Laurene Powell Jobs spends $94 to buy fourth Malibu estate

Laurene Powell Jobs can’t stop buying real estate in Malibu, having just picked up a 1950s ranch house in prestigious Paradise Cove for $94 million.

The widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs bought the four-bedroom, four-bathroom oceanfront spread at 28106 Pacific Coast Highway, just east of Paradise Cove Beach, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The kicker: the off-market purchase of the 3,400-square-foot home on 4 acres sits next to three other properties Jobs owns, according to the newspaper.

Listing sites describe the L-shaped house, built atop a bluff in 1956, as part of a 6,400-square-foot estate. The eight-bedroom, six-bathroom property last traded in 1978 for $487,000, according to Realtor.com.

Three years ago, the Silicon Valley billionaire paid $17.5 million for an oceanfront property next to her compound in the central Malibu cove, which in 2021 brought her investment in Malibu properties to $80 million.

The latest purchase brings the Jobs tally to $174 million, not counting the cost of building out the compound. The new home she’s building next door was heavily damaged in the Woolsey Fire in 2018.

Her new property at the end of Sea Lane Drive is the biggest home sale in Southern California this year, according to the Times. It’s also the priciest since last May, when Jay-Z and Beyoncé bought a Brutalist mansion up the street for $200 million, a state record.

The philanthropist swept into Malibu in 2015, spending $44 million on a two-parcel property and bulldozing its 13,000-square-foot mansion. Two years later, Jobs paid $16.5 million for the house next door. In 2021, she added an adjacent five-bedroom cottage for $17.5 million.

Over the last decade, Paradise Cove has become the most valuable coast in California and one of the priciest pockets in the country, according to the Times.

In 2021, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum landed a 3-acre spread for $87 million. At the same time, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen broke the-then state record when he bought a 7-acre estate between Paradise Cove and Escondido Beach for $177 million. He then bought two more local properties, bringing their beach total to $255.5 million.

Meanwhile, America’s most expensive trailer park in Paradise Cove had listings last year as high as $5.9 million, with rumored off-market deals close to $7 million. The official sales record is $5.3 million in 2016.

Jobs manages the Steve Jobs Trust and founded the Emerson Collective, which pours money into education, immigration reform and environmental causes. Forbes pegs her net worth at $14.3 billion.

As of 2021, the New Jersey native owned three homes in Silicon Valley and one in San Francisco.

She has also assembled a large spread in Florida. In 2016, she paid $15 million for a 3.6-acre estate in the equestrian community of Wellington, and a year later bought a neighboring 7.2-acre property for $8.3 million.

More recently, Jobs was among a cabal of Silicon billionaires funding a plan to secretly buy up thousands of acres of farmland in Solano County, north of San Francisco, to build a utopian city.

— Dana Bartholomew