Bezos spends $256m on most expensive LA home
Jeff Bezos has bought the most expensive home sold in Los Angeles – and it cost him a tiny fraction of his overall wealth.
The founder and chief executive of Amazon, who is the world’s richest man by a distance, spent US$165 million (NZ$256m) on the fabled Beverly Hills estate of the film studio boss Jack Warner, according to US media reports.
He bought it from David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, who described the property as ‘‘a staggeringly stupid thing to buy’’. Geffen spent US$47.5 million on the mansion and its grounds in 1990, a record at the time, and then invested US$45 million on renovation and landscaping.
A source close to Geffen said around the time of his purchase that the Georgianstyle house featured a 15m long bar and a floor ‘‘taken from a palace in France on which Napoleon proposed to Josephine’’.
The 3.6ha estate is believed to include a nine-hole golf course, tennis court and several guest houses, plus extensive gardens and terraces.
Warner was the longest lasting of the handful of Hollywood figures who built the motion picture industry and shaped present-day Los Angeles.
He constructed and expanded the estate in stages as his success grew in the 1930s. By the end of the decade it was among the most spectacular residences in the country, with a social milieu to match.
‘‘I remember one New Year’s Eve party in 1939 or 1940,’’ Olivia de Havilland once recalled. ‘‘All the men were glorious in white tie. Errol Flynn was behind the bar, Howard Hughes was my date, and Jimmy Stewart was seated on a stool. Just the four of us having our first drink of the evening.’’
Geffen, 76, visited shortly after the death of Warner’s widow, Ann, and heard about plans to subdivide the mansion.
‘‘I bought it, with everything in it, instantly,’’ he later told The New York Times. ‘‘I just bought it with all the furniture, all the scripts, all the Oscars, everything.’’
Bezos, 56, who owns The Washington Post, was already among the largest private property owners in the US, even after his divorce from his wife of 25 years, Mackenzie, 49. Earlier this year he bought three New York apartments for US$80 million.
The rest of his extensive portfolio includes a huge estate in the heart of Washington that was constructed out of two mansions. It cost US$23 million in 2016 and is the largest private home in the capital. He also owns a ranch in Texas and an estate in Seattle.
According to Forbes, his net worth is US$130.7 billion, almost US$20 billion more than Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder. – The Times