Malibu's New Power Buyers: Tech Founders, Politicians, and Where They're Quietly Buying Malibu Real Estate

On a leafy street in Point Dume, a black SUV idles outside a four-bedroom house that until December belonged to a producer most people had never heard of. The new owner is the former Vice President of the United States. About a mile away, a Google co-founder just dropped roughly fifty million dollars on his second oceanfront home on the same street as his first. Five minutes down the PCH, near Paradise Cove, the widow of Steve Jobs has now stitched together four adjacent properties into a private compound that has cost her more than one hundred and seventy million dollars across a decade.

This is what is happening in Malibu in 2026.

The buyers used to be Hollywood. Now they are Silicon Valley, Washington, and a small set of media titans who, just a few years ago, no one would have called Malibu locals. They are not loud about it. They are not shopping the open market. And they are not buying in just any neighborhood, there is a map, and three coastal enclaves where most affluent Malibu buyers are settling now adays.

The Politicians

Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff — Point Dume, $8.15M

The Harris/Emhoff purchase is the buy that put Malibu back into national political conversation. The former Vice President and her husband closed in late December 2025 on a 4,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, six-bath home in Point Dume. The sale price was $8.15 million, or roughly $2,038 per square foot.

The home itself is, by Malibu standards, not large. It was built in 1979, sits on roughly three-quarters of an acre, and includes a heated pool, in-ground spa, fire pit, and gated entry. Interior features include beamed ceilings, skylights, and a wet bar, what NY Post described as "the trappings of a high-dollar coastal escape" rather than a hyper-modern trophy property. The Harrises upgraded from a 3,500-square-foot Brentwood home that Doug Emhoff has owned since 2012, which they still hold.

What makes the move politically interesting is the geography. Point Dume is, in the words of one of Harris' new neighbors quoted in Politico, "where people usually come to try to downshift". Past and present Point Dume residents include Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Anthony Kiedis, Julia Roberts, and, as of last year, Sergey Brin once again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lived here at one point before relocating. Many of Harris' new neighbors, Politico reported, read the move as "a sign of retreat" rather than a 2028 launchpad.

That reading may or may not turn out to be right, Harris is "thinking about" a 2028 run, but the real estate decision is what it is. She bought into the most private, surveillance-shielded, celebrity-dense stretch of the Malibu coast.

King Abdullah II of Jordan — Point Dume, ~$70M

It is not the first head of state to land in Point Dume. The 2021 Pandora Papers leak revealed that Jordan's King Abdullah II had quietly accumulated $70 million in Malibu properties on the Point Dume peninsula, including a seven-bedroom oceanfront home, through a network of shell companies. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported total foreign luxury spending of more than $100 million across his portfolio, with Malibu as the largest single concentration.

The Tech Founders

Marc Andreessen — Paradise Cove, $255M+ across three deals

If Harris is the political headline, Marc Andreessen is the financial one. The co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz bought a nearly seven-acre Paradise Cove compound for $177 million in October 2021. It was, at the time, the most expensive single-family home sale in California history, surpassing Jeff Bezos' 2020 Beverly Hills purchase by $12 million.

The property is unusual. It includes 13 separate structures: a 10,000-square-foot main house, two guesthouses, two barns converted into a car collector's garage, a detached screening room, a poolside cabana, to name a few. It was designed by architect Scott Mitchell after Andreessen bought it off-market from apparel mogul Serge Azria, who had previously paid $41 million for it in 2013. Westside Estate Agency's Kurt Rappaport handled both sides of the transaction.

Five months later, in March 2022, Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen added $44.5 million to buy two adjacent Escondido Beach parcels just below the bluff-top compound, with 130 feet of ocean frontage. Shortly after, they spent another $34 million more for a third adjacent property, a 3,600-square-foot 1973-built house with 57 feet of beach frontage, in an off-market deal. By the named transactions alone, Andreessen's reported Malibu spend is approximately $255 million ($177M + $78.5M).

