Why billionaire Larry Ellison paid $10 million for eight suburban Florida houses he'll never live in

American billionaire Larry Ellison has a $173 million oceanfront compound in Manalapan and, half an hour inland, eight more houses he does not live in. They are for the people who run his home.

The Oracle co-founder spent nearly $10 million in 2023 buying the homes in Palm Meadows Estates, a gated community of about 288 houses in west Boynton Beach, to house tutors for his children and other household staff, the Wall Street Journal reported. The purchases were made through a limited liability company and closed within days of each other in May and June, several of them on homes that were never listed.

The secrecy held for a while. Neighbors, watching a single buyer sweep up house after house, guessed Zuckerberg or Musk. Even the local agent who lined up the deals did not know who the buyer was until Ellison arrived to tour the properties with bodyguards, according to the Journal.

The homes are modest by his standards: single-story ranch layouts with tidy yards, some with pools, in a neighborhood where listings run around $1 million. Their purpose is logistics. Ellison, 82, and his wife Jolin have five young children, and keeping tutors and staff within a 30-minute drive solves a problem that a 16-acre estate on a barrier island cannot: where the help lives.

The arrangement is becoming a pattern among the ultra-wealthy, who buy or lease separate homes for nannies, chefs and teachers in expensive markets. It works as a recruiting tool and keeps the main residence private. "Investing in lodging can be a very smart decision," Peter Mahler of Mahler Private Staffing told the Journal.

Palm Meadows residents were less enthusiastic. The concentration of eight homes in one corporate owner's hands unsettled the community, and the homeowners association has since changed its rules to prevent similar bulk acquisitions.

Buying in bulk is an Ellison habit. Forbes has put his property portfolio at about $2.9 billion, including a Woodside estate and adjoining parcels in Redwood City, four houses in Newport, Rhode Island, and roughly a dozen homes along Carbon Beach in Malibu. He paid $80 million for his first Palm Beach mansion in 2021 before assembling the Manalapan compound.

The Florida homes are a rounding error next to the sums Ellison is moving elsewhere. He has personally guaranteed $46.7 billion of the equity behind his son David's $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which cleared its last court hurdle last week. Eight houses for the tutors is the domestic end of the same balance sheet.