Those tracking the area’s growing income inequality won’t be surprised that Washington State is home to the two richest men in the world: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The pair teeter around the tops of richest-people lists depending on how Amazon and Microsoft shares are doing. But lately, Bezos has kept his iron grip on the top spot, and doesn’t show many signs of dropping back to second, although $111.1 billion and $107 billion are both unfathomable amounts of money.
The pair are neighbors not just in net worth, but physical location, both with sprawling estates in the wealthy enclave on Evergreen Point Road in Medina. Bezos owns additional homes from coast to coast, with a massive $23 million home in Washington, DC and a set of ritzy Upper West Side apartments.
Most of the state’s billionaires choose to hang their hats outside Seattle, even if their homes are just outside. The only state billionaires to openly live in Seattle proper are Starbucks founder and short-lived presidential candidate Howard Schultz, in a ritzy gated community in Madison Park, and Nordstrom shareholder and heiress Anne Gittinger, who’s part of an exclusive condo community in Belltown.
While Gates, Bezos, and Schultz are perhaps the most famous on the list, many impossibly rich people—tech billionaires, telecom billionaires, even a sunglasses billionaire—all live, or at least own property, within a few hours of Seattle. While they all don't spend their time living in Washington State exclusively, all of these billionaires own large swaths of property within. And yes, one of them owns an entire island.
Net worths are based on Forbes’s real-time billionaires list as of October 8, 2019.
Note: Some addresses included in the map are used for proximity and not actual addresses. We make no guarantees as to
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