Stability was the name of the game for a bulk of Southern California’s wealthiest residents last year.
The cumulative wealth of the richest people in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties remained largely the same over the past year, according to the latest rankings in each of the Business Journals for those regions.
The combined wealth of the 106 people tracked across the three sister publications runs close to $160 billion, roughly the same as it was a year ago.
The three-county region now counts 51 billionaires, one fewer than a year ago. Only 17 people on the three lists, including 12 of the billionaires, saw gains of more than 10% to their estimated wealth over the past year.
The lack of movement among the region’s rich follows several years of oversized gains and steep drops on each publication’s respective Wealthiest Lists, during the boom years, downturn and subsequent recovery.
The recent flat rate of growth for the region’s super-rich runs counter to several key economic indicators.
There have been a few notable changes.
Los Angeles saw three new billionaires added to its May ranking of the wealthiest Angelinos: entrepreneur Elon Musk ($2 billion), communications executive Marc Nathanson ($1.05 billion) and former Walt Disney Co. chief executive Michael Eisner ($1 billion).
Falling from the ranks of billionaires in L.A., but still remaining on the list, were investor Lowell Milken ($900 million) and Occidental Petroleum chairman Ray Irani ($800 million).
Los Angeles leads Southern California by a comfortable margin in total number of billionaires, with 38 of the top 50 wealthiest there—a combination of Hollywood moguls, real estate owners, techies, finance execs and heirs to family fortunes—cracking the 10-figure mark.
The lowest total for an individual on the most recent L.A. list was film director and producer James Cameron, who is estimated to have a $650 million fortune.
Cameron would be the 16th richest resident in OC if he lived here.
He’d be tied for No. 3 in San Diego, whose latest list has only one billionaire, Qualcomm Inc. founder Irwin Jacobs ($1.5 billion).
The seventh-wealthiest resident in San Diego’s latest rankings, and a perennial list member, Walter Zable, passed away in June at the age of 97.
Zable founded one of San Diego’s largest technology companies, Cubic Corp., a defense contractor and maker of mass transit fare collection systems. His stake in the company, where he continued to work regular hours, was valued at about $490 million at the time of his death.
Bren Tops
Irvine Co. owner and chairman Donald Bren, who saw his estimated wealth increase by $500 million to $13 billion last year, remains Southern California’s wealthiest resident by a wide margin (See entries, starting on page 31; the list, starting on page 44; related stories throughout issue).
The wealth of Bren, a Newport Beach resident, far exceeds the No. 1 entry in Los Angeles, where biotech executive Patrick Soon-Shiong topped that region’s list for the fourth consecutive year with an estimated worth of $8 billion.
Bren is the country’s wealthiest real estate owner. In April he was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the fifth-richest businessman in all California, behind Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison ($36 billion), Google Inc.’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page ($18.7 billion each) and Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg ($17.5 billion).
L.A. and OC both count one billionaire as their own: Fountain Valley-based Kingston Technology Co. cofounder John Tu.
Both papers’ latest rankings of Tu’s wealth reflect an industrywide sales slump and falling prices for Kingston’s memory products and components for computers and consumer electronics, though our respective valuations differ.
The L.A. Business Journal pegs the wealth of Tu, who has a home in Rolling Hills, at $1.6 billion, a 45% drop from a year ago. We estimate his fortune—and that of Kingston cofounder David Sun—to be $2.6 billion, representing a 5.5% year-over-year decline. (Forbes, which also publishes an annual list of the nation’s wealthiest, puts Tu and Sun at $2.8 billion each, as of March.)
