It’s getting tougher for ambitious parents to steer their children towards more conventional professional careers as doctors, lawyers, and accountants when so many young folks around the world are getting ridiculously rich practically overnight making silly YouTube and TikTok videos in their bedrooms and backyards.
Just ask Brian Awadis, 25-year-old veteran social media maven and YouTube gamer better known to his legions of fans as FaZe Rug. The popular esports player and entrepreneur, who co-owns the FaZe Clan esports and entertainment organization, boasts 6.2 million Instagram followers, another 2.6 million on Twitter, and almost 21 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where his high-energy videos regularly rack up a many millions of views. Indeed, a video in which he paid random strangers $100 bucks apiece to draw and paint on his brand-new Lamborghini Huracán, which start at well over $200,000 a pop, garnered more than 27 million views all by itself.
All that internet traffic allowed the digital dynamo to splash out $4.25 million, in June 2020, for an almost 8,000-square-foot mansion in the manicured, moneyed, and sedate San Diego-area community of Rancho Santa Fe. He spent a fortune customizing the estate before he realized he didn’t like living there all by himself. So, he sold the place in April 2021, for $4.5 million, and moved back in with his parents, in the unsung suburban city of Poway, Calif., about 25 miles north of San Diego.
It wasn’t too long before Rug started house hunting, and earlier this year he shelled out $4.4 million — almost half a million dollars more than the asking price! — for a family-sized home that’s tucked into a wealthy guard-gated development that winds through the rolling foothills above the Maderas Golf Club. The house also happens to be just down the street from his parents’ home. The property was listed with Ross Clark of The Dickinson Clark Team at Compass, while Rug was repped by Gilbert Gorou of Keller Williams Realty.
Rug made no secret of his move from Rancho Santa Fe back to his parent’s house and then, to his new home in Poway. Indeed, the moves were documented for his YouTube channel. The video in which in announced that he planned to sell in Rancho Santa Fe tallied up more than 2.4 views, and the video in which he tours viewers through his new Poway home has quickly racked up nearly 3.9 million views.
Tax records show the seller was a corporate concern tied to cannabis tycoon Cody Sadler, who co-founded the Platinum Vape brand of cannabis products. Sadler not only cashed in on the sale of Platinum Vape when it was sold to Red White & Bloom Brands Inc., in 2020 for up to $60 million in cash and stock, he also turned a tidy profit on the sale of this property, which he scooped up in November 2020 for just over $3.1 million.
Highlights of Rug’s new 6,700-square-foot neo-Mediterranean extravaganza include a double-height foyer with twin staircases, formal living and dining rooms, and a vast great room that encompasses a family room with fireplace, a sunny breakfast nook, and a double-island kitchen he described as “plain and simple but beautiful.”
The sellers commissioned lego artist Dante Dentoni to create a fantastical installation that’s embedded into the walls of the foyer and adjacent home office with secret hatches that, like a Fabergé egg, open to reveal elaborate hidden dioramas. Because the artwork is built into the walls, it had to be sold with the house.
The home’s seven bedrooms and six and a half bathrooms include a self-contained one-bedroom and one-bath guesthouse on the main floor, and a sprawling homeowner’s suite upstairs that’s complete with a morning bar, an arched loggia, two walk-in closets, and a massive bathroom with a preposterously long glassed-in shower.
The backyard is a 20-something-year-old’s fantasy — Rug called it a “dream backyard” — with multiple fire pits, a swimming pool and spa, and an open-air cabana complete with built-in barbecue and wet bar, pizza oven and smoker, and several drink fridges. There’s also lots of easy-maintenance ever-green faux grassing, a pretty fountain, vast terraces, a putting green with sand pit, and a sport court, which Rug says he may turn into a full-court basketball court, all with sweeping views towards the mountains.
Whatever Rug’s bright-eyed plans for his new home may be, at just 25 he certainly has more money than most middle-aged doctors, lawyers, and accountants to do whatever he wants. No wonder more and more young people would rather spend all their time playing video games than pursuing a more conventional education or career!
