April 1, 2026
The real estate gluttony of the super-rich is truly breathtaking.
Billionaires have amassed vast swathes of real estate across the country, including in Indian Creek Village, Florida, pictured here.(Zak Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images) On Sunday, Bernie Sanders held his tax-the-rich road show in the Bronx, drawing another large and enthusiastic crowd. But as support for a wealth tax grows, so does opposition. In California, a group of tech and business leaders contributed nearly $80 million to a campaign to block a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of residents with at least $1 billion. In Washington state, the recent passage of a 9.9 percent tax on millionaires has presaged an outmigration of tech executives, and on March 11, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announced that after more than four decades in Seattle, he and his wife would be moving to Miami (although he did not mention the new tax). In New York, leaders flocked to CNBC to issue apocalyptic warnings about a mass exodus of the megarich if Mayor Zohran Mamdani succeeds in raising the income tax rate on city residents earning more than $1 million, and the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, raised the specter of a decamping of financial companies to Florida and Texas.
In light of all this, it’s worth examining how the ultra-rich actually spend their money and how these taxes might be harming their lifestyle. Their most visible advantages are private planes. The go-to model is the Gulfstream G700, which can accommodate up to 19 passengers, 20 panoramic windows, a master bedroom with shower, a range of 7,750 nautical miles and a price tag of $80 million.
Then there are the yachts. They range in size from super (100 to 200 feet) to mega (200 to 300) to giga (above 300). Many have swimming pools, jacuzzis, saunas, gyms, movie theaters, and garages for jet skis and other toys. Some have smaller support vessels that provide additional storage and space for crew members. A more exclusive accessory is the private submarine. Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio owns not one but two submersibles and regularly invites scientists and journalists to accompany him to explore the depths of the oceans.
But there are only so many jets, yachts and submarines that one person can own. It is in real estate that the consumption of the super-rich is most visible. We used to talk about the trophy wife; now it’s the trophy property(ies). The ultra-rich do their best to conceal their portfolios, often using limited liability companies with obscure names to conceal transactions. They care not only about safety, but also about appearance, because the level of gluttony on display is truly astounding. A look at the palaces of the patriciate reveals the staggering scale of their wealth – and the hollowness of their complaints about having to pay more taxes on that wealth.
Aerial view of the Warner estate, which was owned by David Geffen until 2020, when he sold it to Jeff Bezos for $165 million.(James Aylott/Getty Images) Current number
Take David Geffen. He is revered among the culturati for his generous philanthropy. He endowed the David Geffen Wing at the Museum of Modern Art, the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. But Geffen spent just as much on real estate. In 1990, he paid $47.5 million for Hollywood mogul Jack Warner’s legendary 10-acre Beverly Hills estate, with its 13,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion, 14 bedrooms, two dozen bathrooms, terraces, a pool complex and a nine-hole golf course. Geffen then spent $45 million renovating it, including $20 million on landscaping alone. During the renovation (which took eight years), he stayed at her Malibu beachfront estate, once owned by Doris Day and located on Carbon Beach, a mile-long strip also known as Billionaires’ Beach. (Geffen sold it in 2017 to Mark Walter, CEO of Guggenheim Partners and majority owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, for $85 million, which proved prescient, given that the place burned down in the Paradise Fire.)
In 2020, Geffen sold the Warner estate to Jeff Bezos for $165 million, which was the most ever paid for a California home — until the following year, when venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen paid $177 million for a seven-acre, 13-structure compound at Paradise Cove in Malibu, also known as Billionaires’ Bluff. (In March 2022, the couple paid $44.5 million for another home on Escondido Beach in Malibu, less than a mile away.) Geffen also owns a two-acre estate on Lily Pond Lane, a star-studded street in East Hampton, for which he paid $70 million in 2016, and a multi-story penthouse on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. After purchasing the penthouse, Geffen embarked on an extensive renovation that caused so much noise, vibration and damage to adjacent apartments that aggrieved shareholders filed more than a dozen lawsuits and claims against him.
For a May 1993 profile in The New York Times MagazineBernard Weinraub, interviewing Geffen aboard his Gulfstream 4, wondered if all his “extravagant homes” were really necessary. Geffen was indignant: “You say extravagant, well, I’m a very rich man. I made all this money. I worked for it. I didn’t fool anyone…And I live relatively modestly given my level of success and wealth.”
