When American tycoons get tangled up with royalty, it rarely ends happily.

If Thomas Friedman’s columns for the New York Times sound a tad glum lately, there’s a reason: Besides the world economic meltdown and his employer’s accumulating red ink, his wife’s fortune has all but evaporated.

Several dozen participants of a secretive group thought to rule the world gathered in suburban Virginia last week, talked for three days and then departed.

Pity the child with the silver spoon. No matter what he accomplishes in life, it won’t measure up to the achievements of mom and dad.

Another way the rich are different: They don’t have to pay mortgages.

Many Americans can’t take new jobs because they are stuck in houses they can’t sell. That wasn’t a problem for Qwest CEO Edward Mueller. When it hired Mueller last year, Quest bought his California home, then resold it at a $1.8 million loss.

Sex, money and marital dysfunction: It’s all there in the Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce settlement, splayed out in 58 revelatory pages that read more like a British tabloid story than a legal decision.

Little-known philanthropist Chuck Feeney has patterned his life on an Irish proverb: “There are no pockets in a shroud.”

As Margot Roosevelt of the Los Angeles Times reported in a rare profile yesterday, Feeney plans to give away $8 billion in the next 8 years.

Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, which was bought by Bernard Arnault in 1997, put most of his fortune into Atlantic Philanthropies eight years ago. He gave the foundation leadership an usual mission: Spend every dollar by 2016.

Three Wall Street executives were held up by a Congressional Democrats today as poster boys for executive compensation run amok.

Two of the three - E. Stanley O’Neal, chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, head of Citigroup - lost their jobs last fall after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market which they had once ridden to huge profits.

Bill Gates and Pete Peterson

Bill Gates may have lost top seating on the Forbes billionaires list, but he leads Vanity Fair’s accounting of America’s 50 richest paydays.

The magazine ranked windfalls that came from big deals such as company sales, real estate transactions and stock cash-outs. Gates sold $2.5 billion in Microsoft stock last year.

For this year at least, Bill Gates can no longer claim to be the richest man in the world.

On Feb. 11, when Forbes ranked assets of the richest people around the world, Microsoft stock had dipped because of its efforts to acquire Yahoo. Gates’s rank on the Forbes billionaire list dipped from 1 to 3. His good buddy, Warren Buffett, who now holds the top spot.