The bike shown in the pic is a Colnago CLX. For those not that familiar with bikes, I would equate the Colnago brand of bicycles to Ferrari (both Italian and you pay for the name more than anything else). It's debatable if there is any actual performance difference, but just as Ferrari has a long F1 heritage, Colnago has a long heritage in the Tour de France. Similar type of snobbery I guess.
The CLX is their low end carbon fiber bike and made in Taiwan, which most of all of the carbon fiber bikes in the world are made. The frameset (fork, seatpost, and frame) will generally set you back about $2k, and then the component group was about another $1k (kept it Italian with a mix of Campagnolo Record and Chorus) and the wheels are about $600.
This is my "other" road bike. My primary racing bike is a Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL, which is both lighter and has a more aggressive geometry. I'm probably in to that bike about $5k at this point.
I know some people are going to think I'm crazy spending so much on bikes, but I like to think everybody has their hobby and thank god mine is only bikes, unlike a lot of my buddies who have car fetishes (one of my closest friends has now gone through a Ferrari, Porsche 911 GT Turbo, and is now "downgraded" to a Lotus Elise). Also, about 3 years ago, I turned off my computer fetish, meaning I stopped upgrading with every product cycle. I was upgrading my CPU, vid card, about once every 6 months. Granted, I wasn't taking that big of a hit on it as I could sell my old stuff for about 75% of what I paid for it, but after a while, I realized 1) I now play games on my Xbox 360 as I got sick of dealing with drivers, patches, etc, and 2) 95% of my time is spent surfing, sending emails, and watching videos on my computer, which a Celeron could handle quite nicely. So for the last 3 years I hadn't upgraded until this January, when I put in a AMD 5000+ Black edition in.
Basically, my priorities changed from computer to bicycles, which has made me that much healthier....believe me, when you spend that type of money on something, you are intrinsically motivated to use it. Or the wife berates you by saying "you spent how much on that bike and you're not riding it???!!!??"
Lastly, it's made my professional life better. I exercise with people from work, which has helped me build relationships and network to keep on climbing that corporate ladder. I'm currently a manager of 4 departments with about 50 people reporting to me. I aspire to keep on climbing to director and then VP eventually. I'm riding with people who are currently directors or program managers whom I now consider friends that I can go to for professional help using our exercising as the connection. That's been huge.
In addition, it's helped with a lot of impasses that I get in to sometimes at work. It's amazing how well your peers treat you when they know you're riding or doing things on a personal level with their bosses.
So Zim....long answer to a short question!