Take a Stroll Down Billionaires’ Lane in the Hamptons

Ranked #55 in wealth by Forbes, billionaire Leon Black, formerly of Apollo Global Management, owns this three-house spread, along with a bayfront lot across the street. Black “retired” from Apollo in March 2021 after an investigation found he had paid $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein for tax and other financial services.

Black’s other homes include a beautiful Upper East Side townhouse bought in 2016 for $50.3 million. Later the same year he shelled out $38 million for Tom Cruise’s former Beverly Hills mansion.

Real estate investor Jason D. Carter, whose better-known wife Julia Vance Carter died in 2014, owns this rambling 1929 mansion that’s known as Oceancastle. There are 12 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms on six acres. Oceancastle is for currently sale at $75 million.

Carter also owns a condo on New York’s Central Park South, in a landmarked building next to the Plaza Hotel.

Blue-blooded Wall Street investor Chase Coleman III, a descendent of Peter Stuyvesant, purchased this house on almost five acres in 2007 for $32.5 million. In addition to the main residence, there’s a poolside guesthouse and a pint-sized cottage atop the dunes overlooking the beach.  

The 40-something-year-old founder of Tiger Global Management, whose net worth exceeds $10 billion, and his wife Stephanie Ercklentz, who comes from oodles of money — she was in the 2003 documentary “Born Rich” bragging about how much money her family had — also own several units in one of the most exclusive apartment houses on New York’s Fifth Avenue. They bought the first place — a two unit combo — in 2008 from Veronica Hearst for $36.5 million, and then in 2016 they dumped another $52 million — $4 million more than the asking price — for the full-floor unit downstairs. The couple invited a bunch of rich and famous people over for an after party to the Save Venice masquerade ball after in 2018 to “vandalize” the new apartment before it was turned over to Peter Marino for renovations and, presumably, combining with the apartment upstairs.

Manhattan real estate developer K. Thomas Elghanayan, a member of one of America’s richest families, acquired his six-acre spread in 2007 for $24 million. There are formal gardens at the front of the more than 7,800-square-foot house, and a raised boardwalk spans the grassy backyard and dunes for easy beach access.

In 2018, Elghanayan paid a then-record price, $81 million, for a 1936 house in Palm Beach. The relatively modest four-bedroom also boasts a two-bedroom guesthouse.

Dallas-based billionaire financier Gerald J. Ford, with an estimated fortune of $2.5 billion, bought this 3.5 acre spread with its 6,300-square-foot home in 1996 for $5.25 million. He also owns the nearly 3.5-acre bay-front parcel across the road, which includes a tennis court and private dock.

Ford — no relation to the Fords of the Ford Motor Company or the late U.S. president — and his interior designer wife Kelli also maintain homes in Manhattan and Dallas, as well as a 147,000-acre ranch near Roswell, N.M. and a thoroughbred farm in Kentucky.

Fashion icon Calvin Klein bought this seven-acre property in 2003 for just under $30 million and spent the next 15 years and about $45 million building an ultra-contemporary compound that he sold last year for $84 million in a widely publicized off-market deal to hedge fund manager and trophy property collector Ken Griffin.

With a net worth pegged at $16 billion, Griffin maintains a property portfolio valued at nearly a billion dollars. His holdings include but are not limited to: a $37 million mansion on Miami’s Star Island; a $58.5 million condo in Chicago; a $122 million mansion in London — it was the wartime home of Charles de Gaulle; and a 23,000-square-foot Manhattan penthouse that set him back a record setting $238 million. Additionally, down in Palm Beach he owns somewhere around $350 million worth of real estate, including an 18,000-square-foot oceanfront mansion he scooped up in 2019 for $99.1 million.

When David Koch, at one time the 5th richest man America, died in 2019, he made his surviving socialite wife, Julia Koch, one of the richest women on the planet with a fortune currently estimated at almost $45 billion. He also left behind a handful of lavish homes that, in addition to this Hamptons estate, include a 13-bedroom Palm Beach villa, an 18-room duplex at New York City’s illustrious 740 Park Avenue and an eight-bedroom townhouse in Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was purchased in a 2018 all-cash deal valued at $40.25 million.

