The country’s top tech founders have accumulated luxurious and stunning homes complete with cutting edge technology and innovate lifestyle amenities. Tech’s wealthiest serving CEO is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2007 spent a minuscule fraction of his $56.6 billion fortune on a $30 million 12,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion, complete with a sunken tennis court, gym, swimming pool and a free standing guest house.
While some have favored location, other tech founders have made innovation their home’s foundation. Google co-founder Larry Page created a 6,000-square-foot eco-compound in the leafy and historic city of Palo Alto. The eco-friendly features include solar panels, a rooftop garden, zinc cladding on the exterior walls and permeable pavements in the driveway and pathways along the property that not only reduce runoff, but also effectively filters pollutants from the water. Palo Alto is also home to Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose gorgeous century-old five-bedroom home is managed by Jarvis, Zuckerberg’s self-created artificial intelligence based personal assistant. As well as controlling the home’s lighting and heating and acting as a digital assistant, Jarvis’s facial recognition technology monitors when Zuckerberg’s daughter Max wakes up and starts her day with a Mandarin lesson. The same technology monitors the front door on the property’s deep porches and instantly informs Zuckerberg of the identity of all visitors.
Also in Northern California, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey enjoys impressive views across the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge from his stunning $10 million Seacliff condominium. Dorsey’s home is San Francisco’s most expensive two-bedroom property, making it a relatively modest dwelling compared to the seven bedrooms, ten baths and eight fireplaces of Zynga co-founder Mark Zingus’s $16 million classic San Francisco estate. Built in 1907, Zingus’ estate features historic elements as well as state-of-the-art amenities, such as an elevator to move effortlessly among the home’s four stories.
Bespoke technology also enhances the immense $124 million estate designed by Bill Gates. The complex’s name, Xanadu 2.0, is nod to Charles Foster Kane’s estate named Xanadu in Orson Well’s legendary film Citizen Kane. The complex is situated on across 66,000 square feet in Medina, Washington. Xanadu 2.0 is built into the surrounding earth to promote eco-friendly temperature regulation. The walls are adorned with $80,000 worth of computer screens which utilize $150,000 worth of computing hardware that can display almost any artwork with the finest attention to detail. Less high-tech features include a 60-foot pool that stretches both inside and out of the 3,900-square-foot pool house. Xanadu 2.0 also has a trampoline room with 20-foot-high ceilings.
Unlike Gate’s, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen doesn’t display art on computer screens at his 10,000-square-foot home and the six adjacent mansions he owns on Seattle’s Mercer Island. Instead, Allen’s art collection is worth upwards of $750 million, with works from Monet, Turner, Klimt, Cézanne and other masters. As a historian with a passion for military hardware, Allen’s estate features an extensive collection that includes a $2.5 million German Panzer tank and a Soviet MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jet. He also owns two superyachts, with the largest boasting a submarine and two helipads.
Michael Dell has sprawling estates in his real estate portfolio. The first, a 33,000-square-foot compound called ‘The Castle’ overlooking Lake Austin in Texas, as well as a 16,000-square-foot Hawaiian vacation complex known as ‘The Raptor Residence.’
Yet, the most illustrious real estate portfolio among tech moguls is almost certainly Larry Ellison. The Oracle founder’s property empire includes a $70 million replicated 16th-century Japanese palace in Woodside, California, an $86 million garden villa in Kyoto, Japan, two dozen multi-million dollar residences in Malibu, California, and an incredible $600 million private island in Hawaii.For more information on luxury luxury real estate, contact Arlene Rutenberg today!