As Snap, Inc.’s stock price has skyrocketed over the past year, nearly all of the social media company’s top executives have spent lavishly on big new homes. The chief business officer bought a house, the chief strategy officer bought a house, and a cofounder added another house to his collection. Even the firm’s top lawyer got in on the real estate action.
Now the longtime CEO is having his turn. Last year, Evan Spiegel forked over $30.4 million for a baroque estate in Paris, France, where the 31-year-old and his wife Miranda Kerr live part-time. The couple’s main residence remains Los Angeles; the pair have bunked up in a celeb-pedigreed Brentwood estate for the past five years, but it seems that place can no longer accommodate the growing family’s needs. And so Spiegel is spending north of $100 million to buy a titanic — and currently unfinished — compound in Holmby Hills, one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in Los Angeles. With a net worth of $14 billion, he can afford it.
The complicated transaction involves two side-by-side properties across the street from the Playboy Mansion, both of them sold by English billionaire Ian Livingstone. Totaling about four acres of mostly flat land, the estate is comprised of a 1.4-acre parcel that’s completely vacant — Spiegel paid exactly $25 million for that lot back in May, records reveal. There’s also a larger 2.6-acre parcel that contains a mansion, albeit a mansion that’s currently gutted and under major construction. The amount Spiegel paid for that parcel hasn’t yet appeared in real estate documents, but corporation records show he created a shell company to purchase the place way back in February, so the entire deal — believed to top $100 million — has been in the works for the better part of a year.
Livingstone purchased the two properties in two separate transactions — one in 2014, one in 2017 — for a total outlay of $72 million. He subsequently spent another small fortune on plans and permits before ripping the entire place apart, and it’s been one giant construction zone ever since. Aerial views show the estate is nowhere near being completed.
Jonathan Nash and Stephen Resnick of Hilton & Hyland held the listing; Drew Fenton of Hilton & Hyland repped the buyers.
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Image Credit: Zillow Unclear is whether Spiegel plans to work with the existing structure or raze everything and start fresh. But the current mansion has an interesting, only-in-L.A. sort of history. An international-style affair with a “European influence,” the big house weighs in with more than 20,000 square feet of living space and was once owned by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the famed music producer.
In 2004, Babyface and his former wife Tracey Edmonds sold the mansion for $21.3 million to Frank and Jamie McCourt, the then-owners of the Dodgers baseball team. The McCourts gave the place a complete renovation and expansion — including the installation of an Olympic-length indoor swimming pool — before acrimoniously divorcing; it was Jamie McCourt who sold the property to Livingstone in 2014.
Livingstone is clearly basking in the glow of his big $100 million score, and has already paid $47.7 million to “downsize” into a smaller Holmby Hills mansion (below), this one located almost directly across the street from the place he’s selling to Spiegel. The off-market deal closed in July.
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Image Credit: Zillow As for Spiegel himself, he and Kerr continue to reside in Brentwood, in a house once owned by Harrison Ford; the pair were married at the $12 million property back in 2017. And Spiegel also still owns his L.A. “starter” home, the very first property he ever purchased. Located on a quiet, pedestrian-friendly street in Brentwood, the relatively humble (about 2,800-square-foot) bachelor pad was the tech mogul’s main residence from 2014-2016.
Spiegel and Kerr also maintain a multimillion-dollar vineyard estate in her native Australia, and Kerr has long owned a petite cottage hidden away on a private cul-de-sac in Malibu.