Haute 100: John Arrillaga, Isha & Asim Abdullah, Nancy Bechtle, Carl Berg and more

Roberta Economidis
Category: Thinkers
Company: Georgopoulos & Economidis
Industry: Law
What Makes Her Haute: Economidis has been a fixture in California law since the early 1990s. Today she is a partner in the law firm Georgopoulos & Economidis specializing in corporate, business, and criminal law. In addition to her stellar professional career, Roberta is active in the San Fran community with former and current titles like chair of the Board of Governors of the City Club of San Francisco, chair of the San Francisco—Thessaloniki Sister City Committee, and chair of the Advisory Council of Symphonix

Larry Ellison
Category: Billionaires
Company: Oracle
Industry: Software
What Makes Him Haute: We can sum up his haute factor in one word: Oracle. The billionaire entrepreneur is CEO of the software company and counts the likes of Steve Jobs as a weekend pal. Another way to impart the magnitude of Ellison’s hauteness: he ranked No. 4 on Forbes’ list of world billionaires in 2009 with an estimated net worth of $22.5 billion. He is also an avid yachting enthusiast and the owner of a 453-foot superyacht called the Rising Sun as well as a 90-foot trimaran. His BMW Oracle Racing team, representing the Golden Gate Yacht Club, brought the America’s Cup back to the states in February 2010.

Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson
Category: Billionaires
Company: Sierra Pacific
Industry: Lumber
What Makes Him Haute: He might be one of the most dressed-down billionaires on our list, possibly because he is in the business of cutting down trees. Time spent in the woods can do that to a person. As of 2009, his company, Sierra Pacific, owned 1.7 million acres of forestland in California and Washington, holdings that allowed it to take the title as the second-largest producer of lumber by volume in the U.S.

Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield
Category: Power Couples
Company: Flickr
Industry: Technology
What Makes Them Haute: Fake is an art director; Butterfield is a Web designer. The two of them are hailed as Web 2.0 geniuses, thanks to their photo-sharing site Flickr, which they launched in 2004 without a dime of investments from venture capitalists. Just 16 months later, Yahoo! wrote a check to the power couple to the tune of $30 million. More recently, gamers are holding their breaths in anticipation of Glitch, Butterfield’s collaboration for a new online game, and Fake launched Hunch.com, a site that will offer a recommendation to a dilemma after the user answers 10 questions or less. Is that haute? Yes.

Maria Manetti Farrow
Category: Socialites
Industry: Fashion
What Makes Her Haute: The Italian sophisticate has an eye for what is haute, so much so that when she arrived in the U.S., Aldo Gucci offered Maria the marketing division of Gucci small accessories collections throughout North America, which she ran for 10 years, before moving on to Fendi and Mark Cross. She has been involved with the San Francisco Opera since the early 1980s, and her Russian Hill co-op served as the setting for an event a few days before the 2009 Opening Night Gala, where lucky women were able to get a peek at the exclusive collection of Boucheron, one of the Opera Gala’s sponsors.

David Filo
Category: Billionaires
Company: Yahoo!
Industry: Technology
What Makes Him Haute: Co-founder of Yahoo! should be enough to sum it up. New adventures are on the horizon for this Haute 100 member, though, as reports in early February indicated that David Filo has intentions of selling up to two million shares of common stock over the course of a year on the open market starting in May 2010.

Doris Fisher
Category: Entrepreneurs
Company: The Gap
Industry: Retail & Art
What Makes Her Haute: Along with her late-husband Donald, Doris opened up the first Gap store in 1969 in San Francisco. She later went on to expand her brand to include Old Navy, Baby Gap, and Banana Republic. She and Donald amassed quite the modern and contemporary art collection, and she is working with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on securing a museum space to showcase the works to the public.

John J., Robert, & William Fisher
Category: Entrepreneurs
Company: The Gap
Industry: Retail
What Makes Them Haute: These three brothers are the heirs to the Gap fortune. Their parents, the aforementioned Doris and her late husband Donald, founded the denim company in 1969 in San Francisco, and passed 50 percent control over to the sons in 2004. The empire includes Banana Republic, Gap, Gap Kids, Old Navy, and has afforded the sons the wealth for each of them to be listed separately on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, but no longer in the billionaire category. John also owns a minority stake in Oakland A’s baseball team.

Kenneth Fisher
Category: Thinkers
Company: Fisher Investments
Industry: Finance
What Makes Him Haute: Founder, chairman, and CEO of Fisher Investments, a multibillion-dollar money management firm headquartered in Woodside, Fisher is obviously an expert on finances. So it makes sense that he has been a columnist for Forbes for nearing three decades. He’s also the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller How To Smell a Rat. Fisher has written dozens of research papers in the field of behavioral finance, and his theoretical work identifying and testing price-to-sales ratios made groundbreaking strides in defining and using PSRs as a financial forecasting tool.

Stanlee Gatti
Category: Creators
Company: Stanlee R. Gatti Designs
Industry: Event Designs
What Makes Him Haute: We first introduced readers to Stanlee Gatti for our inaugural issue in January 2009, but he has been such a staple of high-society events in San Francisco that he needed little introduction. He is the premier event designer in town. His resume is chock-full of some of the most well-respected names and brands the world over that have called on him for their grand-scale fetes, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Armani, Arista Records, Elton John, Gordon Getty, and all of the San Francisco cultural institutions.