The Truth About Jeff Bezos' Massive House

Saying that Jeff Bezos is on a luxury real estate shopping spree is an understatement. The Amazon founder, currently trading the position of world's richest person back and forth with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has always had his eye on real estate. However, after taking to Twitter in January 2019 to announce the separation and divorce from MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott), his wife of 25 years, his acquisition of the choicest of land and sky went into overdrive, resulting in an estimated real estate portfolio worth in the area of $500 million to $1 billion, per news.com.au.

Bezos' first luxury property was close to home in Seattle, Washington, but he has since expanded to Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C., and West Texas, where he owns Corn Ranch, the spaceport for his Blue Origin aerospace company. However, his most recent purchases are less strategic as they are firmly in the lifestyle category. In August 2021, Bezos closed on a unit with a $23 million price tag at the famed 212 Fifth Avenue building, where he already owns a triplex penthouse and another unit below it, according to The Real Deal. And, most recently, Bezos and his partner Lauren Sanchez purchased a property on Maui for an undisclosed sum, per Pacific Business News.

For all the properties Bezos owns across the country, only one has set a record thus far — the Jack Warner estate, which he purchased from David Geffen for $165 million, The Wall Street Journal reported in February 2020. The previous record from the most expensive Los Angeles home was set by Lachlan Murdoch, who paid an estimated $150 million in 2019 for Chartwell, the Bel Air property used on The Beverly Hillbillies. The Warner property was built in stages over the course of a decade in the 1920s and 1930s by Jack Warner, the film executive who became the driving force behind Warner Bros. Studios.

Warner's project was finally completed in 1937 after Warner purchased three surrounding properties and demolished the mansions on them to pave the way for his L.A. dream home. When Warner died in 1978, his wife Ann was offered $25 million for the estate but had no intention of selling before her death. When she died in 1990, media magnate David Geffen snatched up the property the same year for $47.5 million, according to Insider. One Los Angeles real estate agent told The Wall Street Journal that the Jack Warner estate was "one of the most beautiful properties in the world, let alone Los Angeles."

Bezos' purchase of the Jack Warner estate includes nine acres of land that surround a 13,600 square-foot Georgian-style mansion, two guest houses, a nursery, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and its own nine-hole golf course. Warner, who was a collector of luxury cars, also put in a full-service garage and a gas pump on the property. However, among the more notable details of the main house is the original imported wood flooring which, according to the Los Angeles Times, is the very same floor that Napoleon was standing on when he proposed to Empress Joséphine. Other historical features include 18th-century English paneling in the living room, early-19th-century French wallpaper in the dining room, and a sunroom with Gothic-style wood paneling, according to a 1992 feature on the property by Architectural Digest.

It may seem strange for a pioneering internet entrepreneur, who is obsessed with making trips to space as common as to the Grand Canyon, to invest so heavily in a property laden with things of the past. However, Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland, who wrote about the Warner estate in his book, "The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills," told The Hollywood Reporter that, "It's about the emotions and the statement you want to make," adding, "There are only a handful of these class-A estates left, and what this tells me is that there's a return to classicism being the ultimate aesthetic — not newness or flash."