Palm Beach Billionaires Battle for Oceanfront Land

Think of it as billionaire Pac-Man, with a few of the world’s ultrarich gobbling up everything in their paths. In Palm Beach, Fla., power players are vying to outspend and outbuild one another in a real-life video game of one-upmanship.

“This is not slowing down any time soon,” said Elizabeth DeWoody, a local real estate agent with Compass.

Lately, a series of unusual deals have dominated the local chatter. It started with the sale of two oceanfront parcels at 1063 and 1071 North Ocean Boulevard, on the north end of Palm Beach, to an unknown buyer.

The side-by-side lots — a combined 2.3 acres, with 360 feet of oceanfront access — lay empty for years, with little between them and the Atlantic but a cyclone fence and a poetic stand of transplanted palms.

Until recently, they belonged to the billionaire cosmetics heir William P. Lauder. He bought the first lot in 2020 for more than $25 million, public records show. The next year, he acquired an adjacent property in a private transaction. At the time of those deals, grand houses stood on the two pieces of land. Mr. Lauder demolished both.

Why would someone acquire a pair of oceanfront mansions only to tear them down and let the land lie fallow?

“Buyers want what they want and can get what they want,” Ms. DeWoody said. “And sometimes what people want might change.”

Two years ago, Mr. Lauder listed the two properties for $178 million. In February, they were sold off market for an undisclosed sum. The buyer was not named in public records.

While many in Palm Beach are curious about the identity of their deep-pocketed new neighbor, Ryan Serhant, the real estate agent who represented the buyer in the deal, declined to say who his client was, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Mr. Lauder did not reply to requests for comment.

The first of these, at 1066 North Ocean Boulevard, was a Mediterranean-style villa owned by the lawyer Thomas E. Harvey and his wife, the former Hearst executive Cathleen P. Black. It sold for a reported $18 million to Creekshore L.L.C., a Delaware-based limited liability company registered to Greyson Blue, a lawyer in Seattle who has worked closely with the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

The sale of the second property, a 5,800-square-foot house on a half-acre lot at 1072 North Ocean Boulevard, quickly followed. It went for $30 million to Mango Leaf L.L.C., another Delaware limited liability company with ties to Mr. Blue.

Once again, Mr. Serhant, who appeared in nine seasons of the Bravo series “Million Dollar Listing New York,” was the agent on the buyer’s side of the deals; once again, he declined to shed light on his mystery client (or clients). Mr. Gates was not the buyer of the two inland properties, according to a spokesman. Mr. Blue did not respond to requests for comment.

Residents of the small island, along with local brokers and journalists at South Florida real estate trade publications and The Wall Street Journal, have raised the possibility that one of Mr. Gates’s former Microsoft associates may have been behind the spate of acquisitions, naming the billionaires Steve Ballmer and Charles Simonyi as likely possibilities. Neither Mr. Ballmer nor Mr. Simonyi responded to requests for comment for this article.

While much remains obscure, what is clear is that, while global markets remain uneasy, the market in Palm Beach real estate continues to be, as the broker Ms. DeWoody noted, “bulletproof.”

Surely, the most famous part-time resident is President Trump. Yet he is far from the wealthiest. Bloomberg has pegged the net worth of the Palm Beach homeowner Julia Flesher Koch and her family, for instance, at more than $80 billion. Other multibillionaires in that economic stratum and the same neighborhood include the brokerage magnate Thomas Peterffy and the Blackstone Group chief executive Stephen A. Schwarzman.

Originally envisioned as a haven for moneyed Northerners, Palm Beach benefits from the geographic advantages that inspired its original developer, the Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, to characterize it as a “veritable paradise.” And its physical isolation makes it ideally suited to an increasingly insulated elite. Accessible only by way of three drawbridges, the town has its own Police Department, Fire Department and, since the 2016 election, Secret Service security zone.

Pointing to a building boom in nearby West Palm Beach, Todd Peter, a real estate agent at Sotheby’s, noted that, for those at the apex of the wealth pyramid, Palm Beach island is, in some sense, an inevitable destination.

“There’s only so much world-class oceanfront to go around,” Mr. Peter said.

27 Coveted Acres

No one seems more hellbent on gobbling up attractive Palm Beach properties than the hedge fund titan, Republican donor and philanthropist Ken Griffin.

More than a decade ago, Mr. Griffin began acquiring mega-mansions along a stretch of South County Road known even then as Billionaires’ Row. Not long after each deal closed, Mr. Griffin bulldozed each one.

By the best current estimates, Mr. Griffin, the 56-year-old founder and majority owner of the Citadel hedge fund, now owns in excess of 27 contiguous acres — beating a local record formerly held by Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, which was for years the largest residential compound on Palm Beach.

