Bill Gross, the Newport Beach financial manager who co-founded Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) and is worth a billion and change, has reportedly bought a Beverly Hills estate Jennifer Aniston bought in 2006 for $13.5 million, gutted and rebuilt to the fawns of Architectural Digest and put on the market for $42 million a couple months ago.
Though Rachel only got a reported $37 million for the digs, you gotta wonder who in this transaction is the dizzy blonde and who is the world-class investor?
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Actually, to read Mark Gongloff's Wall Street Journal blog post on the sale, Gross had already earned a reputation as a ditz for “his early/wrong call on Treasurys or just plain bad call on Lehman Brothers.” But don't cry for Bill, Argentina. He's got more homes than I do butt moguls.
Besides Aniston's 1970 Hal Levitt on just under one acre in the Trousdale
Estates that comes with five bedrooms, seven and a half bathrooms, a gym, a
pool, outdoor living room and kitchen and a staff room, Gross and his wife own:
- An ocean front house in a gated enclave in Laguna Beach they've owned since at least 1989;
- A cliff-side house in Corona del Mar with panoramic ocean vistas purchased for $8.1 million in August 2006;
- An “ordinary” tract house in an inland gated development in San Clemente purchased in late 2006 for $1,040,000;
- A house near the Laguna Beach house bought in December 2008 for $4.5 million;
- An 11,316-square-foot mansion that backs up to a golf course in Indian Wells in the Palm Desert area;
- A 7,091-square-foot house on 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach that backs up to one of the famous golf fairways in the world;
- Condos in Cupertino and Park City, Utah.
Gross is also reported to have purchased an 11,000-plus-square-foot mansion in Newport Beach's Harbor Island enclave for $23 million in July 2009 before demolishing the nine-bedroom/12-bathroom pad house and recently putting the bare parcel back on the market for $26.5 million.
In other, slightly less heady real estate news (courtesy of the Orange County Register), Chris Cox, the disgraceful Newport Beach-based congressman-turned-disgraced chairman of Bush II's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), just bought a gated, ocean-view house in Laguna Niguel's exclusive Bear Brand Ranch for $5.35 million.
Cox, who cleaned out his SEC office when Barack Obama moved into
the White House, is now a partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP, which was
founded in Boston but has an office in Costa Mesa. Besides being a
member of the firm's corporate, mergers & acquisitions and
securities group, he's a principal of Bingham Consulting Group that
focuses on “strategic issues” involving federal and state governments,
homeland security and multi-state litigation.
Before the new gigs, Cox shepherded legislation through Congress that led to the nation's financial meltdown before becoming the SEC watchdog when the Bernie Madoff scandal broke.
He'll spend his days marveling at his government service in an 11,000-square foot house that sits on nearly an acre atop a hill at the end of a long, private driveway. Reports the Reg:
The home has 7 bedrooms, 8.5 baths, a “huge'' lawn, swimming pool, spa and an outdoor kitchen, with panoramic views of the coastline and valley, according to the listing. There also are guest/maid quarters, a wine cellar, and a master bedroom retreat with a fireplace.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.