saying it’s bad policy and bad for her state, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has placed a hold on the ambitious energy bill that would encourage alternative sources and boost fuel-efficiency benchmarks, The Dallas Morning News reports.

The bill would repeal tax incentives designed to increase domestic oil production and redirect the money toward other energy sources, including ethanol.

We’ve come to expect political dynasties. They’re a fact of life in the U.S., perhaps even more than royal succession is in the modern UK.

In 1961, A&P supermarket heir Marie Robertson and her husband, Charles, gave $35 million in stock to Princeton University for its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Today, the gift is worth more than $880 million.

But the university and the descendants of the couple have spent millions in legal costs in a years-long fight over how the money should be used.

New York City’s ambitious charter school initiative gets a new director this month in Michael Thomas Duffy, fresh from a successful run in Roxbury, Mass.

The city has about 60 charter schools, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he wants 100 by the time he leaves office in 2009. So Duffy has a big goal to meet.

He claims he IS America in the title of his best-seller, I Am America (And So Can You!). So why is it so surprising that Stephen Colbert has announced he’s running for president?

For starters, Colbert is running only in South Carolina. And he’s a comedian.