His primary residence is reportedly still a Tuscan-style estate in the Silicon Valley town of Atherton. Malibu is, for now, the home away from home.

Sergey Brin — Point Dume, $85M across two deals

Google's co-founder is the most active 2025–2026 tech buyer in Malibu. Brin's first Malibu purchase was a $35 million oceanfront mid-century home in June 2023. Then, in a deal that closed in July 2025 and was first reported in January 2026 by NY Post's Gimme Shelter, he picked up a second home„ÄÅ for roughly $50 million, just a few doors down on the same Point Dume street.

The second property is a Mediterranean-style villa originally built in the 1980s, refurbished into a contemporary farmhouse: 8,000 square feet on one acre, with five bedrooms and six baths. It comes with private stairs to Point Dume Beach and a key to Little Dume. The seller had asked $65 million originally in 2024 before reducing to $58 million in December.

Brin's two homes cannot be combined because a third property sits between them, sources told NY Post he will likely use the smaller as a guest house and move into the larger one. The buying spree comes even as he moved 15 of his investment LLCs out of California ahead of a proposed state billionaire tax, an interesting signal about what he believes Malibu specifically is worth holding.

Laurene Powell Jobs — Paradise Cove, $170M+ compound

The widow of Steve Jobs has been quietly assembling what is now one of the largest single-owner residential compounds in California. According to the Los Angeles Times, her June 2024 purchase of a $94 million, four-acre Paradise Cove parcel was the fourth in a decade-long, side-by-side acquisition strategy that has totaled more than $170 million in four transactions completed between 2015 and 2024.

Each parcel is adjacent to the last. The most recent included a 1950s L-shaped four-bedroom, four-bath home that will likely be razed. She had earlier spent part of $44 million in 2015 to demolish a 13,000-square-foot house on a different parcel and paid $17.5 million in 2021 for a five-bedroom cottage on yet another.

Powell Jobs runs the Steve Jobs Trust and founded the Emerson Collective. Her estimated net worth is $11.2 billion per Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, making the cumulative Malibu spend roughly 2% of her wealth, a meaningful concentration even by ultra-high-net-worth standards.

Jan Koum — Paradise Cove, ~$200M

The WhatsApp co-founder has executed a similar adjacent-parcel strategy. Two next-door Paradise Cove homes, totaling roughly $200 million in combined purchases, including one with a working funicular down to the beach. The second property was $87 million paid in February 2021.

Jeff Bezos — Point Dume, $600,000/month rental

Bezos has not yet bought in Malibu, but he has rented at scale. Starting March 2023, he and Lauren Sánchez leased Kenny G's 2.5-acre Point Dume compound for $600,000/month, while his $165 million Beverly Hills home was undergoing renovations. The Kenny G compound includes access to the exclusive Little Dume Beach, the same key that comes with Sergey Brin's second home. Bezos was regularly spotted in Point Dume throughout the summer of 2024, per The Ankler.

Bezos rented, in other words, into the same one-square-mile micro-market that Brin and Harris would later buy into.

The Entertainment Moguls

Byron Allen — Paradise Cove, $100M

Allen Media Group founder and Weather Channel owner Byron Allen purchased a $100 million Paradise Cove estate in 2022. At the time, Black Enterprise reported it was the highest single-residence purchase by an African American on record. The deal was first surfaced by Realtor.com, and Robb Report later estimated Allen's total real estate portfolio at $200 million-plus, with the Paradise Cove compound as its anchor.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z — Paradise Cove, $200M

In May 2023, Beyoncé and Jay-Z paid $200 million for a Paradise Cove compound, briefly setting the California all-time residential price record (since surpassed in 2024 by Oakley founder James Jannard's $210 million Malibu sale). The house was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando for art collector William Bell, who had paid $14.5 million for the parcel in 2003 and then commissioned the build. The finished house is roughly 40,000 square feet and required 7,645 cubic yards of concrete. Kurt Rappaport of Westside Estate Agency handled both sides — same broker as Andreessen, same broker as several of the Carbon Beach trades.

