After nearly three decades in the Seattle area and some two years after stepping down as CEO of Seattle-based Amazon, Jeff Bezos is leaving the Pacific Northwest for Miami, he announced Thursday on Instagram. The world’s third richest person has purchased two homes on Indian Creek, Miami-Dade County’s luxury island community, in the past five months, snapping up a $68 million mansion in an off-market transaction in June and a $79 million pad right next door in October.
Indian Creek is a 294-acre man-made barrier island with just 41 homes all on one road, Indian Creek Island Road. The population was last tallied at a total of just 84 people, which includes a host of high-profile residents and billionaire landowners. What is so attractive about this area of luxury real estate?
Forbes wealth reporters Phoebe Liu and Giacomo Tognini meet on ‘Forbes Talks’ to break down the migration of the uber-rich to this secluded Miami island.
Indian Creek is a 294-acre man-made barrier island with just 41 homes all on one road, Indian Creek Island Road. The population was last tallied at a total of just 84 people, which includes a host of high-profile residents and billionaire landowners. What is so attractive about this area of luxury real estate?
Forbes wealth reporters Phoebe Liu and Giacomo Tognini meet on ‘Forbes Talks’ to break down the migration of the uber-rich to this secluded Miami island.
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00:00 Indian Creek is a 294-acre man-made barrier island with just 41 homes all on one road,
00:06 Indian Creek Island Road.
00:08 The population is tallied at a total of just 84 people in the last census,
00:13 which includes a host of high-profile residents and billionaire landowners.
00:17 Hi, everybody. I'm Giacomo Tonini, a reporter here at Forbes.
00:23 Today, I'm joined by my colleague, Phoebe Liu,
00:25 who recently penned an article about Indian Creek Island,
00:28 a luxurious billionaire bunker in Miami.
00:31 Hi, Phoebe. Welcome. How are you?
00:32 Hi, Giacomo. I'm good. Thank you for having me.
00:34 So, Forbes has published various articles about millionaires and billionaires on Indian Creek.
00:41 Can you tell me a little bit more about the article and sort of what prompted it?
00:45 Yeah, so I guess Indian Creek is a man-made island, as you said, off the coast of Miami.
00:50 It was originally, I guess, built in the early 1900s
00:55 when they dredged the bay that it's bordering.
00:58 And no one really lived there for a long time.
01:01 Then, during the Great Depression, all these really wealthy people from out of town were like,
01:06 "Let's go make a retreat for ourselves when everyone's suffering on this island."
01:11 So, in the 1930s, they kind of built it out with the 41 homes.
01:16 They made like a country club and a golf course and incorporated it in 1939.
01:22 So, ever since then, it's kind of been branded this exclusive getaway
01:27 for really wealthy people/famous people kind of looking for a place to be, I guess, if that makes sense.
01:36 Yeah, so I guess the reason we decided to look into this again right now
01:41 is because Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who's currently the world's third richest person,
01:47 announced earlier this month that he was moving to Miami
01:52 and had recently purchased two really expensive properties in this very exclusive island.
01:58 Can you kind of say more about why specifically this place?
02:01 Yeah, so, you know, we wrote this article together,
02:04 and the privacy, I think, is the biggest draw, right?
02:08 There's only one road, one small bridge in and out of the island,
02:13 which is guarded by the police force of the island, which is very small.
02:16 And another potential reason could be taxes, right?
02:19 Florida has no state income tax, has no state capital gains tax,
02:23 unlike the state of Washington, where Bezos has obviously resided for a long time.
02:28 However, you know, a lot of these very wealthy billionaires are so wealthy,
02:32 they don't necessarily see the tax benefits as a reason.
02:37 But when you look at Bezos, right, you know, who does sell stock in Amazon from time to time,
02:42 the capital gains tax burden is definitely a consideration.
02:46 And so while we're on the topic of Jeff Bezos, Phoebe, that was sort of the reason for this article.
02:52 What are some of the other reasons he moved there?
02:54 Sort of what else is surrounding this decision?
02:56 Yeah, so I guess I think on November 2nd, he made this really sentimental Instagram post
03:02 showing the first place he moved to when he founded Amazon in Seattle,
03:06 and saying that it had basically been really good to him,
03:10 but he was moving because he was essentially returning to his roots.
03:15 He went to high school there, and his family, he said his parents live there,
03:18 and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, spends a lot of time in Miami and loves Miami.
03:23 So he made this really sentimental post saying that he was moving for personal reasons,
03:27 which of course is a factor, and people have been like, "Oh, we really respect someone who wants to be with their family."
03:34 But of course, other people have speculated that it's because of tax reasons.
03:40 Interestingly, I guess, I think exactly a week after he announced that,
03:45 he registered to vote in Florida, which is, I guess, a way of proving that you live there,
03:50 and that's one of the things that would make you pay Florida taxes.
03:56 Not saying that this is necessarily the reason, but speculation-wise,
04:00 like Washington State recently implemented a, I think, 7% capital gains tax.
04:06 Over the course of Bezos' lifetime, he had sold, I think, $27 billion worth of Amazon stock,
04:14 and if that capital gains tax had been in effect that entire time,
04:17 that's like $2 billion in taxes that he would have had to pay.