Tax records aren’t clear exactly when Koch bought his four-acre Meadow Lane estate but they do show the main residence rambles across almost 12,000 square feet with seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and six fireplaces. The landscaped grounds include a swimming pool with cabana, a tennis court and a putting green. This estate, or at least the road in front of it, was the scene for Occupy protests in 2012.

Ranked as the 102nd wealthiest person in the United States, according to Forbes, Henry Kravis of Wall Street’s KKR, has owned this four-acre property for at least 20 years.

Kravis also owns a 26-room triplex penthouse on New York’s Park Avenue that was purchased in 1994 for $15 million from Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, twin sister to the late Shah of Iran, and a 5.6-acre bay-front estate in Palm Beach bought in 2012 for $9.2 million. Last year he sold a 4,600-acre ranch in Colorado for $44.79 million to Michael Bloomberg.

Sitting on a massive 7.5-acre oceanfront lot and featured in the Showtime series “Billions,” the Meadow Lane home of businessman Michael Loeb measures in at a monstrous 16,000 square feet. Loeb, who also maintains a historic townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, acquired the property in 2013 for an undisclosed amount.

Howard Milstein, chairman, president and CEO of Emigrant Bank, the country’s largest privately owned, family-run bank, owns one of the more modern homes along Meadow Lane. Set on 2.1 acres with a tennis court and a beach-side infinity-edge swimming pool, tax records show the just over 10,000-square-foot home contains eight bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms.

Milstein also owns an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue and a house in Westchester County, for which he paid $3.35 million in 1996.

Edward A. Mule, co-founder and CEO of the Silver Point Capital hedge fund, bought this roughly, 8000-square-foot contemporay in 2001 for $3.8 million, per tax records.

Mule’s primary home has long been in Greenwich, Conn., where he owns an almost 5.5-acre estate purchased in 2009 for $6.8 million, and about two years ago he splashed out close to $16 million for a beachfront home in Palm Beach.

The boxy, contemporary home of hedge fund fat cat Daniel Nir, CEO of Gracie Capital, and philanthropist Jill Braufman was designed by architect Alexander Gorlin. The property was purchased in 1998 for $3.9 million.

Along with three master bedrooms, there are three more guest bedrooms, staff quarters, an ocean-facing swimming pool, and a roof terrace. The house was featured several years ago in Architectural Digest.

Nir and Braufman previously owned a full-floor co-op on New York’s Fifth Avenue that they sold in 2016 for $52 million to Chase Cole III, another billionaire who owns a home on Meadow Lane. They also own a 5,200-square-foot penthouse atop the Four Seasons Surfside hotel and condo complex in Surfside, Fla., just north of Miami Beach, that they scooped up in late 2017 for $12 million, and a house in Encino that was briefly on the market earlier this year asking $7.3 million.

Daniel Och, billionaire founder of Och-Ziff Capital Management, and ranked #260 on the Forbes 400 list in 2020 with a net worth of about $3.6 billion, purchased this four-acre property in 2006 for $26.5 million from furniture tycoon Robert Villency. In addition to the 7,100-square-foot residence, the estate offers a swimming pool and guesthouse, a tennis court and separate sport court.

Och, who makes his primary home in South Florida, made the property gossip columns in 2019 when he dropped $95 million for a 9,800-square-foot penthouse pied-a-terre, plus a second unit on a lower floor, at 220 Central Park South where, according to reports, he stays when visiting New York.

A principal of RFR Holding LLC with a museum-quality contemporary art collection, Manhattan-based real estate tycoon Aby Rosen has owned this 3.4-acre oceanfront estate since 2001 when it was acquired for $6.8 million. Rosen and his wife, psychiatrist and socialite Samantha Boardman, also own a bay-side residence across the street, a fairly modest shingled affair with a swimming pool and private dock, that was purchased in 2010 for a tad more than $5.6 million.

Rosen’s residential real estate holdings also include the A. Conger Goodyear House in Old Westbury, N.Y., on Long Island, which he bought in 2011 for $3.4 million. Designed by modernist architect Edward Durrell Stone and built in 1938, the 6,000-square-foot home sits on about 5.5 acres. Rosen keeps many of the most important works from his collection there, including Damien Hirst’s 33-foot tall Virgin Mother sculpture.

He also has a condo in New York’s Soho neighborhood that was acquired for $7.6 million in 2018, around the time he sold a seven-floor townhouse on the Upper East Side for $18.75 million, and, reportedly, a $36 million home on the elite Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy.

