Bums vs. Billionaires: Malibu’s Silicon Valley Takeover is Almost Complete'Seething resentment': Big Tech is colonizing Hollywood’s hideaway, trampling on what locals hold dear. And the fires only make things worse
This Ankler Feature is a 16-minute read. To hear Scott Steindorff list his favorite A-list encounters after four decades of living in Malibu is like thumbing through a scrapbook of recent Hollywood history. Like the time the 64-year-old producer (Station Eleven, Fire Chasers) ran into the actor Michael Landon, his childhood hero, at the gym shortly after moving to Malibu in the 1980s. Or those Halloweens when he took his family trick-or-treating in the Malibu Colony in the ’90s and saw Steven Spielberg hand out candy. And, of course, a parade of run-ins with leading men of various vintages — from Sean Penn to Gerard Butler to Jonah Hill to Chris Hemsworth — during walks along Little Dume, the gated beach that’s home to one of the most coveted surf breaks in the country. But over the past year, Steindorff has noticed a shift in the high-profile folks he bumps into. In June, he was surprised to see a large security detail on Little Dume — a rarity for the laid-back, celeb-friendly spot, which requires a key to gain entry — surrounding an individual who turned out to be Jeff Bezos (net worth: $242 billion). The Amazon founder and second-richest man in the world was renting Kenny G’s house — for what I’m told was around $600,000 a month — and was regularly spotted in Point Dume throughout the summer.
A few weeks later Steindorff ambled past Marc Andreessen (net worth: $1.9 billion), the iconoclastic cofounder of the venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz, who at the time was galloping toward the waves clad in a wetsuit and clutching a surfboard. Soon after it was Google cofounder Sergey Brin (net worth: $163 billion) whom he bumped into as he was heading up the stairs that lead to the beach’s gate. “I remember when I saw Sergey, I was on the phone with my daughter,” Steindorff recently told me. “She asked me how I was doing and I told her, ‘Well, I just realized I’m the biggest loser in my neighborhood.’ And there’s a lot of truth to that.”
Long a playground and outpost for Hollywood writers, actors and directors dating back to the silent film era, the famed seaside community has seen a strange phenomenon unfold over the past few years. Malibu’s population is plummeting — down more than 15 percent from 2010 to 2020 according to census figures. The diaspora in large part can be attributed to the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which burned more than 96,000 acres, destroying 670 structures in Malibu (and 1,643 in total) and prompting thousands of residents to pick up and move. Yet despite this exodus — or perhaps because of it — Malibu’s billionaire density has been soaring. As longtime residents who work in Hollywood depart, Silicon Valley bigwigs in particular are gobbling up as much prime real estate as they possibly can. And they’re not exactly being subtle about it. The tech titans are lured by the privacy, the acre-sized lots and the laid-back lifestyle of a town that’s bookended by two private airports where they can park their private jets — Camarillo Airport to the north and Santa Monica Airport to the south. Like much of coastal southern California, Malibu is accustomed to extreme affluence, but brokers and residents interviewed for this story say the kind of wealth pouring into places like Point Dume, Carbon Beach and Paradise Cove is unlike anything they’ve seen before. “There’s just an incredible amount of seething resentment,” says Peter Maguire, a documentary filmmaker and writer (his forthcoming doc Thai Stick is based on a 2013 book he coauthored). He grew up in Malibu in the ’70s and ’80s but was priced out years ago, he says. ... Subscribe to The Ankler. to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Ankler. to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
|