Geffen’s modest lifestyle includes the Rising Sun, a $590 million, 454-foot yacht that includes a basketball court and showpieces from his $2 billion art collection and on which he has hosted celebrities such as Julia Roberts, Paul McCartney, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and Bradley Cooper. In March 2020, as the world was shutting down due to Covid, Geffen was on his boat in the Caribbean, from where he posted a series of stunning photos on Instagram. “Sunset last night… isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. Hope everyone is staying safe.” The response was so virulent that Geffen kept his story private.
Bezos, purchasing the Warner estate from him, undertook his own extensive renovation, which included building a gleaming silver structure modeled on the nose of Apollo 11 (which was to house a sauna) and not one but three pickleball courts, to ensure he would never have to wait for a game.
The Warner estate has joined an already bloated Bezos portfolio. It included three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Miami (costing $200 million); a 27,000-square-foot mansion in Washington, DC (the largest house in the city), for which he paid $23 million cash in 2016 and which has a dozen bedrooms and twice as many bathrooms; a four-bedroom house opposite this mansion; a 20,600-square-foot, four-bedroom home on 5.3 acres on Lake Washington in Medina, outside Seattle; a 17,000-square-foot, 12-bedroom triplex penthouse in a building in Manhattan’s Flatiron district; four connected apartments in an iconic Art Deco condo on Central Park West; and Corn Ranch, a 400,000-acre tract in the West Texas town of Van Horn that also serves as a launch site for Blue Origin, its space transportation company.
Bezos, of course, is known for his extravagance. His 417-foot, three-deck yacht, the Koru, cost about $500 million to build; his 246-foot chase vehicle, the Abeona, has a helipad for use by his wife, Lauren Sánchez, a helicopter pilot. Their Venice wedding cost up to $50 million, lasted three days, was hosted by Usher and DJ Cassidy and had a guest list headlined by Tom Brady, Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bill Gates.
In 2020, Bill Gates paid $43 million for this beachfront estate in Del Mar, California.(Kevin Carter/Getty Images) One might expect Gates – the polio crusader, the co-founder of the Giving Pledge, the Cassandra of climate change – to be immune to such greatness. “Bill Gates is not like other tech billionaires,” said one New York Times title of an article last year about his new memoir, highlighting his modest tastes and public service. In fact, when it comes to real estate, Gates is just like other billionaires. His main residence, located in Medina, Washington (a short walk from Bezos’ estate), may well be the most opulent home in the country. Covering an impressive 66,000 square feet, it features seven bedrooms, 24 bathrooms, a 60-foot swimming pool with underwater sound system, a 2,500-square-foot gym, six kitchens, a 1,000-square-foot dining room that can accommodate over a hundred people, a private library including the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Leicester Codex (for which Gates paid more than $30 million) and a hillside garage where Gates keeps his collection of luxury Porsches and Mercedes. The property also has a man-made stream stocked with salmon and trout and a beach on Lake Washington landscaped with sand said to have been shipped from Hawaii or the Caribbean. The domain is known as Xanadu 2.0, named after the Palace of Feverish Dreams in Citizen Kane.
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When it’s cold in Medina, Gates can go to his Indian Wells, Calif., home near Palm Springs, which he bought in 1999 for $12.5 million and which covers 13,573 square feet, has six bedrooms and nine bathrooms and borders a golf course managed by the exclusive Vintage Club, of which he is a member. Gates can also visit his 7,234-square-foot home in Wellington, Fla., which features four bedrooms, six bathrooms and a 20-stall barn used to support his show jumping daughter Jennifer’s equestrian activities. To further accommodate it, Gates in 2014 paid $18 million for a 228-acre thoroughbred training facility in Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego. Six years later, he paid $43 million for an estate in Del Mar (less than five miles from there), which includes six bedrooms, a 10-person Jacuzzi overlooking a fire pit and a deck located on 120 feet of beach.
To shuttle between these areas, Gates has not one but two Gulfstream G650ERs, seating 10 people and burning up to 500 gallons of fuel per hour. It also has two helicopters served by a floating helipad moored near Seattle.
