We just posted a feature story from Carole Edrich on the top spas in Argentina, the best places to get pampered in Buenos Aires, Bariloche, Mendoza, and Salta.

Argentina, the land of vinotherapy and cosmetic surgery vacations, may not contain the fountain of youth. But it certainly tries hard. Look around the posh areas of Buenos Aires and the ladies don’t look that much different than the ones trying to keep that youthful look going in Palm Beach or Beverly Hills. Just speaking a different language.

This round-up has spa descriptions of some of the hotels we have reviewed in full, including Llao Llao, Cavas Wine Lodge, and Patios de Cafayate. In my opinion the Park Hyatt in Buenos Aires belongs in this company too, so perhaps it will get added when the writer swings back through the capital. Meanwhile, you can’t go wrong scheduling treatments at one of these spots.

[photo - Hammam at Faena Hotel + Universe]

We recently posted our reviews of the top 5 hotels in Los Cabos, at the bottom tip of the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. Our correspondent quickly dismissed some of the so-called luxury hotels in Los Cabos, but dished out high praise for some of the ones that are truly special. Although I try not to take magazine readers’ polls too seriously, I was happy to see that some of our top picks’ spas were highly praised in the April issue of Conde Nast Traveler. The poll rated the top spas in North America, the Caribbean, and at sea.

Esperanza in Cabo San Lucas earned a perfect score for both its setting and its treatments. Las Ventanas al Paraiso in Los Cabos also earned a perfect score for its setting and was #6 overall for resort spas.

I was surprised to see One & Only Palmilla miss the cut, but an ad in the middle of the section praising the magazine’s Johansens Awards for Excellence listed One and Only Palmilla as the “Most Excellent Resort”in Mexico and Central America. (Marquis Los Cabos was a runner-up in that section, along with Royal Hideaway Playacar, on the other coast.)

They say that once you’re a multi-multi-millionaire, the first thing you want is…to be a billionaire.

If so, there are now 946 people who got their wish, according to Forbes. The world’s population of billionaires climbed to 946 last year, a record. Bill Gates is still at the top, with some $56 billion to his name, while new entries include Howard Shultz of Starbucks and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. The second one is a bit galling. How out of hand has corporate CEO pay gotten when you can build up a billion-dollar fortune in an office job? That seems too much like a something from the snap of a genie’s fingers.

Meanwhile, U.S. households with a net worth over $5 million, excluding the primary home, topped the one million mark in 2006, up from 250,000 in 1996. A rising tide may not lift all boats, but it looks like the American Dream is alive and well.

Maybe those overpaid CEOs everyone is railing against would be better off downsizing. A study profiled in Business Week shows that Chief Executive Officers with huge trophy mansions underperform in the stock market.

Two finance professors studied 432 CEOs of S&P 500 companies and found that 12 percent of them lived in homes of at least 10,000 square feet, or on a minimum of 10 acres. “And their companies’ stocks? In 2005 they lagged behind those of S&P 500 CEOs living in smaller houses by 7 percent, on average,” the article says.

In the hotel world, Paris isn’t the only Hilton who knows how to spend money better than manage it. Hilton Hotels’ Stephen Bollenbach bought a 13,000-sq.-ft. L.A. house after taking the top job in 1997. In the 36 months after the purchase, Hilton trailed the S&P by 74 percent.

Overall, the showy home buyers lagged the S&P by roughly 25 percent in the three years after their CEOs’ purchases, while smaller-home buyers’ companies beat the index by 22 percent.

Perhaps the ones who wanted to prove something should have just bought a nice little vacation home with a view instead.

Just when you start thinking there must surely be a limit to how much money the super-rich have to burn, a story comes along to show us differently. Apparently the world’s largest jet will not go into commercial use, but is being bought by an unnamed Middle Eastern head of state. For $300 million. That doesn’t even include the interior, which will cost an estimated $100 million to $150 million more. Here’s the article, One “World’s Biggest Jet” Please.
Just for comparison, the total tab is higher than any yacht ever built and over three times the price of any house on the market anywhere in the world. Oh, but they are figuring out how to include a screening room and a whirlpool tub at least.

Just one little hitch: the thing is too big to land at anything less than a major airport. So they can forget the private airstrips and high-end ski resort towns.