Jeff Bezos’ property empire is now worth almost $600m with his latest purchase in Hawaii

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘ real estate portfolio grew to astronomical new heights in 2021, burgeoning by more than $100 million thanks to a pair of high-profile property purchases in Hawaii and Manhattan.

The purchases saw the Blue Origin founder’s already extensive property portfolio balloon to nearly $600 million, in a year where the e-commerce kingpin relinquished his title of world’s richest man to rival Elon Musk, as well as the title of CEO of the trillion-dollar company he founded nearly three decades ago, out of his garage in Washington state in 1994.  

Since then, Bezos, who boasts a reported net worth of $195 billion – with $5 billion of that coming in the past year – owns 14 pricey properties purchased beginning in 1998, with price tags ranging from $5 to $165 million in places like New York City, California, Texas, his home state of Washington, and Washington, DC.

Bezos’s latest purchase came in the form of a private Hawaii estate that spans 14 acres and is surrounded by dormant lava fields. 

The three-building estate, situated on the picturesque La Perouse Bay on Valley Isle in Maui, Hawaii, set the ex-Amazon head back an estimated $78million. 

He is the latest internet billionaire to snap up a waterfront property, despite local discontent. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 37, recently bought a sprawling 600-acre property for a cool $53million on the island of Kauai. He also reportedly owns a 700-acre property on one of the islands that he acquired for more than $100million in 2014. 

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison owns most of the property 141-square-mile island Lanai, located eight miles off the coast of Maui.   

It is unclear when exactly Bezos purchased the property, but he donated to the Hawaii Land Trust in mid-September, which is responsible for the environmental conservation in Maui. He and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, 51, reportedly donated to several local charities to feel a part of the community.  

The property was sold to Bezos in an off-market deal, with the billionaire buying from Colorado-based holding company Lochland Holdings, which is owned by the Schatz family. Doug Schatz, an energy businessman, was the previous owner, having bought it for $4.2million in 1996.

The property is home to three buildings, including its main structure, which is 4,450 square feet and has three bedrooms and three bathrooms. 

The second building, meanwhile, is 1,839 square feet guesthouse with two-bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms. And the third is 1,815 square feet with three bedrooms and one bathroom. 

The entrepreneur’s new digs also sits on a marine fishing reserve. 

What’s more, the eccentric property is also surrounded by dormant lava fields where the Haleakalā volcano – which is eight times larger than the Empire State Building in New York City and its hotspots can reach up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit – last erupted in 1790. It is expected to erupt again within 500 years, scientists say.  

Both Bezos and Zuckerberg have faced backlash from locals for their extravagant purchases, with many arguing the brazen billionaires are raising housing costs by purchasing property on what they call sacred land. 

But that hasn’t deterred the business-minded Bezos, who is reportedly scouting more off-the-market properties in Maui to expand his real estate portfolio in the Aloha State and is reportedly searching for a home for his parents in Montage Kapalua Bay, where he often stays at a luxury resort, per the New York Post. 

Bezos’ other purchase in 2021 served as an addition to a string of apartment purchases he made in years prior on Manhattan’s posh Fifth Avenue, with the billionaire businessman buying up five properties over the course of three years to form a de facto mega mansion.

Picking up a $23 million unit in the same historic building where he had already spent $96 million on four separate homes, Bezos’ most recent purchase in the building situated in the city’s Flatiron District brought his holdings in the building to more than 20,000 square feet.  

Bezos initially bought three apartments in the building, which overlooks Madison Square Park, in 2019, for a cool $80million. At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bezos’s over-the-top purchase was one of the most expensive real estate transactions in New York City for the year. 

The space, which at the time covered a combined 17,000-square-feet with 12 bedrooms and multiple terraces, included a three-floor, 10,000-square-foot penthouse with a grand ballroom, a three-bedroom unit below with high-end finishes, and an adjoining four-bedroom pad with oversized windows on three of its four sides. 

At the time, it was rumored that the space would serve as a love nest for Bezos and his then-wife of 25 years – until the pair divorced in April of that year.

A year later, in April 2020, Bezos bought a fourth unit in the luxe Madison Square Park apartment complex, dropping $16 million for a three-bedroom unit adjacent to the two lower-level units from the original purchase.  