An aerial view of billionaire Ken Griffin’s 25-acre estate on Billionaires’ Row in Palm Beach, Florida. He is building a house that, when completed, is expected to be the most expensive in the world.Google Earth As compulsively greedy as Gates, Bezos and Geffen are, they are all overshadowed by Kenneth Griffin. Founder and CEO of Citadel, the financial colossus, Griffin is worth around $50 billion and he has used it to amass an archipelago of properties spanning the continent. Among them:
a four-level penthouse on N. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, for which he paid $58.75 million in 2017 — the highest amount ever for a residence in that city (which he recently unloaded as part of his high-profile move to Miami); an oceanfront property at the Four Seasons Hualalai resort on Hawaii’s Kona Coast; a pair of adjacent homes in Aspen, Colorado, with a combined total of a dozen bedrooms; a seven-acre oceanfront estate in Southampton that he bought from fashion designer Calvin Klein, for which he paid $84.4 million, and which sits on Meadow Lane (aka Billionaires’ Lane), where his neighbors include Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, Robert Kraft and Leon Black; a Georgian-style mansion near Buc Kingham Palace in London, for which he paid $122 million; a quadruplex penthouse at 220 Central Park South in New York, for which he paid $238 million in 2019, still the largest sum paid for a residence in the United States; and a collection of lots spanning more than 25 acres on Billionaires’ Row in Palm Beach, for which Griffin paid $350 million and on which he is building a 50,000-square-foot estate (including a clay tennis court for his mother) and which, when completed, is expected to become the most expensive home on the planet. A view of Spelling Manor in Holmby Hills in Los Angeles, which Eric and Wendy Schmidt purchased in August 2025 for $110 million. At 56,500 square feet, it is the largest privately owned home in California.(Paul Harris/Getty Images) We could go on to catalog Eric Schmidt’s properties (more than a dozen, stretching from Montecito and Yellowstone to Miami Beach and London); Larry Ellison (owner of 87,000 acres on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, constituting 98 percent of its land area); Laurene Powell Jobs (owner of at least seven high-end properties, including a sprawling beachfront compound at Paradise Cove in Malibu, purchased in four LLC transactions totaling $172 million, as well as a mansion in San Francisco that cost $70 million, a record for that city); and Sergey Brin, who paid $42 million last July for an eight-bedroom home on a five-acre cliffside property on Lake Tahoe in Nevada that includes two glass-enclosed funiculars that transport guests down the hill to a guest house.
This purchase fueled speculation that Brin would abandon California. He donated $45 million to the campaign to block the state’s billionaires tax and filed papers to move or terminate 15 California-based LLCs, including one tied to a superyacht and another to a private air terminal. However, in July 2025, the Google co-founder purchased an 8,000-square-foot, six-bedroom Mediterranean-style villa in Malibu, for which he paid $49.75 million. It’s just steps away from the 6,000-square-foot, six-bedroom estate he purchased in 2023 for $35 million. “He will probably use the smaller house as a guest house and move into the bigger one,” a source told New York Post.
This voracity for luxury homes seems all the more obvious at a time when the United States is facing a serious housing shortage (of 5.5 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors). “Blue-collar America grapples with housing crisis,” the newspaper headlined recently Financial Timeswhich describes how, since the 2008 financial crisis, “too little new housing has been built in the United States, contributing to a surge in prices that has outpaced wages and left people struggling to find affordable housing.” Currently, approximately 770,000 people in America are homeless, and a growing number of them are employed, as Brian Goldstone documents in his recent book: There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homelessness in America— the result of soaring rents, low wages and a lack of tenant rights. In New York, a record 154,000 public school children experienced homelessness during the 2024-2025 school year. Child care in the city costs an average of $20,000 per child, which represents about 20% of the median family budget. Although many wealthy people may flee the city if their taxes rise, more than half a million residents have already left it since 2020, many of them driven out by the high cost of living.
The rich defend this state of affairs by claiming that they pay more taxes than everyone else. But that’s not the case. According to a recent study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the effective tax rate for the richest 0.0002 percent of the population (roughly the Forbes 400) averaged 24 percent from 2018 to 2020; compared to 30 percent for the general population and 45 percent for those with the highest earned income. ProPublicaanalyzing leaked tax returns, found that from 2014 to 2018, the 25 richest Americans paid just $13.6 billion in taxes, an effective tax rate of 3.4% on $401 billion in income.
A single wealth tax, like the one proposed in California, would actually have a negligible redistributive effect. This would fail to address the structural realities of an economy that has kept wages low in order to keep corporate profits high and drive up stock prices, thereby inflating the wallets of the very rich. (At his rallies, Bernie Sanders likes to point out that Elon Musk’s net worth exceeds the combined wealth of the poorest 53 percent of American households.) And that makes the protests of the super-rich all the more unconvincing. This reveals an axiom of modern-day tycoons: the more they have, the more they want. One can only wonder: has their lust caused a breakdown in their value system, rendering them incapable of understanding their responsibility to their fellow citizens as part of the social contract?
Michael Massing Michael Massing is the author of Now they tell us: the American press and Iraq And Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Struggle for the Western Spirit. He’s writing a book about wealth and influence.
