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Google played host to the X Prize Foundation’s fundraiser this weekend, gaining $2 million for the space race organization.
New York-based sadsack crooner Rufus Wainwright cried on the piano — could they have picked a less uplifting musician? — and comedian Robin Williams told a few jokes.
Google, of course, has a replica of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne dangling inside the Mountain View Googleplex.
Esther Dyson has a few photos of the event up on her Flickr, and the SFChron has a nice slide show on its site as well.
According to the Chronicle, the A-list invitees included:
“Sir Richard Branson (who was so enthused by Rutan’s Ansari X Prize, he struck a deal with Rutan to design suborbital rocket planes for his new Virgin Galactic fleet for commercial spaceflight by 2009); Google co-founder Sergey Brin; Larry’s gal Lucy Southworth, a Stanford biomedical informatics doctoral student; Tipper Gore (sans the Gore-acle) with daughter Kristin Gore and Kristin’s husband, Paul Cusack; X Prize Foundation President Tom Vander Ark; Attorney General Jerry Brown and his wife, Anne Gust; journalist-blogger Arianna Huffington; geneticist John C. Venter; Google’s Gil Elbaz (co-founder of Applied Semantics) and his wife, Elyssa Elbaz; actress Connie Nielsen and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich; Amir and Anousheh Ansari; Mayor Gavin Newsom and actress Jennifer Siebel; PayPal co-founder and Tesla investor Elon Musk; Burt Rutan; Ghislaine Maxwell; Gordon and Ann Getty; “Beach Blanket Babylon” producer Jo Schuman Silver; Kleiner Perkins’ Juliet Flint and her husband, Andre de Baubigny; Nadine Weil; Cnet’s Shelby Bonnie and his wife, Carol Bonnie; and Google’s Omid Kordestani and his wife, Bita Daryabari. “