Inside ‘Billionaires’ Bluff’: Why Paradise Cove Keeps Drawing the Superrich

Driving north in Malibu, Calif., on the famed Pacific Coast Highway, there is a spot where the road veers away from the ocean, and the views are replaced by a hillside, thick foliage and, in some places, a man-made barrier. Many drivers have no idea they are driving past some of the world’s most expensive homes, including a recently-expanded compound owned by the widow of Apple visionary Steve Jobs.

Beyond that hillside sits a roughly 1-mile stretch of beach known as Paradise Cove, known to local realtors as “Billionaires’ Bluff.” It is so exclusive that, since 2020, three of the approximately 25 homes there have sold for $100 million or more, making up a third of the deals that closed at that price point in the Los Angeles area during the same period. Two have broken the record for the most expensive home ever sold in California at the time of each sale.

They include transactions by household names such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z, as well as technology heavyweights such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen , WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum and Laurene Powell Jobs . Some buyers have gone to great lengths to piece together their blufftop Paradise Cove compounds over time.

“Rich people like to congregate and they’ve congregated here,” said local agent Leonard Rabinowitz. “It makes them feel safe and more comfortable.”

In some ways, the location, roughly 35 miles from Downtown Los Angeles, seems like an unlikely destination for the country’s wealthiest people. To the north is Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park, widely regarded as the most expensive trailer park in America. Dating to the 1950s, when the then-owners allowed commercial fishermen to park campers there, the park is a throwback to the days before Malibu was brimming with the super rich. Its roughly 250 trailers and manufactured homes have since drawn celebrities such as Stevie Nicks and Matthew McConaughey, who have helped drive prices of the trailers into the millions of dollars. A casual beachfront cafe sits at the base of the bluff.

On the other side of the trailer park, on the cusp of Paradise Cove, sits an estate long owned by Barbra Streisand. To the south is the iconic Geoffrey’s restaurant, which has been serving surf and turf from its oceanfront patio since 1983.

Local realtors say the appeal of the Cove is obvious. Rather than a beach house on the sand or a blufftop mansion with more far-reaching views, homes in Paradise Cove offer the best of both worlds. Sitting behind gates off the highway, the houses are largely shielded from public view and occupy multi-acre parcels much larger that those typically available in nearby Point Dume or in the neighbouring celebrity-filled Malibu Colony. Most of the homes are also shielded from the view of their neighbours. “If you do see them, you’re seeing the corner of a roof in the distance,” said local agent Kurt Rappaport , who has sold many of the homes on the cove.

A lot of the homes also offer direct beach access via private pathways and some include beachfront cabanas or smaller homes on the sand. One formerly owned by singer Kenny Rogers has a private funicular, a type of cable railroad, that leads from the blufftop house to the ocean.

While publicly accessible, the beach at Paradise Cove is rarely busy, since there is limited parking, though it is a draw for local surfers, local agents said. Some might recognise it from the 1970s television hit “The Rockford Files,” starring James Garner, which was filmed at the cove.

A steady drumbeat of big-ticket deals in recent years has helped cement the stretch’s reputation as the most sought-after beachfront enclave in California.

Most famously, entertainment power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z paid $190 million for a mansion designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The blufftop house, measuring about 42,000 square feet, was designed by Ando for prominent art collectors Bill and Maria Bell, who spent a dozen years constructing what Maria Bell has said is a “sculpture as much as it is a building.” The deal, which closed in May 2023, was briefly the most expensive ever in the state.

Before that, a deal by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, on the same blufftop held the record. In 2021, they paid $177 million for a 7-acre compound formerly owned by fashion mogul Serge Azria and his wife, Florence Azria. That property includes a roughly 10,000-square-foot main residence, two guesthouses, a cinema and a spa.

More recently, Powell Jobs, founder of philanthropic and investment company Emerson Collective, added a $94 million property to her private Paradise Cove compound, bringing her total aggregate spending in the cove to more than $170 million. The assemblage has involved separate transactions with four sellers spanning from 2015 to 2024.

