The world-famous Los Angeles, known for being the largest city in California, is home to giant film studios like Paramount Pictures and has the busiest port in the United States. It is home to many of the Hollywood stars, movie industries, beautiful beaches and expensive houses.
When Los Angeles ranked 77th most expensive city to live in in the world according to numbeo.com then you know the people living in this city must be rich to be able to fit with the expenses. Are you wondering who these rich people are?
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9 Of The Richest Person In Los Angeles And Their Biography
Here is a list of the nine richest persons in Los Angeles and their biography.
1. Robert Murphy
Born Robert Cornelius Murphy on 19th October 1988 in Berkeley, California. His dad is Richard Cornelius Murphy Jr and his mom Rosie L. Go-Murphy was a Philippine immigrant. He is an entrepreneur, internet guru, and software engineer.
Popular for being a co-founder of the American multinational social media platform Snap Inc. He co-founded the company with Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown during their University days at Stanford University. The trio were members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree of science in mathematics and computational science. After graduation, he worked for a year with Revel Systems as a software engineer.
Murphy and Spiegel worked on a website Future Freshman which aimed at helping give high school students with advice as regards college applications. The website was not a success. In 2011, he together with Spiegel co-founded Picaboo now known as Snapchat. He covered the server bill until they secured funding from a Venture Capital Company.
As of today, Snapchat records over 300 million active users daily globally.
He was listed by Forbes in 2015 as the second-youngest billionaire in the world. The majority of his wealth is acquired from his 14% stake in Snap. He purchased actor Eddie Albert’s Pacific Palisade estate in 2018 for $19.5 million. One of his recent purchases was a $14.5 million property on Manhattan Beach Strand.
He had led the Snap labs, engineering and research teams. As of 2017, Murphy and Spiegel owned 45% of total stock and 70% voting power. In 2017, 16 million shares were sold giving Murphy $272 million at $17 apiece.
In 2013, Facebook offered to buy Snap for $3 billion which was turned down. The company was valued at $20billion as of 2017 according to Bloomberg.
2. Evan Thomas Spiegel
Born in Los Angeles on 4th June 1990. He is an American French citizen popular for being a co-founder of the social media platform Snap Inc. His parent were both Lawyers. He is married to Miranda Kerr, a former Australian model. Their wedding took place as a private event in Los Angeles in 2017. Kerr gave birth to their first son in 2018 and their second son I’m 2019. He was a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity along with Murphy and Brown who he co-founded Snap Inc with.
As of 2015, Spiegel was the youngest billionaire in the world at age 25. In 2016, he bought a $12 million house which was owned by Harrison Ford. He was ranked by Forbes 400 as the 55th with a net worth of $13.8 billion.
3. Patrick Soon-Shiong
Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa on 29th July 1952. His parent are Chinese immigrants who fled during the Japanese occupation in World War ll. Heli es in Los Angeles, California with his wife Michele B. Chan who was a former actress and their two children.
He is a transplant surgeon, bioscientist, investor, and medical entrepreneur. He invented the drug Abraxane which is an effective drug against cancers like breast, lung and pancreatic cancer. He has over 100 scientific papers to his credit.
He graduated from the University of Witwatersrand with a bachelor’s degree in medicine and did his internship at Johannesburg’s General Hospital. He became a certified surgeon in 1984 after training at the University of California. He was the first to perform the pancreas transplant which was done at UCLA.
He chairs three non-profit organizations Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health and Healthcare Transformation Institute. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, a minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and the CEO of Nantworks. He has an estimated net worth of about $19.1 billion.
He is among the early investors of the video conferencing app company Zoom in 2013. He owns 28% of Directs plus, a European based graphene-based technology company.
4. Sean Parker
Born in Herndon, Virginia on 3rd December 1979. His mom Diana Parker was a TV advertisement broker and Bruce Parker, his dad was a chief scientist at NOAA and an oceanographer for the U.S government. He married singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas in 2013. The couple has two children, a girl Winter Victoria and a boy Zephyr Emerson.
His dad started teaching him programming when he was seven. His hobbies as a teen were hacking and programming. He was sentenced to community service at the age of 16 by the FBI after hacking Fortune 500 company network. He worked with the CIA in his teen earning about $80,000 including other side projects. His current net worth is estimated to be around $13.2 billion.
Parker and Shawn Fanning whom he first met online developed a music sharing service Napster which later had to shut down due to different lawsuits from numerous music industries. Parker became the president of Facebook when it was five-month-old and was the first investor as a result of the potential he saw in the company. He developed the user interface and photo-sharing function.
In 2010, Parker made an investment worth $15 million in Spotify.
Parker has lately been involved in various philanthropy work. He pledge a $5 million grant for cancer research in 2012. In 2014, he pledge $24 million to create a centre for allergy research. He announced the launch of the Parker Foundation in 2015 and contributed $600 million.
