Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a $130-billion fortune. The $165 million he spent on David Geffen's mansion amounts to just 0.13% of his net worth.
The Los Angeles housing market is notoriously expensive and has recovered fully from its lows at the depths of the financial crisis. In the last 10 years, L.A. County home values grew about 60%, but the median value of the top 2% of homes nearly doubled, to about $5 million, according to Zillow. It’s the tippy top of the market, however, that has been going berserk.
Shapiro said that when Geffen paid $47.5 million for the Warner estate 30 years ago “everybody thought that was a crazy number.” But sales in the tens of millions of dollars are now almost commonplace in Beverly Hills and other exclusive L.A. hillside neighborhoods, reflecting the huge growth in wealth that has been created in the last several decades.
“The share of wealth going to the U.S. billionaire class has exploded in recent decades. Therefore, they can bid up the prices on the fanciest mansions in the country as Jeff Bezos just did with the Beverly Hills mansion,” Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, who has advised both Sanders and Warren on their tax plans, said in an email.
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