The Microsoft cofounder built his dream home overlooking Lake Washington in Seattle’s Medina area. Gates’s biographers nicknamed the 66,000-square-foot house Xanadu 2.0 after the estate in Citizen Kane. The massive residence was built by architects James Cutler and Peter Bohlin and boasts a trampoline room and a 60-foot swimming pool. Gates described the design process in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead. “My house is made of wood, glass, concrete, and stone,” he wrote. “It’s built into a hillside and most of the glass faces west over Lake Washington to Seattle to take advantage of the sunset and Olympic mountain views.” Naturally, the tech mogul also made sure his new home was cutting-edge. “My house is also made of silicon and software,” Gates wrote. “The installation of silicon microprocessors and memory chips, and the software that makes them useful, will let the house approximate some of the features the information highway will, in a few years, bring to millions of houses.”
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Gates’s real estate portfolio was divided during his divorce from his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates. Together, their holdings included a $43 million home in Del Mar, California, an $18 million horse ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, California, a $12.5 million home in Indian Wells, California, and a property in Big Sky, Montana. Gates let go of another Medina property in April of 2024, putting his four-bedroom, three-bath midcentury-modern house on the market for just under $5 million. In addition to his multiple residences, Gates also owns 275,000 acres across the US, making him the 41st biggest landowner in the United States, according to the Land Report.
Mark Zuckerberg
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has built an impressive portfolio of real estate in California, beginning with a 5,617-square-foot home that he purchased in 2011 for a reported $7 million. The five-bedroom, five-bathroom home was built in 1903 and boasts a saltwater pool, a custom AI assistant, and a backyard pavilion. In 2012, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, began buying four neighboring homes. They later renovated two of them, creating a 1.83-acre compound. The family also owns the Brushwood Estate and the Carousel Estate, two adjoining properties in Lake Tahoe, California.
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Like Larry Ellison, Zuckerberg has spent millions on real estate in Hawaii. He began buying land on the island of Kauai in 2014 when he paid around $116 million for 707 acres. He and Chan then bought 89 acres for $45 million in 2017 and spent $53 million on 600 acres in 2021. A recent Wired investigation revealed details of his $270 million Koolau Ranch compound, which features over a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms, a complex of treehouses, and a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker.
Steve Ballmer
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