Minor’s spending has remained in high gear since the split. For his 40th birthday, he leased a 727 jet to fly 30 people from New York to Los Cabos, Mexico, for a two-day, all-expenses-paid vacation at the Palmilla Resort, where oceanfront rooms range from $600 to $2,600 a night. “I was newly separated,” he says. “It was people I was just getting to know. The jet did have a bar. And I flew out a really great D.J. from L.A. But it’s not like it would go in the story­books as one of the most expensive parties of all time. It was under $250,000.”

After his divorce, Minor also rented an expensive house in L.A. “I used to sit with friends at a certain table for eight at Koi every Friday night,” he says. His current wife, Shannon, met him there after being shown a photo by a mutual friend. “I knew immediately I’d met the woman I was going to marry,” Minor says of that evening. The feeling was mutual. At the time, Shannon was recently separated from Hollywood producer Marc Gurvitz, with whom she has a son. She quickly filed for divorce. Late last year, she and Minor welcomed a baby girl.

Minor’s Charlottesville estate is the most modest property he owns. Last De­cember, he paid $15.3 million for Carter’s Grove, an even more exquisite Georgian-style mansion 120 miles away, in Williamsburg, Virginia. It sits on 476 acres and was built in 1755 for the grandson of Robert “King” Carter, the richest and most powerful Virginian of the mid-18th century. In California, Minor owns two homes that he bought in the past two years, one a sleek $20 million glass-lined house in Bel Air, which is currently on the market, and the other a $22 million manor in San Francisco modeled on Madame de Pompadour’s Petit Trianon château, replete with lush gardens, a ballroom, rotundas, and an interior courtyard. He is also sinking more than $30 million into a nine-story, 100-room luxury hotel that is slated to open in downtown Charlottesville in July 2009. He says that he insisted on being the sole investor: “I don’t like squabbling.”

Minor, who flies back and forth between properties on his own Challenger 603 jet, is sparing no expense on any of them. He’s already planning a $15 million makeover of the San Francisco property, which he finds “kind of offensive and ugly.” The mansion, which sits on one of the biggest lots in the city (rumored to be second only to the one owned by novelist Danielle Steel), “needs a lot of work to go from this grandiose monstrosity to a real house,” Minor says. Meanwhile, he’s hired British landscape artist Arne Maynard—one of the most sought-after experts on English gardens—to tackle Car­ter’s Grove’s vast expanse of terraced lawn, which stretches to the banks of the James River. He’s also put Los Angeles decorator Michael Smith on the payroll. Smith, whose client list includes Steven Spielberg, Sir Evelyn and Lady de Rothschild, and Wendi and Rupert Murdoch, is designing the interiors of Carter’s Grove, Minor’s San Francisco home, and his new hotel. In addition, Minor is in negotiations to buy and renovate the historic Hialeah Park Racetrack, in Florida.

Minor lives grandly—in short, like any wealthy businessman with gubernatorial aspirations. Whether it’s foreshadowing or wishful thinking, the former CNET board member who calls Minor pathological says that he’d be very supportive of Minor’s move into the Virginia governor’s mansion: “I assume he’d like nothing more than to be King of Silicon Valley, but I’ll be happy if he decides to live in Virginia, because I don’t do anything in Virginia.”

Minor gives the impression that it has been smooth sailing since his promising start. But when I email him to ask what he makes of CBS’s acquisition of CNET, he gives a response that’s both funny and poignant: “If I had to say my company was bought, the Tiffany Network sounds as good as any ending.” He adds, “Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin”—CBS’s former president—“walked right past me after dinner at the Bel-Air Hotel and didn’t know who I was, just three days after the deal was announced. What is it they say about the sands of time?”