Other major transactions include WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum’s purchase of two neighbouring compounds for a combined $187 million in 2020 and 2021, as well as movie producer Edward H. Hamm Jr’s $91 million deal to buy a home from British videogame designer Jonathan Burton and his ex-wife, Helen Musk, in 2023. In 2022, billionaire media mogul Byron Allen also paid $100 million for a Malibu estate formerly owned by self-storage billionaire Tammy Hughes Gustavson.

These wealthy newbies join a string of well-known names on the bluff. They include tennis legend John McEnroe, “The Apprentice” creator Mark Burnett, and Kari Clark, the wife of the late television host Dick Clark.

Leonardo DiCaprio is also doing construction on a home on Paradise Cove; he bought the site, which is next to the home owned by Burnett, for $23 million in 2016, according to property records and a person familiar with the deal. His property was formerly owned by director Ridley Scott.

Values in Paradise Cove have shot up so significantly thanks in large part to the lack of available inventory, Rappaport said. Since prices there are so high, the cove doesn’t typically draw speculators. Owners there are so rich they usually don’t need the money and don’t typically sell, unless they have had a significant change in circumstances, he said. One of the few available homes on the cove is an $85 million Greek-inspired estate owned by Peter O’Malley, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. O’Malley has owned the 2.5-acre property since around 2000 and is selling following the death of his wife, Annette O’Malley, last year.

When properties do come up, “there’s usually a neighbour to buy it,” Rappaport said.

Homeowners such as those on the cove don’t always start out with a plan to assemble a larger compound. Those plans shape up over time as opportunities arise, Rappaport said. The larger footprints mean increased privacy and protected views and limit the chance that homeowners will have to deal with construction on the neighbouring lot. “They think, ‘Oh, it would be nice to have the house next door,’ ” he said.

Even as the broader Los Angeles luxury market has been hobbled by interest rate increases, a drop in demand from foreign purchasers and an exodus of high-net worth individuals to lower-tax states, the Paradise Cove market has continued to post record deals.

“It reminds us that these home sales have nothing to do with the broader market they sit within,” said appraiser Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel. “It’s a very specifically designed submarket and its success doesn’t wash over onto the whole housing market.”

Miller said it isn’t uncommon in ultrahigh-end communities for transactions to happen in clusters as they have in Paradise Cove.

“There is one big transaction and then a lot of copycats around it. I think it’s FOMO,” he said, using the popular acronym for “fear of missing out.”

In the overall L.A. market, the slowdown in deals has been compounded by a new mansion transfer tax, which applies only to the city of Los Angeles. It has “killed off excess demand,” particularly from developers and property speculators who plan to flip the properties, Miller said. Previously, that represented a significant portion of the buyer pool and the market fed on itself, he said. The new tax, enacted last year, requires sellers to pay 4% on sales of homes priced between $5 million and $10 million, and 5.5% on sales of properties at $10 million or above.

While sales are up 15% year-over-year in the overall luxury Los Angeles market, eight-figure sales are rare. None have closed in the city of Los Angeles since the introduction of the tax, according to data from Stephen Shapiro, co-founder of Westside Estate Agency.

The tax has only made sellers more resolute about their pricing, local agents said.

“Our problem [in Los Angeles] has been that the buyers think that it’s a buyer’s market and the sellers have been feeling like they’ll get their price if they hold out,” said agent Jade Mills of Coldwell Banker Realty.

In Paradise Cove, buyers are under no such illusion that the market favours them.

“They are willing to step up,” Mills said.

On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.

Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.

“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”

Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.

With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.

“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.

After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.

But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.

“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.

Jamie Peva shooting an upcoming Instagram reel on a historic house on P Street in Georgetown.

A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.

“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”

Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.

“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.

A street of colorful row houses in Georgetown.

Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.

Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, shoots, edits and posts his reels.

Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.

Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.

Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.

Peva at one of his listings, a 1870s house on Prospect Street.

“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.

One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.

Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.

Peva often travels around Georgetown by bicycle.

Inside ‘Billionaires’ Bluff’: Why Paradise Cove Keeps Drawing the Superrich

Residents of this Malibu enclave include Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs and Beyoncé and Jay-Z

Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.