Donald Trump's Palm Beach becomes battleground for titans richer than US President

US President Donald Trump's Palm Beach has become a playground for the world's ultrarich. In Palm Beach, Florida, power players are vying to outspend and outbuild one another in a real-life video game of one-upmanship. Lately, a series of unusual deals have dominated the local chatter. It started with the sale of two oceanfront parcels at 1063 and 1071 North Ocean Boulevard, on the north end of Palm Beach, to an unknown buyer.

The side-by-side lots -- a combined 2.3 acres, with 360 feet of oceanfront access -- lay empty for years, with little between them and the Atlantic but a cyclone fence and a poetic stand of transplanted palms. Until recently, they belonged to the billionaire cosmetics heir William P. Lauder. He bought the first lot in 2020 for more than $25 million, public records show. The next year, he acquired an adjacent property in a private transaction. At the time of those deals, grand houses stood on the two pieces of land. Lauder demolished both, as per NYT News Service report.

Why would someone acquire a pair of oceanfront mansions only to tear them down and let the land lie fallow?


"This is not slowing down any time soon," said Elizabeth DeWoody, a local real estate agent with Compass. "Buyers want what they want and can get what they want," DeWoody said. "And sometimes what people want might change," DeWoody said.

Two years ago, Lauder listed the two properties for $178 million. In February, they were sold off market for an undisclosed sum. The buyer was not named in public records.

Real Estate Hub Palm Beach

While many in Palm Beach are curious about the identity of their deep-pocketed new neighbor, Ryan Serhant, the real estate agent who represented the buyer in the deal, declined to say who his client was, citing a nondisclosure agreement, NYT News Service reported.

The real estate mystery deepened in June, when two more estates on North Ocean Boulevard -- directly inland from the lots previously owned by Lauder -- were sold to an unknown buyer, perhaps the same person.

The first of these, at 1066 North Ocean Boulevard, was a Mediterranean-style villa owned by the lawyer Thomas E. Harvey and his wife, the former Hearst executive Cathleen P. Black. It sold for a reported $18 million to Creekshore LLC, a Delaware-based limited liability company registered to Greyson Blue, a lawyer in Seattle who has worked closely with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

The sale of the second property, a 5,800-square-foot house on a half-acre lot at 1072 North Ocean Boulevard, quickly followed. It went for $30 million to Mango Leaf LLC, another Delaware limited liability company with ties to Blue.

Once again, Serhant, who appeared in nine seasons of the Bravo series "Million Dollar Listing New York," was the agent on the buyer's side of the deals; once again, he declined to shed light on his mystery client (or clients). Gates was not the buyer of the two inland properties, according to a spokesperson. Blue did not respond to requests for comment.

Donald Trump is not wealthiest in Palm Beach

Residents of the small island, along with local brokers and journalists at South Florida real estate trade publications and The Wall Street Journal, have raised the possibility that one of Gates' former Microsoft associates may have been behind the spate of acquisitions, naming the billionaires Steve Ballmer and Charles Simonyi as likely possibilities. Neither Ballmer nor Simonyi responded to requests for comment for this article.

While much remains obscure, what is clear is that, while global markets remain uneasy, the market in Palm Beach real estate continues to be, as the broker DeWoody noted, "bulletproof."

Surely, the most famous part-time resident is President Donald Trump. Yet he is far from the wealthiest. Bloomberg has pegged the net worth of the Palm Beach homeowner Julia Flesher Koch and her family, for instance, at more than $80 billion. Other multibillionaires in that economic stratum and the same neighborhood include the brokerage magnate Thomas Peterffy and the Blackstone Group chief executive Stephen A. Schwarzman.

Originally envisioned as a haven for moneyed Northerners, Palm Beach benefits from the geographic advantages that inspired its original developer, the Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, to characterize it as a "veritable paradise." And its physical isolation makes it ideally suited to an increasingly insulated elite. Accessible only by way of three drawbridges, the town has its own Police Department, Fire Department and, since the 2016 election, Secret Service security zone.

FAQs

Q1. Who is President of USA?
A1. President of USA is Donald Trump.

Q2. Where does Donald Trump reside?
A2. US President Donald Trump has a house in Palm beach.