you can call it “The house that the mouse built“Since Michael Eisner spent twenty-one years as CEO of Disney, but calling this property just a ‘house’ would be naming Titanic a boat. Even words like ‘complex’, ‘property’ and ‘mansion’ don’t really do justice to this property. Without being accompanied by additional words such as “sprawling”, “luxury” or “other world”.
And speaking of “eschatological” things, let’s talk about price. Michael Eisner’s sprawling/opulent complex/management/mansion has just been listed for…
225 million dollars
If Michael and his wife Jane approach this amount, he will break the record for the sale of the most expensive home in California. The record is currently $177 million and was set by Netscape/Venture Capitalist founder Marc Andreessen in October 2021 when he purchased the similarly stunning Malibu roadside property from the Eisner mansion/real estate/complex.
When I was first informed about the sale of Eisner, a few hours before you saw me Confirmation in the Wall Street JournalI looked around the internet to see if I could locate an aerial view. I quickly found the property, but I was confused.
How this 200+ million dollar real estate could be:
This is definitely a very nice multi-structured home with a great pool, great ocean views and an impressive circular drive. But what we see above does not fit the description of a 200 million dollar property.
I was even more stunned when I found out that the property records actually matched Michael Eisner’s family trust as ownership of the property at the address opposite the photo above.
After a few minutes of seriously scratching my head, the revelation reached me. Yes, what you see in the photo above is the $225 million Eisner mansion. But! As it turns out, I was focusing too narrowly on the aerial stare.
In fact, this is the Eisner mansion:
As you can understand, my first instinct was to see the compound above as four distinct mansions.
no.
Michael and his wife Jane bought their first package in the aforementioned area in the 1990s. Over the following decades, they acquired four more parcels for a total of five spread over five acres. Then they hired famed architect Robert A.M. Stern to design what you see now.
There are nine structures spanning 25,000 square feet of living space. There are 16 bedrooms and 28 bathrooms. There is an underground tunnel leading to a circular grassy knoll with a spa overlooking the ocean. There is an oceanfront cabana structure accessible by lift.
As we already mentioned, this is located on an oceanfront bluff in Malibu. This is an angle from the ocean side:
During Michael’s decades-long career supervising Disney, the company’s stock price has risen 2,000%. As a result, Eisner was at times the world’s highest paid CEO. For example, in 1993 he earned $ 203 million. That’s the same as making around $400 million in today’s dollars.
In 2002, a securities report showed that Michael owned 14 million shares of Disney. It’s unclear how many of those shares he owns today because he’s no longer CEO of the company and doesn’t own enough shares to seek disclosure. If he still has 14 million, that stake is equal to $1.6 billion.
For context, when George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, he got $2.2 billion in cash and 37 million Disney shares. When Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney, he acquired 138 million shares of Disney, making him BY FAR’s largest single shareholder. Steve’s widow Lauren Powell Jobs has since sold half that stake but still owns 74 million shares and is the company’s largest single shareholder. Laurene’s 74 million shares generate an estimated dividend of $120 million annually. Michael Eisner, if he still had 14 million shares, would make about $25 million a year in Disney earnings.
And as we always like to discuss when we’re exploring crazy real estate, let’s calculate some real estate taxes.
If someone paid $225 million for Michael Eisner’s property, the annual property tax bill would be…
$2.25 million
In order to earn $2.25 million after taxes, one would need to earn about $4.5 million in pre-tax income.
But hey. If you had enough money to buy a $225 million mansion, I hope you had about a billion extra dollars in cash sitting around the cover of annoying little bills like property taxes.
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