The Billionaire Bunker: Why Four of the Five Richest People on Earth Just Moved to Miami

Indian Creek Island sits off the coast of Miami Beach. It is 294 acres of manicured land, accessible by a single causeway, patrolled by its own private police force. There are 35 homes on the island. The waiting list to buy one is long, the sellers are few, and the prices are stratospheric.

Jeff Bezos moved there in 2023. He spent $234 million across three adjacent waterfront properties.

His neighbors include Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Carl Icahn has a home there. So does auto dealer Norman Braman. Indian Creek is known, informally, as "the Billionaire Bunker."

Bezos was early. He has since been followed by three more of the world's five wealthiest people.

Mark Zuckerberg paid $170 million for a waterfront estate in Miami — the highest price ever paid for a home in Miami-Dade County. Larry Page assembled a 4.5-acre compound in Coconut Grove for approximately $188 million across multiple purchases. Sergey Brin bought a double-lot property on Allison Island for $51 million.

The only member of Forbes' global top five not buying Miami real estate is Elon Musk, who remains in Texas.

Together, these four men have a combined net worth of approximately $940 billion, according to Forbes' 2026 list. They are not just moving their homes. They are moving their fiscal lives. And the numbers explain exactly why.

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The Tax Math

Florida has no state income tax. It has no estate tax. It has no capital gains tax at the state level. It has no wealth tax.

California, where all four men built their fortunes, has a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3% — the highest of any U.S. state. California also taxes capital gains as ordinary income, meaning long-term stock sales are taxed at the same rate as a paycheck.

For individuals with hundreds of billions in unrealized stock gains, the difference between California and Florida residency is not a rounding error. It is hundreds of millions — or potentially billions — of dollars over a lifetime.

The California calculus became more urgent in 2025. The state legislature introduced AB 2289, the California Wealth Tax Act, which proposed a 1.5% annual tax on net worth above $1 billion. The bill did not pass in its 2025 session, but variants have been reintroduced. The signal it sent to ultra-high-net-worth individuals was clear: California is actively exploring extracting more from its wealthiest residents, and it may eventually succeed.

To establish Florida residency and benefit from the state's tax advantages, an individual must live in the state for more than 183 days per year (more than half the year). They must also file a Declaration of Domicile with the county. Most billionaires maintain homes in multiple states; the Florida residency designation changes which state gets to tax them.

The Properties

The scale of these purchases is worth examining in concrete terms:

Combined real estate spend: approximately $643 million. For context, each individual's annual tax savings from Florida versus California residency, on income and capital gains alone, likely exceeds the purchase price of their home within a decade.

Why Miami Specifically

Multiple U.S. states have no income tax — including Texas, Nevada, Washington, and Wyoming. Bezos originally lived in Seattle (Washington state, no income tax) before moving to Florida. Why Miami rather than one of those alternatives?

Several factors converge:

Climate and geography. Miami offers subtropical weather, direct ocean access, and a waterfront lifestyle that inland no-tax states cannot match. For individuals who value yacht access, private boat harbors, and coastal estates, Florida is unique.

Proximity to Latin America. Miami is the de facto business capital of Latin America, a major hub for private aviation, and within a four-hour flight of most South American capitals. For executives with global operations, this is a genuine operational advantage.

Infrastructure for extreme wealth. Indian Creek has its own police force. Coconut Grove and Miami Beach's gated islands offer private security, controlled access, and significant buffer from public intrusion. The infrastructure for billionaire-level privacy has matured in South Florida in ways that comparable areas in, say, Wyoming, have not.

Network effects. Once Bezos established Indian Creek as a viable primary residence, his presence attracted others. Real estate agents describe the dynamic as self-reinforcing: each high-profile arrival validates the area's security, exclusivity, and amenity profile, making it more attractive to the next buyer. Brin's purchase on Allison Island — a historically lower-profile island compared to Indian Creek or La Gorce — immediately elevated Allison Island's market standing.

What This Means Economically

The aggregate capital moving from California (and other high-tax states) to Florida is not trivial. California's Franchise Tax Board has estimated that a single high-income residency departure can remove tens of millions in annual tax revenue. When the departing individual is worth $200+ billion, the figure scales accordingly.

California's state budget has historically depended heavily on its wealthiest residents. The top 1% of California earners pay approximately 46% of the state's personal income tax revenue, according to IRS Statistics of Income data. The concentration risk has been noted by California's own Legislative Analyst's Office, which has repeatedly warned that the state's revenue volatility is driven by this dependence on a small number of very high earners whose income fluctuates with capital markets — and who can leave.

Florida, conversely, gains. Miami-Dade County collected record property tax revenue in 2025, driven in part by the appreciation of high-end waterfront properties. The county does not break down its top taxpayers, but the pattern is visible in overall collections.

The Broader Pattern

The four billionaires moving to Miami are the most visible examples of a broader trend that has been accelerating since 2020. The pandemic triggered the first major wave of high-income migration out of California and New York, enabled by remote work. Miami, Austin, and Nashville absorbed the largest flows.

What is notable about the 2025–2026 wave is that it is not remote-work driven. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin run companies headquartered in California. They are not moving their businesses; they are changing their domicile while maintaining operational presence elsewhere. This is the clean tax-optimization play — change where you live, not where your company operates.

The Tax Foundation has estimated that high-income migration cost California approximately $3.5 billion in annual income tax revenue between 2019 and 2024. That figure is likely to grow as the migration continues and as California's proposed wealth taxes make the calculus more acute.

For Florida, the geography is shifting. Indian Creek, Coconut Grove, Allison Island — enclaves that were prestigious before are now home to a concentration of wealth without historical precedent in American real estate. Four individuals together worth nearly $1 trillion now live within a few miles of each other in South Florida.

The last time that kind of capital concentration was visible in a single American city's geography was the Gilded Age, when Fifth Avenue in New York hosted Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller mansions in succession. The architecture was different. The logic was the same.

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