Buried after the jump in David Carr's piece on the Michael Wolff's quixotic bid for New York Magazine is this amazing fact: Although Mr. Wolff, 50, makes more than $450,000 as a columnist for the magazine and received an advance of more than $500,000 for a book, 'Autumn of the Moguls' (HarperCollins), he does not have the $50 million or so it will take to walk away with the weekly magazine franchise—which made all of $1.5 million lasy year, according to executives at Primedia, the magazine's owner.
Okay, I take it back: two amazing facts. First, Wolff makes a shit load of money (enough, practically, to double New York's profits). But what's with Carr's vagueness? What does "more than $450,000" mean? Does he get merit bonuses for being linked from Romenesko? And then, there's that advance of "more than $500,000." Why can't we get an exact figure on that?
I'm too polite to even comment on New York's anorexic profit margin, but needless to say, it sort of re-combines and inverts the old maxim that you can never be too rich or too thin.
Before sipping the Primedia Kool-Aid, Elizabeth Spiers hilariously described Wolff as looking like Mike Myers as Dr. Evil at Gawker.com.
Previous Wolff entries on low culture.