The de facto mega mansion, located in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, is housed at 212 Fifth Avenue, a building which offers a fitness center, golf simulator, game room and movie screening room.

The year prior, Bezos purchased a second Kalorama residence in Washington, D.C., across the street from a $23 million property he snapped up in 2016.

The initial $23million mansion, once a former textile museum, boasts 27,000 square foot of space and was built in 1912. It also occupies a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. 

The town is known to be an enclave for Washington power-players including the Obamas, who own a $5.3million home nearby, and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Bezos snapped up the second property for a considerably more modest $5 million. At the time, many theorized that the Amazon head made the purchase primarily made for privacy reasons, as the mansion boasts a direct line of sight into the larger, more expensive residence.

Jeff’s other big investment in the nation’s capital came in the form of the The Washington Post, which he purchased in August 2013 for $250million. The paper is included in his estimated net worth. 

In July 2020, Bezos built upon his already extensive Beverly Hills holdings by purchasing the property adjacent to Assylum Records creator David Geffen’s estate – which he had purchased for $165 million months before – for $10 million,

A considerably more humble abode than Geffen’s historic mansion, the home is still luxurious nonetheless by the average person’s standards. 

The $165 million property, meanwhile, purchased by Bezos in February of that year, is a massive 10-acre estate that boasts a 13,600-square-foot Georgian-style main house, two guest houses, a nursery and three hothouses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, expansive terraces, and a nine-hole golf course. 

The grand motor court even has its own service garage and gas pumps. Another notable feature of the main house is its antique wood flooring, which are imported and believed to be the same floor that Napoleon stood upon when he proposed to his first wife, Joséphine.  

Bezos owns two other homes in Beverly Hills. He bought the first for $24.45million in 2007 and snatched up a neighboring property 10 years later in 2017 for $12.9million. 

The first home is a seven-bed, seven-bath Spanish-style mansion with a greenhouse, tennis court, swimming pool, six car garage and four fountains. 

Neighbors reportedly include A-listers Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and Walter Matthau.

The second home is far more modest at just 4,568 square feet with just four bedrooms.

With that said, the majority of the Bezos’ land holdings can be found, surprisingly, in West Texas, where the ex-Amazon exec owns an estimated 400,000 acres in Culberson and Hudspeth counties east of El Paso, known as Corn Ranch.

The land was purchased by Bezos for an unknown amount in 2004, as most of the Texas land was bought using limited-liability companies named for famous explorers, the Wall Street Journal wrote at the time.  

The sprawling property includes the his 30,000-acre Figure 2 ranch outside of Van Horn, which serves as a reminder of the summers Jeff spent on his grandparents’ ranch growing up, outside the small town of Cotulla.

Bezos bought the home from attorney Ronald Stasny, who reportedly spent millions renovating the gray stucco, one-story property, built in the 1920s. Stasny added a spa in the bathroom, remodeled the kitchen, put in new tile floors, and refinished its posh porches, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. 

The ranch serves as the home base for Jeff’s private space company Blue Origin, which was founded in 2001.  

A portion of the Bezos’ net worth comes from Blue Origin, which is valued at somewhere between $1billion and $28billion. 

It is difficult to determine the specific value of the company because of the lack of details available about the enterprise, and the fact that Jeff is the sole shareholder, Chad Anderson, CEO of venture fund Space Angels, told Bloomberg. 

Jeff said in April 2017 that he funds Blue Origin through the sale of ‘about $1billion a year of Amazon stock’.  

Back in 1999, Bezos, then sporting a net worth of roughly $10 billion, made his first property purchase in New York City, snapping up a pad on Manhattan’s ritzy Central Park West, overlooking Central Park, for $7.7million. The previous owner was former Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola.

The home is made up of not one, but three interconnected apartments in the famed Century building in the city’s Upper West Side  

Bezos first big real estate purchases, however, came in the form of two homes purchased in his home state of Washington in 1998, which the businessman combined into one estate that has served as his primary residence over the past few decades.

The pair of properties, situated in Medina, an exclusive Seattle suburb also home to Bill Gates, cost the then rapidly emerging mogul $10million, for 5.3-acres of property. 

One of the homes covers 20,600 square feet with five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The other is 8,300 square feet with five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The latter is rumored to have cost $53million to build.  

The estate with 310 feet of Lake Washington shoreline underwent a $28million renovation in 2010. 

Source: dailymail