The property sits directly adjacent to Andreessen's. Two of the five largest residential sales in California history are now next-door neighbors.

The Legacy Holder — Larry Ellison's Carbon Beach Empire

Larry Ellison's Malibu position is structurally different. He did not arrive recently. According to the Los Angeles Times' 2014 reporting, the Oracle co-founder has been buying Malibu real estate since the mid-2000s and now owns nearly two dozen properties in the city, including at least nine, later expanded to ten, on Carbon Beach, the 1.5-mile stretch known locally as "Billionaires' Beach." Among the named transactions: a $48 million home — his 10th on Carbon Beach, a $38 million purchase from film producer Joel Silver, and a Jerry Bruckheimer purchase reported in 2012.

Ellison's pattern is what Powell Jobs' and Koum's strategies look like at scale and over a longer time horizon: buy adjacent, hold quietly, never list. The 2026 newcomers are following a playbook he established two decades ago.

For a deeper look at Carbon Beach itself, check out our article here: Carbon Beach: Inside Billionaire's Beach.

The Three Main Neighborhoods Billionares are Buying Malibu Real Estate

If you plot the deals above, the geographic pattern is unmistakable.

Point Dume — Malibu's Quintisential Riviera

Recent named residents/buyers: Kamala Harris (2025), Sergey Brin (2023, 2025), Jeff Bezos (2023 rental), King Abdullah II of Jordan (pre-2021), Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Anthony Kiedis, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, Gerard Butler, Chris Hemsworth, Jonah Hill (until 2024).

Point Dume's appeal is privacy through topography. The peninsula's homes sit behind gates, hedges, and surveillance systems on streets that dead-end into the bluff. Access to Little Dume Beach, Malibu's most coveted private surf break, requires a literal key, which a small number of Point Dume properties carry. The result is a neighborhood that functions, for residents, as a semi-private resort.

For a full street-by-street breakdown of Point Dume's sub-areas, check out our article here: Point Dume: A Complete Street by Street Buyer's Guide.

Paradise Cove Area — the Silicon Valley + Entertainment Compound Zone

Recent named owners: Marc Andreessen ($177M + $44.5M + $34M = $255M+ named), Laurene Powell Jobs ($170M+ across four parcels), Jan Koum (~$200M across two), Beyoncé and Jay-Z ($200M), Byron Allen ($100M), Stan Kroenke (Rams owner), Jimmy Iovine, and Matthew McConaughey, who has been associated with a Paradise Cove mobile home.

Paradise Cove is where the biggest checks are written. SFGate counted "more than half a billion dollars in real estate transactions" in just three years across a single cove. Of the Yahoo Finance / Wall Street Journal-reported metric, three of the approximately 25 homes in Paradise Cove have sold for more than $100 million since 2020. The cove holds roughly 1% of Malibu's home count and a meaningfully larger share of its transaction dollars.

Even the mobile homes here trade in the millions. A trailer in the Paradise Cove park sold for $5.3 million as far back as 2016.

Carbon Beach — Billionares Beach

Carbon Beach is the Larry Ellison stronghold. Roughly 1.5 miles long, 70-some oceanfront lots. Ellison owns ten of them. The rest are held by long-tenured ultra-high-net-worth families and trusts. New entries are rare; when they happen, they happen off-market.

For the full Carbon Beach context, see here: Carbon Beach guide.

Why Here, Why Now

Several structural factors explain the migration:

1. The Bay Area exit. Redfin data shows San Francisco was the #1 origin city for people searching Malibu listings during a recent quarter, with 4,451 SF-to-Malibu searches versus 526 from #2 (New York). Multiple SF-based tech wealth holders cite Malibu's "lower per-square-foot cost than SF".

2. Silicon Beach proximity. Los Angeles' tech corridor, Silicon Beach in Santa Monica and Venice, now has roughly 500 tech companies. Malibu is a 30-minute drive, close enough to keep meetings, far enough to be physically separated from the work and have a slice of privacy in nature.

