The story of how the casino mogul blew $140 million because his elbow ripped into Picasso's "Le Rêve" is making the rounds today. The New Yorker carries an account of the rip and Nora Ephron, who witnessed the whole thing, has her much longer version on the Huffington Post. Wynn was about to sell the portrait of Picasso's mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, to hedge-fund king Steven Cohen. (And just to give you an idea of how great art appreciates, Wynn had bought the painting in 2001 from an anonymous collector who bought it in 1997 for $48.4 million. Hey, it's only money, right?) Wynn told Ephron and some other friends visiting him in Vegas about the sale. And then....

"The girls said, 'We've got to see it tomorrow,'" Wynn recalled last week. “So I said, ‘I’ll be working tomorrow. Just come on up to the office.’ ” (He had recently moved “Le Rêve” there from the hotel lobby.) The guests came at five-thirty, and Wynn ushered them in. On the wall to his left and right were several paintings, including a Matisse, a Renoir, and “Le Rêve.” The other three walls were glass, looking out onto an enclosed garden. He began to tell the story of the Picasso’s provenance. As he talked, he had his back to the picture. He was wearing jeans and a golf shirt. Wynn suffers from an eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects his peripheral vision and therefore, occasionally, his interaction with proximate objects, and, without realizing it, he backed up a step or two as he talked. “So then I made a gesture with my right hand,” Wynn said, “and my right elbow hit the picture. It punctured the picture.” There was a distinct ripping sound. Wynn turned around and saw, on Marie-Thérèse Walter’s left forearm, in the lower-right quadrant of the painting, “a slight puncture, a two-inch tear. We all just stopped. I said, ‘I can’t believe I just did that. Oh, shit. Oh, man.’”