They say the rich only get richer, and almost nobody had a more profitable, pandemic-assisted blockbuster 2020 than Subrah Iyar. The Mumbai-born tech tycoon, reportedly one of the first three investors in Zoom, saw the value of his multimillion-dollar stake more than quintuple over the past year, with the video conferencing company’s market cap at one point topping an eyeball-shredding $130 billion.
Iyar, 63, has now reinvested some of those ballooned winnings into luxury real estate. Records reveal he’s tossed down a total of $14.5 million for two separate mansions on L.A.’s scenic Palos Verdes Peninsula. The two houses, one a $7.8 million Tuscan-style villa and the other a $6.7 million, slightly smaller Tuscan-style villa, are not contiguous but happen to sit on the very same blufftop street, about five houses apart from one another. Both properties are blessed with unobstructed views of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island.
While it’s not yet clear why Iyar, long based in California’s Silicon Valley, suddenly wants or needs two lavish homes in the L.A. area, it’s a logical guess that the properties may have acquired for his two adult daughters, Leena and Nikhita, both of whom appeared in Netflix’s “The Big Day” wedding docuseries. The sisters — both recently married to twin brothers — both celebrated their nuptials with million-dollar, gala-style events, and all the glitzy extravagance was photographed for Vogue India.
Iyar himself can easily afford a seven-figure wedding bill, or two, thanks to his storied career in tech. In the 1980s, he worked for Apple, before jumping to Intel in ’89. In 1996, he cofounded web conferencing firm WebEx, which was sold to Cisco in 2007 for $3.2 billion in cash. Several years later, Iyar founded Moxtra, another digital conferencing solutions provider, though he remains best-known for his involvement with Zoom, where he serves as a strategic advisor.
Photos: The Luxury Level