Planet Business

Image of the week: Virtual fun

It is estimated that 97 per cent of people photographed wearing virtual reality headsets look stupid, but not this guy. This guy has everything sussed. Because as if there’s any doubt that indulging in some virtual reality while at a Deloitte Digital party at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, isn’t the pinnacle of fun, then he’s also got a firm hand on a more traditional, low-tech reality enhancer: beer. Meanwhile, the rest of the room is forced to make eye contact with each other in the name of “networking”.

In numbers: Corporate payouts

£63 million Payout received by Martin Sorrell, the boss of advertising group WPP, after he collected a share award. His salary and bonus should bring his year's pay up to about £70 million.

£92 million The only FTSE 100 chief executive to have received a higher single payout is Bart Becht, during his stint as the boss of Reckitt Benckiser (it makes dishwasher tablets and other household goods).

£250,000 Sum that Sorrell, a former finance director at Saatchi & Saatchi, borrowed in 1985 to buy a stake in Wire & Plastic Products, then a £1 million company that made shopping baskets.

The lexicon: Twitterversary

A "Twitterversary" is the anniversary of a Twitter account, in which a Twitterbot pops up in your mentions to let you know "you've been seven years on Twitter today. That's 20 per cent of your entire life to date. What are you doing? Delete the app now before you waste any more time" – or words to that effect. Now Twitter is having a significant Twitterversary of its own. The social network business was founded as "twttr" on March 21st, 2006, which was when co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet, "just setting up my twttr". For the first couple of years, hardly anyone at all was on Twitter, which was great, as it meant people-on-Twitter could be very nice and lovely to each other while safely bitching about people-not-on-Twitter. Then the fighting began, and perfectly sane people were reduced to tweeting things like "blockety block". Thanks, Jack.

Getting to know: Simon Nixon

The richest resident of Jersey added to his fortune this week when he cashed out his remaining 6.9 per cent stake in price comparison website Moneysupermarket, a survivor from the original dotcom wave. Nixon founded the business offline in his early 20s after quitting an accountancy course at the University of Nottingham that he later described as “boring”. It went online in 1999 and floated in 2007, its shares rising from 170p to 330p since then. Nixon’s latest £124 million share sale bonanza ends his ties with the company, freeing him up to spend more time with his property portfolio. Price comparison websites set up to help people save on their personal finances have done an even better job at making money for their founders: in 2012, Moneysupermarket bought rival site MoneySavingExpert from regular TV face Martin Lewis for £80m.

The list: Consumer shopping baskets

Ireland's Central Statistics Office is soon due another refresh in the basket of goods and services it tracks to calculate inflation (the last refresh was in January 2012). But this week it was the turn of the UK's Office for National Statistics to revise its list of the stuff consumers typically spend money on. So what slipped through the bottom of its basket?

1 Nightclub fees Nobody is paying to get into nightclubs any more and far fewer nightclubs even exist. Frankly, entrance charges were never a good idea anyway.

2 CD-Roms Ask your granny about this one-time method of installing Microsoft Word etc.

3 Rewritable DVDs or DVD-RWs Discs on to which people recorded, erased, recorded, erased and then recorded visual entertainment. Their reign was brief.

4 Organic carrots Organic produce is now so mainstream, the statistics body no longer distinguishes between organic carrots and the non-organic kind.

5 Sliced turkey Now combined into a shared "sliced cooked turkey/chicken" item to reflect the fact that nobody eats turkey 11 months of the year.