Cher Wants $85 Million for Her Venice-Inspired Malibu Home
The singer and actress says the Italian Renaissance-style house took nearly five years to build
The singer and actress says the Italian Renaissance-style house took nearly five years to build
The singer and actress Cher is listing her longtime home in Malibu, Calif., for $85 million.
The Italian Renaissance-style estate, built in 1999, is set on approximately 1.7 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean, said listing agent Robert Kass of Hilton & Hyland, who is marketing the property with colleague Drew Fenton. The main residence spans roughly 13,200 square feet with arched windows and doors facing the ocean. There is also a separate gatehouse, infinity pool and tennis court, Mr. Kass said.
The “Believe” singer paid $2.95 million for the property in 1989, records show. She previously listed the property for $45 million in 2009, according to Realtor.com. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.)
The house, which took nearly five years to build, was inspired by Venice, Italy, Cher said in an email. “From every room, there is an ocean view,” she added.
Cher said she entertained often in the home, hosting “intimate dinners in the family dining room” and larger “tented parties in the courtyard and pool area.”
“My Rinpoche came to give a prayer session with a large group of friends,” she said.
Located on Pacific Coast Highway, the gated property has a driveway lined with 40 Palm trees and a courtyard with a Moorish-style fountain. There are seven bedrooms, plus the gatehouse, which serves as a guesthouse. In the main residence, the primary suite has a meditation room and two closets, including one that doubles as a panic room, Mr. Kass said. The primary bathroom is designed like a hammam with Turkish wood screens.
The lower level of the house has an indoor-outdoor gym and theatre. Cher also has a climate-controlled wig room with close to 100 hairpieces, according to the 2002 book “The Cher Scrapbook.”
Mr. Kass said the style of the home is dramatic, with high-end finishes, stone and hardware. The estate is “iconic,” he said. “Everyone knows that house; it’s at the end of the bluff so no one is on the right side.”
Malibu, a mecca for celebrities and the uber-wealthy, has experienced a recent string of high-priced sales and listings. Billionaire media mogul Byron Allen just paid $100 million for an estate in Paradise Cove formerly owned by self-storage billionaire Tammy Hughes Gustavson. Former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner is asking $225 million for his Malibu compound. Last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, paid $177 million for an oceanfront home in Malibu.
Cher, known as a pop icon and Academy Award-winning singer and actor, gained popularity in the 1960s as half of the husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher. She later released many of her own albums and there was a Broadway musical about her life.
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Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual