Bezos no. 3 in America

A 10% bump in Amazon's stock price in after-hours trading following a positive earnings report Thursday made a lot of people a little richer — and CEO Jeff Bezos a whole lot richer.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, the leap in Bezos' Amazon stock increased his fortune by almost $5 billion Thursday evening, making him the third-wealthiest person in the United States and the fifth world wide.

At the beginning of the year he was only the 13th wealthiest American, according to Bloomberg.

Bloomberg put Bezos' current net worth at $55 billion. That leaves only Bill Gates, with $83.9 billion and Warren Buffett, with $64.5 billion, ahead of him.


The stock move pushed the Koch brothers, Charles and David, to fourth and fifth place.

Andy Kauffman and Redd Foxx on tour

As comedians, Redd Foxx and Andy Kaufman could hardly be more different. Foxx, the pioneering nightclub performer and star of “Sanford & Son,” who died in 1991, was candid, socially conscious and unapologetically obscene. Kaufman, the standup, sometime wrestler and “Taxi” co-star who died in 1984, was experimental, obtuse, playful and perplexing.

But now these two comics will be united in a most unlikely way: both are being turned into holograms to perform and tour again.

On Friday, Hologram USA, a technology company that specializes in these visual recreations of celebrities, plans to announce that it will use the likenesses of Kaufman and Foxx and parts of their previously recorded routines to create hologram shows that will be presented across the country next year.

“They’re comedy icons,” said Alki David, the founder and chief executive of Hologram USA. “Both of them influenced so many comedians after them.”

Mr. David, a billionaire entrepreneur, said in an interview that while the company is “working with other estates of famous funny guys and funny girls, these just happened to be amenable estates who see the vision.”

Foxx, who released more than 50 albums of his material, was among the first black comedians to find popularity with white audiences and to star in his own network sitcom.

Kaufman was a prankish provocateur and frequent guest of David Letterman’s “Late Night” program. He was the subject of the 1999 biographical film “Man on the Moon,” in which he was played by Jim Carrey. (He also appeared on Mr. Foxx’s short-lived ABC variety show in 1977.)

Michael Kaufman, the comedian’s brother and a representative of his estate, said in an interview that the hologram show was “the right platform for the new generation of audiences to experience Andy.”

In Andy Kaufman’s heyday, when he was picking fights on live television or feuding with the wrestler Jerry Lawler, Michael Kaufman said, such incidents “made it to the newspapers — that’s as much as you could do back then, as far as hoopla.”

If his brother were getting up to the same antics today, Mr. Kaufman added, “I think it would have busted the Internet. This keeps him alive.”

Mr. David said that the hologram shows featuring these comedians would include some of their best-known material — say, Andy Kaufman lip-syncing the “Mighty Mouse” theme on the debut episode of “Saturday Night Live” — as well as narrative segments that dramatize biographical details.

Noting that Malcolm X had known Foxx before his stand-up fame and described him as “the funniest dishwasher on this earth,” Mr. David said, “We’re going to have a scene with Malcolm X. We’re going to have various notable names featuring in his story.”

$750 or $1?

TRENTON, N.J. –  Stepping into the furor over eye-popping price spikes for old generic medicines, a maker of compounded drugs will begin selling $1 doses of Daraprim, whose price recently was jacked up to $750 per pill by Turing Pharmaceuticals.

San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals Inc., which mixes approved drug ingredients to fill individual patient prescriptions, said Thursday it will supply capsules containing Daraprim's active ingredients, pyrimethamine and leucovorin, for $99 for a 100-capsule bottle, via its site: www.imprimiscares.com.
The 3 1/2-year-old drug compounding firm also plans to start making inexpensive versions of other generic drugs whose prices have skyrocketed, Chief Executive Mark Baum told The Associated Press.

"We are looking at all of these cases where the sole-source generic companies are jacking the price way up," Baum said in an interview. "There'll be many more of these" compounded drugs coming in the near future.
The high price of prescription medicines in the U.S. — from drugs for cancer and rare diseases that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year down to once-cheap generic drugs now costing many times their old price — has become a hot issue in the 2016 presidential race.

News that Turing, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and other drugmakers have bought rights to old, cheap medicines that are the only treatment for serious diseases and then hiked prices severalfold has angered patients. It's triggered government investigations, politicians' proposals to fight "price gouging," heavy media scrutiny and a big slump in biotech stock prices.

At the eye of the storm is former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, head of Turing Pharmaceuticals, scorned last month for buying rights to and then increasing by more than 5,000 percent the price of Daraprim, a 62-year old drug with no competition. The startup drugmaker paid Impax Laboratories $55 million in August for rights to Daraprim, which treats a rare parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis that mainly strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients.


“This product is now affordable to make. We can make it and turn a profit and we can take some of that profit and put it back into research for this disease,” Shkreli told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Friday, adding that 60 percent of the drug is sold for $1.

how to use a refrigerator

Sharon Profis shares a few refrigerator organization tips everyone should know.