The Real Estate Behind The Richest Men And Women In The World Part 4: Jeff Bezos
It's no surprise that the founder and CEO of Amazon.com is among the richest people in the world. And he's not letting his enormous $72B net worth tempt him into idleness either. Jeff Bezos has scooped up enough land to earn him the No. 26 spot on The Land Report's list of America's largest landowners last year. Below are his five most impressive holdings.
Bezos picked up this 165,000-acre ranch in 2004 to serve as the base of operations for his aerospace company, Blue Origin. Located in West Texas, this property is the test site of the New Shepard rocket, a vertical-launching manned vehicle that has been in development for a decade and launched for the first time last April.
Amazon is not only one of Seattle's biggest employers, it's also one of the city's largest property owners, largely thanks to its 2012 purchase of the South Lake Union campus. Amazon bought 11 buildings totaling 1.7M SF of office space and 100k SF of retail space for $1.15B from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Bezos is currently constructing three huge spheres filled with over 300 plant species on the site to give his employees their very own indoor jungle.
Even with Bill Gates as a neighbor, Bezos' home on Lake Washington is one of the largest in the area. A $28M renovation project expanded the home's living space from 13k SF to 29k SF. The property features a caretaker's cottage along with a 4.5K SF boathouse, a location Bezos often uses for meetings.
Bezos threw down $24.5M for this near 12k SF Beverly Hills estate, and it's not even his main home. The property is worth an estimated $27M and boasts Tom Cruise as a neighbor, while the property itself has a greenhouse, tennis court, the obligatory swimming pool and a luxurious guesthouse on its two acres.
What do you do for a weekend getaway to NYC when you're one of the world's richest people? Just what Bezos did, you buy three linked apartments in Manhattan's Century Tower. Bezos grabbed the 10k SF combined units up from Sony music exec Tommy Mottola for just under $7.7M in 1999.