Colombian-American financier and brewery heir Alejandro Santo Domingo has a net worth valued at around $3.2 billion. Once owned by private equity billionaire Marc Rowan, Santo-Domingo paid $28.5 million for this 9,000-square-foot house in 2012, several years before he married Lady Charlotte Anne Wellesley, whose father is Britain’s 9th Duke of Wellington and whose mother is Princess Antonia of Prussia, great-granddaughter of late German Emperor Wilhelm II.

Earlier this year, according to tax records, Santo Domingo sold a seventh floor apartment in a swank Park Avenue apartment house for $4.2 million after it had been on and off the market for three years, initially with a price of $6.5 million.

Hotelier and nightclub entrepreneur Ian Schrager has owned this 3.7 acre property since the 1980s. The all but symmetrical residence, which measures about 7,100 square feet, is surrounded by a swimming pool and tennis court.

Schrager is most known for Studio 54, the most famous disco of all time and the place to see and be seen in the late 1970s, which he founded with Steve Rubell. In June 1979, Rubell and Schrager were charged with tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy for skimming nearly $2.5 million in unreported income from the club’s receipts, in a system Rubell called “cash-in, cash-out and skim.” Later, Schrager became a high-end boutique hotelier, practically inventing the niche with such properties as the Delano in Miami and the Mondrian in West Hollywood.

Other properties of Schrager’s include an 8,700-square-foot penthouse in lower Manhattan and a 3,800-square-foot condo in one of the three Richard Meier-designed green-glass towers that lord over the West Side Highway in the West Village. 

The head of Petra REIT, Andrew Stone, owns this three-acre property with a ten-bedroom home that spans nearly 11,000 square feet. Tax records show it was purchased in early 1998 for $5.333 million; Stone and wife Dana also own the bayside property across the street, which they also bought in 1998 for $2.667 million. The bayside property has two guest houses, formal gardens and a private dock.

While working at investment bank Credit Suisse, he financed the real estate development projects of Donald Trump, Harry Macklowe, Ian Schrager, and Steven Witkoff. He and his family live in a Park Avenue building sometimes called “the world’s richest building.” 

Chairman and CEO of iStar Financial, Jay Sugarman, also the managing owner of Keystone Sports and the Philadelphia Union MLS soccer team, and interior designer Kelly Behun live in this stunning ultra-minimalist house. It’s enormous with 22,000 square feet, and set on 4.7 acres of land. The property was purchased in 2002 for $13 million.

Sugarman and Behuns’ Manhattan residence is a 4,600-square-foot penthouse in a Midtown high-rise they picked up in 1998 for $20 million.

With five family members worth a combined $6 billion, it seems safe to call James Tisch a billionaire. The CEO of Loews Corporation purchased this beautiful house sitting on close to two beachfront acres in 2014 for $41 million. The house was featured in the film “Something’s Gotta Give”.

Tisch also maintains a huge urban residence in the same apartment house on New York’s Fifth Avenue where Jackie Kennedy Onassis lived for decades and until her death. Tisch bought the 12-room spread in 2016 for $32 million. Wife Merryl H. Tisch is the former Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents; they also own a home on Long Island Sound, in Rye, New York.

Now a finance professor, Mark Zurack began the equity derivatives research group at Goldman Sachs during an 18-year career there. This property, acquired in 2000 for $10 million from contemporary art gallerist Gloria Naftali, is just under three acres with a seven-gabled shingled cottage, swimming pool and tennis court.

He and wife Kathy Ferguson previously owned a place on Central Park West that was sold in 2018 for $3 million.

Hedge fund manager Thomas Sandell purchased this 9.75-acre property in 2012 for more than $37 million, and has spent another $19 million building the house, which is not completed, and locals complain looks like a shopping mall. Designed with ten bedrooms and ten full and three half bathrooms in close to 18,000 square feet, the monstrous mansion is on the market at $85 million. 

Promo materials explain that “current owner does not wish to finish the project. Currently there is roughly $13+ million in usable material equity behind the facade…” Why doesn’t he want to finish the project? Possibly because he just paid a whopping $105 million to settle claims that he evaded New York city and state taxes on more than $450 million in income.

Sandell mostly lives in London, in palatial Grosvenor Gardens.