It's no surprise that the world's billionaires live in bigger spreads than the rest of us. But those deep pockets also buy the kind of eye-popping extras that stretch the imagination. It takes a nine-digit fortune to buy a home outfitted with a gold-plated pool, Turkish baths and a 2,500-square-foot gym. You'll find these and other amenities in our annual tour of the homes of the billionaires.
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1. Warren Buffett
Omaha, Neb.
Net Worth: $37 billion
Rank: 2
The world's second-richest man still resides in the 6,000-square-foot, five-bedroom gray stucco home he bought in 1958 for $31,500. The 77-year-old keeps fit on his very own handball court. In 2007 an intruder armed with a fake gun tried to break into the modest, ungated property, but was thwarted by security.
 © Graham Barclay/Celebrityhomephoto.com |
2. Lakshmi Mittal
London, England
Net Worth: $19.3 billion
Rank: 8
In 2004, Mittal paid $128 million for this 12-bedroom townhouse in the luxe Kensington neighborhood called Billionaires' Row. Mittal's mansion, tucked between Kensington Palace and the Sultan of Brunei's spread, has an indoor pool, Turkish baths and garage space for 20 cars. The super-home is embellished with marble taken from the same quarry that supplied the Taj Mahal.
 © Woodside Historic Committee |
3. Steve Jobs
Woodside, Calif.
Net Worth: $3.4 billion
Rank: 178
In 2007 preservationists in Woodside, Calif., successfully quashed the tech superstar's plans to demolish the Jackling House, his 30-room historic, though dilapidated Spanish Colonial revival-style home set on six acres. Jobs had hoped to raze the 17,000-square-foot mansion and build smaller, newer digs. No matter. Word is he and his family haven't lived in the house for years.
 © CelebrityHomePhotos.com |
4. George Lucas
Marin County, Calif.
Net Worth: $3 billion
Rank: 205
The acclaimed Star Wars filmmaker lives and works on his famed Skywalker Ranch. The 5,156-acre spread, which boasts its own fire brigade, houses Skywalker Sound, Lucas' post-production company (Cast Away, Million Dollar Baby), as well as five acres of olive trees, a herd of longhorn cattle and even bee colonies. Lucas displays his Hollywood memorabilia--the Holy Grail from the Indiana Jones series, Charlie Chaplin's cane--inside the 50,000-square-foot main house.
 © Mike Carrillo/Celebrityhomephotos.com |
5. Oprah Winfrey
Montecito, Calif.
Net Worth: $2.7 billion
Rank: 234
The self-made media mogul paid $50 million in 2001 for the 23,000-square-foot Georgian-style home she calls the "Promised Land." In 2007 the spread was appraised at just under $85 million. For such a public persona, Winfrey ferociously guards the privacy of her home, situated on 43 acres. At a Barack Obama fund raiser last year, guests were strictly prohibited from entering the house, and cameras were forbidden.
Facebook has enjoyed boasting about their highly active users over the past few years. One statistics that they often state is that 50 percent of “active users” log in to the site on a daily basis. Facebook has most definitely changed the way we interact with each other and for many it has become heavily integrated into our daily lives. I decided to compile the top reasons that users log in to the site and have posted them below.
Facebook is now the largest photo sharing site on the web. The main reason for this growth is the ability to tag your friends in photos. While social tagging has been around before Facebook, tight integration into the social graph has proven to be extremely powerful. It also naturally improves your ability to stalk people given that they are constantly being tagged by others (yes, you can prevent being inappropriately tagged as I outline in the 
When Facebook opened their platform two years ago they weren’t expecting the site to become the central platform for the future of social gaming but soon enough it was. The most popular application on the site based on daily active users is Pet Society and overall, a large percentage of the top 100 applications on Facebook are games. If you are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that you have played a game in the past month and many more are playing daily.
While Facebook’s advertising platform is still in its infancy, many businesses are taking advantage of the site’s ability to efficiently target users based on specific demographic information. Many of the advertising opportunities are still being explored including “nanotargeting” which is the ability to target a single user via a Facebook advertisement. 
While everybody isn’t a developer, Facebook has been extremely effective at attracting new developer talent to build applications on top of the Facebook platform. Facebook initiated the movement toward a more open social web with the launch of their platform two years ago, and they are continuing that movement today. The result has been numerous applications which now are legitimate businesses for hundreds if not thousands of developers.
Embarrassing photos have become a permanent fixture in the media when referencing Facebook. Thanks to the large amount of buzz resulting from articles about individuals being fired and relationships ending due to inappropriate or compromising photos, millions of users log in soon after they are alerted to a newly tagged photo of themselves. 
Facebook is a communication platform and messages are a central component of that communication. Every time we receive a message, an email arrives in our inbox to notify us of that message. Many users (including myself) have complained about the lack of features within Facebook’s messaging system. Despite its downfalls, Facebook messages are one of the most important features of the site.
Often times we log in to Facebook just to find a person we happen to be thinking of at that moment. It can be an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, as well as a childhood friend, or even a distant relative. Whoever you are thinking about, you can log in to Facebook and search for that person. More often, that person now has a profile on Facebook. You can find most people that you’re looking for on the site and that’s why millions of people are logging in every day.
Facebook chat only launched recently but every day that I log in, I end up getting tons of messages (as long as I’m not invisible). From other people that I’ve spoken to, chat has become an increasingly active component of their Facebook usage. As I said before, Facebook is a communication platform and chat is now an integral component of communication on the site.
Status has been an important component of Facebook since early on and with the increasing popularity of Twitter, status is becoming even more important. Users don’t actually need to visit the site to update their status though. Many use their mobile phones to update their status and then wait for the comments to flow in. Status updates were created by Facebook and are now becoming an integral component of general communication on the web.
If you have a lot of friends on Facebook then you probably have a lot of event invites. Whether or not you are attending them, Facebook has become a central location for finding out what events or taking place on any given day. One of the main reasons we log in to the site daily is to figure out what’s going on and what events our friends are going to. If you are on Facebook, then you are most likely creating and RSVPing to events.
Groups are the central place for organizing large numbers of users together around a single purpose on Facebook. Many times groups will surge beyond thousands of users and suddenly there are ongoing conversations that are formed. Users that participate in these conversations return regularly to talk with other users about the topic being discussed in that group.
When the Facebook platform first launched almost two years ago, application requests began flooding in. The primary reason behind this flood of requests was that there were no limitations on how many applications could send. Despite the eventual limitations that were enforced, application requests and notifications continue to fill up within users’ “request” area. Cleaning out your requests is a good reason to log in every day.
Facebook has become a central location for checking up on our friends’ birthdays. Rather than storing birthdays in your calendar, you can simply log in to Facebook and check out who’s birthday it is. You can then be one of the hundreds of people to post “Happy Birthday!” on their wall. To stand out from the rest, you can even send them a gift. Birthdays continue to be one of the most important reasons people log in to Facebook everyday.