The twinkies who have their eggs fertilized by their husbands’ sperm in a laboratory, creating embryos for implantation in the wombs of surrogate mothers who are paid to manufacture children for delivery in nine months, since why on earth should any wife whose husband is worth a billion or even $500 million have to endure the distended belly, bilious mornings, back cramps, not to mention a cramped social life, to end up with her perfect personal-trainer-sculpted boy-with-breasts body she has spent thousands of sweaty hours attaining, ruined … tempting her husband to survey all the little man-eaters out there, including those former wives who used to meet regularly at the Boxing Cat Grill until it burned down, whereas the current wives leave their husbands catatonic before the plasma TV and meet three or four times a week at one local bar or another and drive home in their Hummers and bobtail Mercedes S.U.V.’s, bombed out of their minds, while waiting for the baby to come from the factory—

Whenever such rich gossip is repeated, somebody invariably says, “Who are these people?”

MANY PROMINENT HEDGE FUND MANAGERS are Jewish, and on Round Hill Road and Pecksland Road in Greenwich, as well as on Park and Fifth in Manhattan, there has arisen, like a breeze after dark, the sibilant sound of people with social cachet whispering to one another, behind the hand, variations on the theme “Some of my best friends are Jewish, but … ”

Mercifully, such statistical breakdowns don’t exist, but it would appear that no extraordinary fraction of hedge fund managers are Jewish. There are some 9,200 hedge funds spread all over the world. New York and Greenwich are the two great centers, but the top 100 as rated by Institutional Investor include funds strung out from Paris to London to Boston to East Setauket to Dallas to Los Angeles.

The common denominator is something else entirely: that status fixation. Virtually every hedge fund manager has it, but many hedge fund managers are perfect gentlemen, so well do they restrain the fixation. Paul Tudor Jones II and Stephen Mandel, for example, are two of Greenwich’s universally respected citizens. Mandel is well known for his often anonymous gifts to charities and his support of the Children’s School in Stamford. Paul Tudor Jones II founded the Robin Hood (as in take from the rich and give to the poor) Foundation for poor boys and girls, which is one of the most widely admired and heavy-heavy-heavily supported new charities. Paul Tudor Jones II being one of them himself, all these people feel wanted at his lavish Robin Hood fundraisers.

For its black-tie fundraising auction last June at the Javits Center in New York, the foundation booked Beyoncé, Jon Stewart, and Jay-Z as celebrity lures. They lured well. Four thousand hedge fund souls showed up, so many that each bidder had to use a glow-in-the-dark wand in order not to be lost in the crowd. But the real draw was Paul Tudor Jones II himself, who has turned this annual fundraiser into the party of the year in the hedge fund fraternity.

The auction began and the glow-glow wands went up in the air like swarms of fireflies. There were only seven auction items—and none of them was anything you could take home or possess in any fashion. You could only consume them. The prospect of 10 “power meals,” each with a different financial superstar, among them Steve Cohen, Henry Kravis, Barry Diller, and Paul Tudor Jones II himself, went for $650,000. A five-day “Surf and Sun” trip featuring surfing, sailing, fishing for sailfish and marlin, windsurfing, snorkeling, and golf plus pampering at an “ultra-exclusive boutique” resort in Anguilla brought $420,000.

The other five auction items, two of them trips by private plane to exciting and/or glamorous places and the others exclusive private visits with “living legends” of pop music and the art world, for example, went for a total of $1.42 million. In other words, the Robin Hood Foundation bulked up by $2.49 million for seven ephemeral “experiences.” Quite aside from the auction itself, 528 individual and corporate donors, most of them Paul Tudor Jones II’s fellow hedge fund managers, gave millions more.

Paul Tudor Jones II’s status fixation showed up only in the way he literally stole the show that evening—no small feat considering the wattage of the show’s auction celebrities: master of ceremonies Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and the most prominent auctioneer in the business, Jamie Niven of Sotheby’s.

Midway through the auction, in an intermezzo, out comes Jay-Z, the rapper. A bunch of poor children come up on stage, and Jay-Z leads them in what is meant as an inoculation against gangsta rap, namely scholar rap, featuring a number called “Read, Baby, Read.” Jay-Z departs without rapping himself, leaving that to this evening’s Big Rapper: Paul Tudor Jones II.

As soon as the auction is over, Paul Tudor Jones II comes fairly bouncing out upon the stage in his black-tie outfit, thanking one and all for the auction’s success—but adding that he knows a crowd like this one can give more.

With that, he goes into a hedge fund hip-hop dance routine and raps out lyrics that begin, “If you wanna get, then you gotta give … ”

The Paul Tudor Jones II Show so excites one man, he stands up in the audience, wand aloft and all but blazing, and cries out, “I pledge $1 million!”