Halsey Minor, who founded CNET, helped fund Salesforce.com, and made millions of dollars during the dotcom boom, tried to parlay that success into an old-money lifestyle: A mansion in the style of Versailles. A multimillion-dollar fine art collection. Thoroughbred race horses. A plantation in Virginia.
Now, Minor is forced to defend himself against claims that he's spent himself out of money. In fall of 2008, Merrill Lynch froze his accounts in hopes of collecting on a $25 million loan. In April of this year, California's tax-collection agency publicly listed Minor and his wife Shannon (pictured) as the state's biggest non-payers, with $13.1 million in outstanding taxes due. Art auction house Sotheby's sued him for a different $13 million Sotheby's claimed he owed them, and was awarded a $6.6 million judgement earlier this year.
In a profile by the Bay Citizen, a recently launched San Francisco-based news site, Minor claims to have $125 million in assets Merrill's actions block him from selling. “I've been straight up with the I.R.S., told them what I owed them,” Minor told the Bay Citizen.
But back taxes are only part of the story:
At the time his accounts were frozen, Minor was in the midst of a prodigious spending spree: $20 million for a Bel Air house; $22 million for Le Petit Trianon; $7 million for a failed luxury-hotel project in Charlottesville, Va., Minor's hometown; $25 million in bids for art at Sotheby's and Christie's; $15.3 million for a Virginia plantation; $6.3 million for two thoroughbred racehorses; a $3 million deposit on a now-canceled order for a top-of-the-line Gulfstream jet.
The picture reporter Elizabeth Lesly Stevens paints isn't that of a criminal, but of a multimillionaire who lived as if he were a billionaire. “Halsey wants the best of everything," another former business partner said. "Everything has to be bigger than what anyone else has.”