California record shattered: Jeff Bezos buys $165M mansion

The national housing market has cooled, but in Los Angeles the ultrarich are still shattering price records. An heiress to the Formula One racing empire sold her home for $119.75 million in July. In December, Lachlan Murdoch paid $150 million for a home in Bel Air.

The latest buyer at the top: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief and world’s richest person.

Setting a new high for a home sold in California, Bezos is paying $165 million for a Beverly Hills estate owned by David Geffen, the media mogul and co-founder of DreamWorks, according to two people familiar with the purchase.

That wasn’t all. In a separate transaction, Bezos Expeditions, which oversees the Washington Post and Bezos’ charitable foundation, is buying 120 undeveloped acres in Beverly Hills for $90 million, the two people said. The land was put on the market for $150 million in 2018 by the estate of Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, who died that year. Most recently, the asking price was $110 million.

Both deals are in the contract stage and not yet final.

The superrich are spending huge amounts for some of California’s premier properties. Murdoch, chief executive of Fox Corp., bought Chartwell, which TV viewers of a certain age may remember as the Clampetts’ home in “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Petra Ecclestone, whose father, Bernie Ecclestone, ran Formula One for more than 40 years, sold the Manor. Television producer Aaron Spelling had built the mansion, in the city’s Holmby Hills neighborhood, in 1988.

For Bezos, it was the Warner Estate, which was designed in the 1930s for Jack Warner, president of Warner Bros. film studio. The roughly 13,000-square-foot home is considered one of the premier mansions built during Hollywood’s golden era.

“The property is magnificent,” said David Parnes of the Agency, a luxury real estate brokerage in Beverly Hills, who wasn’t involved in the Warner Estate deal. “It’s the land. It’s the history. It’s the whole experience.”