Where the Richest Americans Live—From Elon Musk to Bill Gates

From Elon Musk to Bill Gates, the very top of America’s rich list is fairly predictable from year to year. But what’s even more interesting than who has the most wealth is often how they spend it, especially when it comes to their homes. 

Their properties range from a megamansion larger than the White House with a trampoline room to a Hawaiian island and beachfront spreads in South Florida purchased for record-breaking sums. Using the latest Forbes 400 list published last month, Mansion Global peeked through public records and published reports to highlight some of the properties owned by the six richest Americans. 

1. Elon Musk

Ironically, this homes-of-the-richest list starts off with a billionaire who’s publicly vowed to “own no home.” Musk, who led Forbes’s 2023 ranking as the richest person in America with an estimated wealth of $251 billion, abruptly announced on social media in 2020 that he was unloading all his properties. 

“I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,” the SpaceX and Tesla CEO wrote on Twitter—the platform now known as X, which Musk renamed after acquiring the site last year for $44 billion. 
In the year following his pledge, he sold off around $100 million worth of luxury homes between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, from a historic, French-style estate in Hillsborough to Gene Wilder’s former shingle-style ranch in Los Angeles’s Bel-Air neighborhood. Amid the selloff, Musk wrote on social media that he lived in a “$50,000” house by the SpaceX rocket-launch facility Boca Chica, Texas, that he rents from the company. Since then, plans were revealed for a futuristic glass building by Tesla’s Austin headquarters that those working on the project described as a house for Musk, the Wall Street Journal reported in July.

2. Jeff Bezos

The founder and chairman of Amazon ranked second on the rich list with a net worth of $161 billion, and unsurprisingly, he has a real estate portfolio to match his bank balance. 

This past week, the billionaire announced he would be leaving his long-time home Seattle for Miami, where he’s recently spent upward of $100 million on real estate acquisitions. In June, he paid $68 million for a waterfront home on Indian Creek, a man-made barrier island in Miami that’s been nicknamed the “Billionaire Bunker” due to its concentration of wealthy residents. Then in October, he reportedly snapped up the property next door, too, for $79 million.

Bezos, 59, also owns a 14-acre Hawaiian estate on La Perouse Bay in Maui, which he paid an estimated $78 million for in 2021, and a Beverly Hills mansion known as the Warner Estate—it was the longtime home of Jack Warner, the late former president of Warner Bros.—that he spent $165 million on in 2020.

On New York’s Fifth Avenue, he owns a handful of apartments in a historic luxury building overlooking Madison Square Park, including the penthouse, which he snapped up along with the two units below it for roughly $80 million in 2019. He’s also the 24th-largest landowner in the U.S. due to the 420,000 acres he owns in west Texas, which is used by his aerospace company, Blue Origin, according to the 2022 land report.

3. Larry Ellison

The co-founder of software company Oracle is the third-richest person in the U.S. with a wealth of $158 billion, according to Forbes, and has the distinction of being the buyer of the most expensive home ever sold in Florida. 

The 79-year-old billionaire purchased the 62,200-square-foot megamansion—set on 16 acres on a barrier island in Manalapan, just south of Palm Beach—for $173 million in June 2022 from fellow tech titan Jim Clark, founder of several Silicon Valley companies including Netscape. 

Clark and his wife, Kristy, had purchased the house in March 2021 for $94.2 million, according to records with PropertyShark, meaning Ellison paid a 45% premium, despite the fact that no major changes were made to the estate. In addition to the main house, there’s also a seven-bedroom guesthouse, two cottages on the beach and a manager’s house—all connected via a series of underground tunnels. 

Last summer, Ellison listed a North Palm Beach, Florida, estate for $145 million, roughly a year after purchasing it for $80 million. Ellison also has a collection of trophy homes around the country, such as Beechwood, a Gilded Age mansion once owned by the Astor family in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as properties throughout California, including along Carbon Beach in Malibu, around Lake Tahoe and in Silicon Valley. 

He also owns a whopping 98% of Lanai, the sixth-largest of the Hawaiian Islands with a land area of 140.5 square miles.

4. Warren Buffett 

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, ranked fourth on Forbes list with a net worth of $121 billion. 

The 93-year-old business magnate, investor and philanthropist is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including Geico, Duracell, Dairy Queen and real estate giant Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. 

Despite his magnitude of wealth, Buffett has possibly the most humble personal real estate portfolio of anyone at the top of the ranking, and continues to live in the same home in Omaha that he purchased in 1958 for $31,500, which is now worth a relatively modest—at least by billionaire standards—$1.44 million. 

In 2018, he sold his beach house in Laguna Beach, California, for roughly $7.5 million. He purchased the property in 1971 for $150,000 as a family retreat.

5. Larry Page

Google co-founder Larry Page was ranked the fifth-richest person in America by Forbes, with a net worth of $114 billion. Page most recently served as the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., and though he stepped down from day-to-day operations in 2019, he, along with his co-founder Sergey Brin, remains a member of Alphabet’s board and a controlling shareholder.

Page, 50, owns several neighboring homes in Palo Alto, California. He purchased the landmark Pedro de Lemos House—built and named for the American painter and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980—in 2005 for about $7 million, listing records show. The Spanish Colonial Revival home spans a little more than 8,000 square feet and has six bedrooms, according to public records.

The billionaire also owns two properties behind the historic home. One of them, a mansion Page bought in 2012 for $9.65 million, was destroyed in a large fire in 2021. The home was allegedly being used as a “secret office” for a handful of employees. Page owns another neighboring property, which he purchased in 2008 for $12 million, according to property records. Page built an eco-home on the site, powered by solar panels and built with materials that don’t emit harmful chemicals and paving that allows rain to seep through. The home’s dense array of solar panels is visible in Google Maps’ satellite images.   

Page was reportedly living in Fiji during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which he was able to enter through the “Blue Lane” initiative, which allows superyacht and private jet owners to enter with minimal restrictions, according to the New York Post. At the time, Page owned a 194-foot-long superyacht named Senses, which had a “private beach club” with a hot tub and sun beds, indoor and outdoor dining areas, and a helipad, according to Business Insider, which reported the 2021 sale of the vessel. 

6. Bill Gates

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is now the sixth-richest American, with a wealth of about $111 billion, according to Forbes. 

Gates, 68, owns an oceanfront home in Del Mar, California, which he and his now ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, 59, bought in 2020 for $43 million through a trust linked to Pivotal Ventures, a company founded by French Gates that’s committed to accelerating social change. The 5,800-square-foot residence has undergone a recent renovation that included completely gutting it and adding solar panels. 

The official “Gates Residence,” however, is in Medina, Washington: a home built in 1994 on more than 5 acres overlooking Lake Washington, according to property records. 

The residence has nearly 50,000 square feet of usable space and a total taxable value of about $146.75 million. Gates also owns a 341-acre island in Belize, according to reports, and roughly 242,000 acres of farmland across the U.S. In an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit in February, he said, “I have invested in these farms to make them more productive and create more jobs.”

— V.L. Hendrickson, Liz Lucking, Casey Farmer and Beckie Strum contributed reporting to this article.