3. Two private airports. Camarillo Airport to the north and Santa Monica Airport to the south bookend Malibu, both with private jet facilities. For tech founders with operational footprints across San Francisco, New York, and international destinations, this is a huge logistical bonus.

4. Acre-sized residential lots. Beverly Hills and Bel Air offer luxury, but rarely the lot size that allows a 13-structure compound or a four-parcel assemblage. The Paradise Cove area specifically allows the kind of contiguous land control that Powell Jobs, Andreessen, Koum, and Allen have all pursued.

5. Private beach access. Little Dume in Point Dume and the Carbon Beach private stretch offer something California legally does not provide elsewhere: meaningful private use of an ocean coast, supported by gates, key systems, and topographically constrained access. Many homes within Paradise Cove also have easy access to Little Dume as well.

6. Post-Woolsey, post-Palisades buyer turnover. The 2018 Woolsey Fire destroyed 670 structures in Malibu and prompted thousands of residents to move. The 2025 Palisades fire compounded the trend. The result is a meaningful share of long-held Malibu properties trading hands at a moment when the buyer pool is dominated by ultra-high-net-worth families who can absorb insurance and rebuild costs that price out more typical luxury buyers.

For Shen Realty's deeper look at this dynamic, see Why Tech Billionaires are Moving to Malibu.

What This Means for Buyers in 2026

A few takeaways for non-billionaire buyers considering Malibu this year:

The very top of the market is detached from the broader market. The Sotheby's Q1 2026 Malibu data shows a median sale price of $4.3 million with 27 closed sales, 206 active inventory, and an average 125 days on market, which is the actual transactable middle of the market. The nine-figure Paradise Cove and Carbon Beach trades are happening in parallel to, not on top of that. If you're buying a $5–15 million home in Malibu, the Andreessen and Powell Jobs trades affect your comp set only indirectly.

Point Dume's price floor is rising. Harris paid $8.15 million for a 4,000-square-foot 1979 ranch. That same property type would have likely closed in the $5–6 million range three or four years ago. The combination of celebrity demand and limited inventory has pushed the Point Dume "entry-level luxury" tier into the $7–10 million band.

Paradise Cove inventory is structurally constrained. With approximately 25 homes in the cove (not including the mobile home park) and three of them now controlled by single-owner compounds (Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Koum), the available pool for traditional sale is shrinking. New listings here are events, not regular occurrences.

Carbon Beach is essentially closed. With Ellison holding ten of the 70-plus oceanfront lots and the remainder held by trusts and long-tenured families, transactions are pocket-listed when they happen at all. If you're targeting Carbon Beach, you need an agent inside the off-market network (We can help with that here at Shen Realty). The same applies, increasingly, to Point Dume and Paradise Cove.

Work with a Realtor in Malibu California for this Exclusive Access

Malibu in 2026 is being reshaped by buyers most of the public has never seen. The transactions are real, the geography is concentrated, and the implications for inventory at the top of the market are structural rather than cyclical. If you are considering Malibu, whether you're looking at a $4 million Point Dume cottage or a Paradise Cove compound, the buyer pool you are competing with is no longer just Hollywood. It is Silicon Valley, Washington, and a tight roster of media moguls who close off-market and rarely make a public listing visible.

We have been tracking these trades and working within Malibu for over 25 years. The buyer pool is bigger, the named neighborhoods are tighter, and the cumulative dollars are now well into the billions across just these three coastal enclaves.

If you would like to be on the buy-side of the next quietly-closed Point Dume, Paradise Cove, or Carbon Beach deal, we can help you understand what's actually available, even if off market.

Shen Schulz, Sotheby's International Realty (310) 980-8809 shen@shenrealty.com DRE #01327630 23732 Malibu Rd, Malibu CA 90265

Looking for homes for sale in Point Dume, Paradise Cove real estate, or the best Malibu realtor to navigate off-market opportunities? Shen Realty has been the #1 Sotheby's International Realty agent in Malibu and one of the top 250 realtors nationwide by RealTrends. We work the network that closes these deals.

SOURCES

Written by Bodhi Schulz