What would Zuckerberg do?
Like, if every single residential property in Palo Alto were suddenly on the block, would the Facebook chairman just buy it all up?
Turns out, he could, at least according to the PropertyShark website. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal worth is $51 billion, while the sum value of Palo Alto’s residential properties – single-family homes, condos and townhouses – is only $43 billion. Which means he could grab Los Altos Hills, as well, or most of it; the city’s residences are worth $10 billion.
Scenarios like these fill a new study, of sorts, from PropertyShark. It’s a hypothetical “if billionaires owned the world” analysis, matching rich guys’ personal fortunes with the total residential real estate values of individual Bay Area cities.
Author Adela Muresan computes that Bill Gates (worth $84 billion) and Warren Buffett ($74 billion) could join forces (a combined $158 billion) to buy nearly every property in San Francisco, valued at $166 billion.
Now you do the math.
Jeff Bezos ($66 billion), Larry Ellison ($50 billion) and Larry Page ($39 billion) could purchase San Jose ($152 billion). Carlos Slim Helu ($50 billion) could buy Mountain View ($19 billion) and Los Altos ($30 billion). Oakland ($37 billion) could get scooped up by Sergey Brin ($38 billion).
PropertyShark drew the personal net worth figures from Forbes’ “World’s Billionaires” list, as published on December 9. The city-by-city value of residences was drawn from the website’s database of approximately 90 million properties in New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and other major U.S. markets.
But why all the fantasizing?
Muresan says the study puts a new perspective on just how lopsided the Bay Area real estate market has become. It spotlights the concentration of wealth among the business elite at a time when the cost of a home here is beyond the reach of most people.
Think about it: “That an entire, bustling city that’s already unaffordable for a lot of people, could, virtually, get bought up overnight by one person just goes to show how strange and uneven wealth has become,” Muresan says. “Take Los Altos, for example; it’s one of the priciest places in America, but someone as rich as Larry Ellison could turn the whole place into one mega-estate.”
For her finale, she compiles a list of 18 billionaires, many from the tech industry, whose combined wealth could basically buy all of Silicon Valley and San Francisco along with tech-centric portions of the East Bay. The whole bundle, 33 cities, would cost $846 billion.
No, Donald Trump is not on the list.
Read the study here.
Photo of Mark Zuckerberg by Kirstina Sangsahachart/Daily News