Money’s No Fun If You Don’t Spend It

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As the ultra-rich get richer, amassing fortunes that are virtually impossible for even them to spend in a lifetime (though it doesn’t seem to be for lack of effort), extravagance knows no bounds. Private islands, personal jumbo jets, art collections valued in the hundreds of millions, even trips to outer space: L.A.’s wealthiest have indulged in these excesses and more. Here are some of the more legendary examples.



-Rocket Man:

In what is certainly the most otherworldly example of extravagance, Dennis Tito, the founder of Santa Monica investment management and consulting firm Wilshire Associates, paid $20 million to Space Adventures Ltd., to become the first space tourist. Tito joined Soyuz TM-32 on April 28, 2001, and spent 7 days, 22 hours, 4 minutes in space orbiting Earth 128 times. Only four other private citizens followed Tito on a Russian spaceship before the Columbia disaster ended the space tourism experiment. However, British entrepreneur Richard Branson is set to launch Virgin Galactic with plans to send 3,000 people into sub-orbit by 2009. Ticket price: $208,000.



-Mega Mansion:

In an unabashed display of excess, the late producer Aaron Spelling built a 56,000-square-foot mansion in 1991 at a cost of $37 million. The vast Holmby Hills estate one block from Hugh Hefner’s place was the single largest private home in the U.S. at the time of its completion in 1991. The six-acre estate includes 123 rooms, four bars, three kitchens, a theater, a gym, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a separate servants’ wing, a 6,000-square-foot guest house, tennis courts, a gazebo, a greenhouse, a bowling alley, a screening room and indoor parking for eight limousines. There were even rooms in the Spelling mansion dedicated to gift-wrapping and doll making. After Spelling’s death last year, his widow Candy put the legendary estate on the market for $150 million. The home wasn’t Spelling’s only extravagance: He once had snow imported just so actress daughter Tori could see the real thing on Christmas Day.



-Titans of Yachting:

It turns out $100 million-plus doesn’t even buy a whole super yacht these days. Music and entertainment mogul David Geffen spent $125 million to buy a half share in the mega-yacht Rising Sun from his buddy Larry Ellison. The Rising Sun is one of the world’s four largest yachts, built at a cost of $250 million. Ellison, founder of database company Oracle, is the richest man in California. He’s also got spending habits equally gargantuan. The mammoth floating palace is five stories high and 453 feet long, making it more than half the length of the Titanic. Among its over-the-top features: a gym, a wine cellar basketball court and movie theater. One big drawback: it’s too large to dock at most marinas.

u Treasured Islands: It’s time-honored among the rich purchasing the kind of real estate so private not even a fence is needed. In other words, your own private island. In Hollywood, Errol Flynn set the precedent and Brando famously followed in his footsteps. So why not Mel Gibson? Two years ago, the movie star spent $15 million to buy Mago Island, a 5,411-acre retreat in Fiji. Talk about remote: Mago is located 166 statute miles from Fiji’s capital city of Suva, and is inhabited by only a few caretakers. Descendants of original native inhabitants of Mago, who were displaced in the 1860s, have protested Gibson’s purchase. But the Austrialian has pushed forward. Last year, Gibson had an eight-lane bowling alley shipped to his private paradise on a cargo ship.



-Duffers’ Paradise:

A. Jerold Perenchio, the billionaire who recently sold the Spanish-language TV network Univision for $12.3 billion, could join just about any country club. But he did one better by bringing the country club to his home. In 1982, he built a 10-acre pitch-and-putt golf course on his Malibu property. Situated between the highway, Malibu Lagoon and Malibu Colony, an exclusive gated community home to many celebrities, the course was appraised at $25 million several years ago. Perenchio has said he had built the golf course for his wife, Margie, who was a golf champion at the Bel Air Country Club. But after years of legal wrangling with state and local environmental groups unhappy about how the course was built without all the necessary approvals, the billionaire offered in 2004 to donate the golf park to the Malibu Lagoon State Park once he and his wife have died.

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