5. David Geffen
David Lawrence Geffen was born on 21st February 1943 in Brooklyn, New York. His parent were Jewish immigrants. His mom owned a boutique at Borough Park. He is an American film producer, businessman and studio executive. He dropped out of the University of Texas and moved to Los Angeles where he ventured into entertainment. In 1992, Geffen came out as being gay. He is ranked among the 50 most powerful Gay men and women in America by Out magazine in 2007.
Having a net worth estimate of $10.8 billion makes him one of the richest people in Los Angeles. He sold his Beverly Hills estate for $165 million to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon in 2020. In the same year, he purchased another estate in Beverly Hills for $68 million.
Geffen is a lover and collector of American artist works. The report has it that he owned the world’s most expensive and valuable private art collection worth over $1.1 billion in 2013. In 2016, he sold a De Joining and two Jasper John’s paintings for a total of $143.5 million. The Mexican financier David Martinez in 2006 purchased the Pollock 1948 painting No. 5 from Geffen for $140 million. In 2016, he sold two paintings to Ken Griffin for the total amount of $500 million.
He was the owner of half-share of the luxury yacht Rising sun which he later purchased the remaining half in 2010. He purchased the yacht pelorus in 2011 from Roman Abramovich’s ex-wife Irine for $300 million He later sold the yacht for €214 million to Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.
6. John Tu
John Tu, son of a former officer of the Chinese government was born in. Chongqing, China on 12th August 1941. Due to his father’s job, the family moved to Shanghai and then to Taiwan. He moved to Germany in 1960 intending to study electrical engineering but bearing does he speak German. She only understood a few English sentences. After working two years as an apprentice at a shipbuilding factory which was a requirement, he enrolled and studied electrical engineering and information technology at Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany. He graduated in 1970 and went ahead to work with Motorola in Wiesbaden.
He co-founded a company Camintonn in 1982 which he sold for $6 million. He later establishes Kingston Technology, the larger manufacturer of computer memory globally. 80% of the company was sold for $1.5 billion to SoftBank in 1996 and was bought back after three years in 1999 for $450 million. The report has it that Kingston generate about $12.8 billion in revenue and he has an estimated net worth of $8.8 billion
7. Stewart & Lynda Resnick
The Steward family is an American business and philanthropic family. Steward was born in New Jersey on 24th December 1936. His first marriage was to Santa Frazier and had three children. In 1973, he married Lynda Rae Harris and had two stepchildren. He resides in Beverly Hills with his wife and five children.
He is a graduate of the University of California, where got a BA and later a JD from the School of Law at the same University. He found his first company while in law school which he sold in 1969. It was a janitorial service company. With the money he got, he bought Franklin Mint where he was chairman till 2006 after it was sold.
Steward and his wife Lynda Resnick are among the richest people in Los Angeles with a total net worth of $6.8 billion. He owns the Fiji water brands, JUSTIN Wines, Landmark Wines and other companies.
The family is very much involved in philanthropic activities. Steward and Lynda’s contribution lead to the naming of The Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital to honour them in 2015. In 2009, they made a donation of $20 million to Caltech for the creation of a sustainability centre. A donation of $4 million was made to a children’s hospital in California. In 2019, a donation of $750 million was made to Caltech to fund climate research.
8. Marijke Elizabeth Mars
She is a fourth-generation member of the Mars family born in 1965. She and her three sisters are the heirs to their father’s Late Forrest Mars Jr.s Company. Mars Incorporated is a world-known food, candy and pet food company. Some of their brands include famous Skittles, M&Ms, Snickers and Starburst. Mars is a graduate of Duke University. She was married to Stephen K. Doyle from 1991-2000.
After the death of their father, each of the four sisters inherited an 8% stake in the company. The candy company was founded by their great-grandfather in 1911. Her shares worth $5.9 billion automatically made her a billionaire.
Mars alongside her sisters was ranked the 30th richest woman in the world. The company records an annual sale of $33 billion.
9. Jeff Skoll
Born on 16th January 1965 in Montreal, Canada. His father sold industrial chemicals while his mother was a teacher. His father was diagnosed with cancer when Skoll was fourteen. He is a graduate of electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. He later attended Stanford University business school. Skoll married Stephanie Swedlove a TV executive in 2014. It was reported he filed for a divorce.
After graduation, he wrote the business plan for eBay which took the business to a larger success. He was the first employer and president from 1996-to 1998. He is also the founder and chairman of Skill foundation and Participant media. Some of the movies include the documentary Muderball in 2015 which was nominated for 11 Oscar awards, Spotlight in 2015 which won an Academy Award.
In 1999, he gave $1 billion worth of eBay stoke to the Skoll Foundation. He donated $20 million and later donated another $100 million to Skoll Foundation in 2020 during the global pandemic (COVID-19). – He was an officer of the order of Canada for his social and philanthropic work.
Conclusion
The biography of some of these billionaires will keep you in awe as to they started and where they are today. Looking at their Net worth I think it is safe to call Los Angeles the Home of the billionaires.