04:22 And that new 7% tax went into effect at the beginning of 2022,
04:28 and I guess, interestingly enough, this could be coincidence,
04:32 but the last time Bezos sold Amazon stock was at the very end of 2021,
04:37 and he's basically only gifted stock since then.
04:40 And I think CNBC reported citing anonymous sources,
04:45 but saying that Bezos could be, or is thinking about selling more Amazon stock soon,
04:51 which kind of the timing all coincides, so that definitely could be a reason.
04:56 But again, at the end of the day, he has so much money that taxes really shouldn't matter,
05:02 but that's like something people have been speculating.
05:04 Right. And of course, Bezos is not the only very wealthy resident on the island.
05:11 You know, when we were reporting the story, we looked at several other people
05:14 who are very wealthy that we know live on the island, perhaps most famously
05:19 Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Tom Brady.
05:22 But if we're looking right at the sort of the higher end of the net worth scale,
05:25 we have Carl Icahn, car dealership tycoon Norman Braman,
05:30 whose wife Irma actually serves on the four member town council on Indian Creek.
05:36 We have the Emir of Qatar also reportedly lives there and several other billionaires,
05:43 you know, airline mogul, Rakesh Gangwal as well, several other billionaires.
05:49 And they all own, you know, about, you know, one property each.
05:54 Generally, we have Bezos too.
05:56 Then we have Jaime Galinsky-Bacal, who is a Colombian billionaire
06:01 who owns the highest number with five properties and has sort of gradually built up his holdings
06:07 on the island over the years.
06:09 And I think one thing we found with Bezos as well, right,
06:14 is that frequently in almost actually all of the cases,
06:18 these properties are not owned directly in their names, right?
06:21 They're owned through LLCs, through trusts.
06:24 And when we were reporting on the story, right, we were trying to figure out,
06:29 okay, we believe these properties are owned by Bezos, but how do we actually prove it?
06:33 Because the name isn't in the documents.
06:36 But we use sort of a combination of deed records, right, in Miami-Dade County,
06:43 corporate registries, right, in Florida and offshore entities for some of the other billionaires
06:48 and wealthy people who own homes there.
06:50 And then also sort of just good old-fashioned reporting, right,
06:53 talking to sources who know the island well and others who helped us together,
06:59 put together the fact that all these individuals own these homes, right?
07:05 There are others that we're still looking into.
07:08 And it's really interesting to see sort of the breadth, I think,
07:12 of the kinds of people who own homes here.
07:14 You have the billionaires we mentioned.
07:15 We also have, you know, wealthy Haitian businessmen, corporate BGOs.
07:19 We have a Serbian media tycoon, Dragan Šorlak, and other people who, while being wealthy,
07:28 probably aren't on our list of billionaires, right?
07:30 So it's really interesting to see the kinds of people who own homes there, when they bought it, right,
07:36 people who bought 10, 20 years ago paid a lot less than Bezos did.
07:41 And, you know, I also wanted to talk a little bit about sort of what are the reasons, right,
07:50 that people might own these through LLCs or trusts.
07:55 Yeah, so you can definitely say more about this as well,
07:58 but from talking to some real estate sources in the area and otherwise,
08:04 they've been saying that these kind of really wealthy, really famous people
08:10 trying to buy this increasingly expensive property,
08:13 I think property prices on the island have more than doubled in the last 10 years, something like that.
08:19 They've, like, increasingly wanted privacy, I guess, in part to prevent people like us from writing about,
08:26 like, where they live and tracking them in that way.
08:30 So I think at least one of Bezos' property sales on Indian Creek Island was reportedly off market.
08:40 And people who work in the industry have said that it's been increasingly common to,
08:45 like, as you said earlier, like not list someone's name at all, like anywhere in the documents.
08:52 And it's just making it harder to track because it's tying in with the theme of the island
08:57 being kind of a private and exclusive getaway.
09:00 Yeah, and sometimes it takes, in one case, we look at court filings to be able to confirm
09:05 because there was a court case between a contractor and the LLC that owned it.
09:09 We can figure out that way. And obviously, right, LLCs have the privacy, right, that we talked about.
09:14 And I think with the trusts, from what we found in our reporting,
09:18 depending on what kind of trust they are, can also have some other benefits for the owners, right,
09:23 in terms of potentially shielding the asset from creditors or anyone else who might, you know,
09:28 be able to take over that asset or something to go wrong.
09:31 And also potentially some tax benefits, right, in terms of inheritance and the like,
09:35 if they're passing it on to their children.
09:38 So it's been great talking to you, Phoebe, and talking more about the story.
09:42 Likewise.
09:43 My last question is, you know, given everything we've talked about in the story and what we found out,
09:48 would you want to live on Indian Creek Island?
09:50 Yeah, absolutely not.
09:53 I, for one, could not afford a house on the island.
09:56 Yeah, me neither.
09:57 And I guess not really looking for privacy.
10:01 It would be cool for reporting in terms of getting to see what these people that we cover do on the island.
10:08 But yeah, other than that, no.
10:10 [ Silence ]