The Amazon founder splurged on a trio of Manhattan apartments overlooking Madison Square Park in early 2019, paying a total of $80 million. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Bezos’ over-the-top purchase could be one of the most expensive real-estate transactions in New York City for the year. (Ultimately, however, a $240 million Manhattan penthouse beat out Bezos’ jaw-dropping purchase.) The acquisition included a three-floor, 10,000-square-foot penthouse with a grand ballroom; a three-bedroom unit below that with high-end finishes; and an adjoining four-bedroom pad with oversize windows on three of its four sides.
2020
Bezos kicked off the year with the purchase of a second residence in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC, for a considerably more modest $5 million. According to The Washingtonian, the mansion is located right across the street from his former textile museum home, leading to speculations that his purchase was primarily made for privacy reasons, as the mansion has a direct line of sight into the Amazon founder’s megamansion.
In February, he paid a record $165 million for David Geffen’s historic Beverly Hills mansion. The massive 10-acre estate includes a 13,600-square-foot Georgian-style main house, two guest houses, a nursery and three hothouses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, expansive terraces, and a nine-hole golf course. The grand motor court even has its own service garage and gas pumps. A notable feature of the main house is its antique wood flooring, imported from overseas and believed to be the very floor that Napoleon stood upon when he proposed to Empress Joséphine. Also in February, it was reported that Bezos spent $90 million on a 120-acre undeveloped plot of land that belonged to the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, though the deal ended up falling through.
In April, Bezos bought a fourth unit in the luxe Madison Square Park apartment building where he’d snapped up three homes the previous summer, dropping $16 million for a three-bedroom unit adjacent to the two lower-level units from the original purchase. While it was unclear at the time what Bezos’ plans were for combining all four units, building permits were submitted in fall 2019, so it’s likely the fourth acquisition was meant to be an addendum to the already-grand Manhattan megamansion.
