$165 million - Beverly Hills, Calif.
Once owned by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, this expansive villa sits on six and a half acres in Beverly Hills.
A massive 75,000 square feet of living space is spread across three stories. The home boasts 29 bedrooms and 40 bathrooms.
The home was built in 1926 in the style of a Mediterranean villa and was featured in the 1972 film The Godfather. The compound comprises six buildings, three swimming pools and a movie theater.
$140 million - Bran Castle, Brasov, Romania
Once inhabited by Romanian prince Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Count Dracula, this castle, built in 1212, sits on 20 acres.
The 17-bedroom castle rests on the top of a cliff and offers views across the countryside and surrounding mountains.
The current owner, Dominic von Hapsburg, is running the home as a museum.
$138 million - Updown Court Windlesham, Surrey
Larger than either Buckingham or Hampton Court palace, this 103-room home has 58 acres of gardens and woodlands, making it the idyllic English country home for those flush with cash.
Several ballrooms and grand entrance ways punctuate this house, which has a panic room, an indoor squash court, bowling alley, 50-seat cinema, helipads, space for eight limousines and a heated marble driveway.
Marble bathrooms are nice, but some would say indoor spas, jacuzzis and pools with views of the grounds are better. For more information contact Savills, Beauchamp Estates or Hamptons International.
$135 million - Hala RanchAspen, Colo.
Until Tim Blixseth finishes constructing his $155 million Montana ski lodge, this 95-acre ranch owned by Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, former Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S., is the most expensive in the country.
The Starwood Ranch estate boasts a 56,000-square-foot mansion with 15 bedrooms and 16 baths.
The estate features several smaller buildings, stables, a tennis court and an indoor swimming pool.
$125 million - Maison de L'AmitiePalm Beach, Fla.
In 2004, Donald Trump bought former health care executive Abe Gosman's palace, Maison de L'Amitie, center, at a bankruptcy auction for $41.25 million.
With the refurbished version--complete with ballroom, conservatory and 475 feet of oceanfront--Trump is confident the property will move. If the water is too rough on the beach, the property has a 100-foot swimming pool surrounded by gardens.
John Arnold, U.S.
Xiaofeng Peng, China
Shivinder Singh, India
Begumhan Dogan Faralyali, Turkey
Aymin Hariri, Saudi Arabia
Fahd Hariri, Lebanon
Yang Huiyan, China
Albert von Thurn und Taxis, Germany
Hind Hariri, Lebanon
Mark Zuckerberg, U.S.
In 1997, the Battelle Memorial Institute, Ohio's largest research center, based in Columbus, managed a single lab for the U.S. Department of Energy with an annual budget of $1 billion. A decade later, Battelle oversees seven major laboratories for different federal agencies; budget: $4 billion in research funds annually. The institute has become a force in almost every area of emerging technology, especially life sciences and energy research. One of its children, Velocys, is working on a way to cut the cost of capturing the 3 trillion cubic feet of the world's stranded natural gas by converting it into easily transportable liquid.
Santa Fe has plenty of dirt roads. It also has major federal laboratoriesmore within a 100 mile radius than any other city on this list, including Los Alamos Laboratory, the birthplace of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb, and Sandia National Laboratories, a leading solar-energy research center. A growing number of wind and solar energy start-ups have popped up in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, N.M. Blue Energy USA, for example, has created a 6-foot-tall wind turbine in the shape of a spiral helix. The turbines use solar energy cells that allow them to convert both solar and wind energy simultaneously and can be used for residential use.
The playground of the rich is also becoming a haven for cutting edge biotech and life-science research. Both the Scripps Research Institute (the world's largest private biomedical research center, headquartered in Southern California) and the Max Planck Institute (Germany's leading life sciences center) are building facilities there. In 2006, BioCatalyst International, a major investor in biotechnology start-ups led by Genzyme co-founder Sheridan Snyder, opened a new office in West Palm Beach to get the first shot at the hottest new prospects.
If you want a 10-gallon disruptive technology, smash different discoveries together. To wit: Houston's itRobotics, founded in 2002, has developed new cost-cutting robots that inspect a variety of boilers and energy pipelines for structural flaws. Other Houston start-ups are commercializing technologies originally developed at local research institutions. Nanospectra Biosciences, a local drug delivery company, is working on a nano-scale particle (pioneered at Rice University) that destroys cancerous tumors. The particles are injected in the bloodstream and accumulate inside cancerous tumors. When the tumor is exposed to a laser, the particles absorb the near-infrared light and convert it into thermal energy, destroying the tumor.
Globalization and poor training may have gutted America's manufacturing base, but stalwart metal-bender Milwaukee is not backing down. Rather than just crank out widgets, local companies are attacking bottlenecks in the manufacturing process itself. For example, Rockwell Automation makes snazzy sensors and controls that boost assembly-line productivity. Johnson Controls, inventor of the thermostat in 1885, has produced energy-efficient heating, air-conditioning and lighting systems running throughout 1 billion square feet of commercial real estate. Chief Executive Stephen Roell plans to expand Johnson's workforce 35%, to 190,000 employees, in the next three to four years.
Resuscitated after decades of economic malaise, the old steel town has become an innovative force in such areas as health care, biomedical technology, nuclear energy and robotics. A big help: Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is making great strides in robot development. The school's Collaborative Innovation Center, funded by Pittsburgh and the state government, has also helped entice stalwarts like Intel and Apple to build labs in the area.
Since the 1970s, chip maker Micron Technology and computer giant Hewlett-Packard, along with the Idaho National Laboratory, had buoyed Boise's technology sector. But now there are new faces. In 2006, Idaho ranked seventh nationally in the percentage increase in venture capital investments and 11th in concentration of high-tech workers. One home-grown start-up, Quantum Point Technologies, provides a suite of information-technology management services to agencies at the U.S. Department of the Interior and regional businesses like Washington Trust Bank.
There's more than corn in Iowa. Like Asoyia. Founded in 2004 by group of 25 farmers, this biotechnology company commercialized a new strain of soybean developed at Iowa State University. Asoyia's soybean is genetically designed to produce trans-fat-free oils. Iowa City is also a hotbed of new technologies in health care and renewable energy. BFC Gas & Electric can generate enough electricity from solid waste in nearby Cedar Rapids to light up 4,000 homes. Fueling the effort: new venture capital and private equity firms that target renewable energy start-ups. Likewise, the government-backed Grow Iowa Values Fund puts up $2 million a year to support the University of Iowa's Centers for Enterprise.
Soaring oil profits in recent years have pumped life into Lake Charles' economy. The city's port is the 12th largest in the U.S. and a leading center for offshore drilling and extraction technologies used on platforms around the world. CITGO, ConocoPhillips and other players in the energy industry have expanded operations in Lake Charles, rapidly making the port city a key choke point in America's energy distribution network. The region already boasts one liquefied natural gas facility, and three more are under construction. When those come online in a few years, as much as a quarter of all natural gas used in the U.S. will flow through Lake Charles, estimates the Southwestern Louisiana Chamber of Commerce.
This small desert town in southern Arizona has more prisons than patent lawyers. The local chamber of commerce fishes for new business by hyping the tourist flow from Mexico and heavy highway traffic. So what's Yuma got? The U.S. armed forces. The Department of Defense runs a testing facility, U.S. Yuma Proving Ground, near the city of Yuma that spans over 1,300 square miles of desert terrain. As the primary U.S. site for desert warfare research, Yuma is now the third-fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country, according to its Web site.And where the military goes, so does tomorrow's top technology.