Plans approved by Palm Beach’s architectural commission in 2022 show that Mr. Griffin intended to build a private home on roughly eight of those South County Road acres. The designer is the Seattle architectural firm Olson Kundig, whose high-profile clients have included Jeff Bezos, LeBron James and Mr. Gates. At 50,000 square feet, the residence will be only slightly less roomy than the White House. The plans also include a guesthouse and a swimming pool.

“Ken is building a house for his mother in Palm Beach that will be completed next year,” Zia Ahmed, a spokesman for Mr. Griffin, said. In the future, he added, Mr. Griffin, “will build another home on the property for him and his family.”

Currently ranked the 31st richest person in the world by Forbes, Mr. Griffin has a penchant for trophies, reportedly once paying a combined $500 million to acquire a Jackson Pollock and a Willem de Kooning from the collection of the billionaire entertainment mogul David Geffen. His most notable acquisitions may be the properties he collects like trading cards.

In 2019, he embarked on what amounted to a spree, spending $238 million for a 24,000-square-foot condominium quadruplex atop 220 Central Park South in Manhattan. That same year, he paid $122 million for a 16,000-square-foot house near Buckingham Palace in London. For good measure, he picked up a co-op at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan for a cool $45 million; the seller, as it happens, was Ms. Koch.

The binge continued with the $84.4 million purchase of Calvin Klein’s former estate in Southampton, N.Y., which Mr. Griffin added to a portfolio that also included homes in Hawaii; St. Tropez; Coconut Grove, Fla.; and Star Island, a gated community in Miami, his main residence.

Still, it is here in Palm Beach that the buying habits of this reticent billionaire — who seldom gives interviews and declined, through his spokesman, to comment for this article — seem at their most conspicuous and, perhaps, strategic.

In Palm Beach these days, it is no longer enough to own a landmark house by a noted architect like Addison Mizner, Maurice Fatio or Marion Sims Wyeth. Nor is it meaningful to test the latitudes of local preservation boards with mega-structures like one resembling an airport terminal and owned by John Phelan, the investor and Trump donor sworn in as secretary of the Navy in March.

Rather, the status flex for today’s billionaire class is snapping up mansions, tearing them down and fitting the accumulated properties together like pieces of a colossal jigsaw puzzle.

“Look at the wealth that’s been created in private equity,” he added. “These are people that assemble companies, that have a mergers-and-acquisitions mind-set.”

Above all, the new class of Palm Beach buyer, Mr. Serhant suggested, is chasing rarity. “If you have 125 feet of oceanfront, your house is only as beautiful as the next new beautiful house,” he said. Double that, and “you begin to control the views, the noise levels, the privacy, the neighborhood.”

Given the scarcity of properties with oceanfront access, what a buyer like Mr. Griffin has done is create his own billionaire biosphere.

“Palm Beach island is 100 percent built out,” said the designer Steven Stolman, a former longtime Palm Beach resident. “There’s no place to go — and so the only way to get a new house is to tear something down.”

Thus the demolition derby that accompanied buying sprees by the likes of Mr. Lauder and Mr. Griffin — in Mr. Griffin’s case, one that entailed the razing not just of fixer-uppers but of other titans’ trophies.

Case in point: the mansion at 60 Blossom Way.

The house was formerly owned by the billionaire businessman George Lindemann, who hired the exacting French architect Thierry Despont to build the ultimate Palm Beach residence. It was put on the market soon after Mr. Lindemann’s death in 2018, and Mr. Griffin bought it for $99.13 million. Then he demolished it. Before that tear down, companies controlled by Mr. Griffin had acquired five other Blossom Way properties.

“Essentially, he bought the whole Blossom estate,” Ms. Stolman noted.

La Follia

In 2019, Mr. Griffin made another attention-grabbing deal in Palm Beach, paying $105 million for La Follia, an Italianate limestone villa built by the investment banking heiress and Broadway producer Terry Allen Kramer on a 4.5-acre plot stretching from the Atlantic to Lake Worth Lagoon.

The house — site of storied Thanksgiving luncheons given by Ms. Kramer and a sometime hideaway for her friend Melania Trump — features 13 bedrooms, a home theater and a fitness center spread across its 37,516 square feet of livable space.

Though the revelers were given access to the loggias and gardens, La Follia’s private quarters and its vast entertaining rooms were off limits to all but the catering staff. Asked by this reporter to describe the interiors of the warehouse-size home, a server offered one word: “Vacant.”

In the months since then, bulldozers and backhoes have been observed entering properties adjacent to La Follia through a gate guarded by off-duty officers from the Palm Beach Police Department.

The gate lies a short distance from La Follia’s entrance and the stone elephants standing sentinel at its approach. At this writing, the white stone house stands gleaming on its rise overlooking the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway. But its fate is uncertain.

“Given what we know,” Mr. Stolman said, “it’s only a matter of time before they bring in the wrecking ball.”