Peter Thiel Bought a Foreclosed Bel-Air Mega-Mansion for $130 Million

The late Gary Winnick once asked $250 million for Casa Encantada. It sold instead at a foreclosure auction in Pomona.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, has bought Casa Encantada, a 40,000-square-foot Bel-Air estate, for $130 million at a foreclosure auction.

He made the purchase in July through a limited liability company, at an auction held in Pomona, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The Los Angeles Times followed with the details on September 30, 2026.

It's one of the most expensive home sales Los Angeles has ever seen. It's also a deal, if you squint. Gary Winnick, the businessman who owned the house for more than two decades, put it on the market for $225 million in 2019 and raised the ask to $250 million in 2023. Thiel paid $120 million less than that second number.

Winnick never found his buyer. He died in 2023 with debts stacking up behind him, the Times reported, and records show the estate had been put up as collateral tied to a loan from the CIM Group, a Los Angeles real estate investor.

His family tried again in April, listing the house at $170 million. Three months later, it went to whoever bid highest.

That's a long fall for a house that's spent most of its life setting price records. James Dolena, a Russian-born architect who designed a handful of trophy homes around Los Angeles, built it in 1938 on 8.4 acres of terraced lawns and gardens above the Bel-Air Country Club.

Hotel magnate Conrad Hilton bought it in 1950. After his death, financier David Murdock paid $12.4 million for it in 1980, a national record at the time. Winnick broke the record again in 2000 when he bought it for $94 million.

He then spent tens of millions more. Winnick hired interior designer Peter Marino, whose crew hunted down the home's original furniture and carved moldings with period-accurate methods, a job that kept roughly 250 workers on site each day, according to Architectural Digest.

What Thiel gets: Ionic columns at the front door, a foyer of sweeping staircases under 14-foot ceilings, a walnut-paneled library, several dining rooms, a tennis court and a 60-foot tiled pool ringed by fountains. There are seven bedrooms and 20 bathrooms.

Nobody's waiting for the shower.

The Bel-Air estate joins a property collection that stretches across several continents. Thiel already holds compounds in Hawaii and New Zealand, homes in Miami and Washington, D.C., and a mansion he recently bought in Buenos Aires, the Times reported.

The Pomona auction where he found it doesn't look like much, but it's moved some famous dirt. A prized parcel of land in Beverly Hills that was once listed at $1 billion sold there for $100,000.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved October 1, 2026.