The worst thing about articles like this is not the few antimustachian idiots who buy these 'halo' bikes, it's the psychological and monetary effects that they have on the rest of us.
One major purpose of 'halo' products, whether in bikes, cars, handbags, watches, clothing, etc. is to shift peoples' price expectations ever upwards. So yes, no one is really dumb enough (ok, apparently a few are!) to actually buy the $20k bike, or a $200k car, or a $10k handbag, or a $2k sweater. But after they hear that $20k bikes exist, the next time they're shopping for a bike, they might say "hmm, $3k for a bike? That sounds kind of crazy, since the bike I had as a kid cost $20 and was awesome. But, it's a tiny fraction of that $20k bike, so I guess that's really a pretty good deal I'm getting. Sure, I'll take it!"
So this "article" is really just another brilliantly evil form of diffuse marketing designed to affect our brains without us even being aware of it.
And the money quote from the article about the sad effectiveness of such schemes (super-ironic LOL-points for the fact that this particular sucker is himself "a strategy director for a marketing company"!):
Avid cyclist Alan Taylor, strategy director for a Sacramento, Calif., marketing company, vowed not to spend more than $3,000 when he went shopping for a mountain bike in the spring. But he wound up paying $5,000 for a carbon-fiber-frame bike that, at 25 pounds, weighed about 5 pounds less than a comparable aluminum model.
"You kind of amortize the price of your bike over miles ridden, and it gets pretty cheap after a while," says Mr. Taylor, who kept his last bike for 12 years. "It's 'smileage,' not mileage, and I am really happy with my bike."
Ugh, just think how much more 'smileage' you could have gotten if you invested that extra $2000 instead, allowing you to work less and spend more time riding your real-man aluminum bike up a mountain rather than that pussy-shit carbon thing.