California's foster-care paradox

Let's blame it on Google. If the search engine monolith weren't so dizzyingly successful, its stock wouldn't have been worth billions of dollars to the 16 company founders and insiders in 2006 who decided to partially cash out. That stock sale did more than make those guys richer. It also unleashed an unanticipated monsoon of tax revenue into California's coffers, submerging Sacramento's negotiations over the 2006-07 budget under a comfortable sea of cash.

By Robert Greene

March 10, 2008