He Poured $27 Million Into His Malibu Mansion. Now There’s Nothing Left.

Real-estate investor Robert Rivani spent close to three years renovating an oceanfront mansion on Malibu’s star-studded Carbon Beach, adding a Zen garden and a sunlit infrared sauna.

The house was built around an interior courtyard with a pond, and the living spaces had limestone flooring and Onyx on the walls, along with travertine and Roman clay plaster. Including the price of the original home, the project cost close to $27 million. He had been planning to list it for $40 million this spring.

Last week, Rivani watched as the California wildfires tore the five-bedroom home apart, reducing it to rubble. “It’s catastrophic,” he said. “How do you sum up losing over $20 million in 24 hours to any human being?

Carbon Beach is a small enclave of roughly 70 houses and spans just over a mile, but it’s known as Billionaires’ Beach because it’s home to some of the most expensive real estate on the planet.

As historic wildfires tore through the Los Angeles area, destroying more than 12,000 homes and buildings and killing at least 24 people, this quiet, wealthy beach community wasn’t spared. Many of the homes on Carbon Beach were completely destroyed by the Palisades fire, amounting to potentially billions of dollars in decimated real estate, according to local agents.

The wealthy have long been drawn to Carbon Beach for its natural beauty and relative seclusion. Over the years, moneyed homeowners have included media moguls David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who still owns multiple houses there. While it’s technically a public beach, it has relatively few public access points and little parking, and therefore remains quiet. Most of the homes are located directly on the sand and face onto the ocean, their entrances appearing relatively nondescript from the Pacific Coast Highway.

Rivani said the fire took the community by surprise. Previous fires in the area haven’t jumped the Pacific Coast Highway and have, therefore, left the homes directly on the ocean unscathed.

Among the most expensive homes on the strip that have been destroyed is a compound formerly owned by Geffen, according to several local residents. Geffen sold the property for $85 million in 2017. The current owner, Guggenheim Partners Chief Executive Mark Walter, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ellison couldn’t immediately be reached, and the status of his homes in the neighborhood wasn’t clear.

On Tuesday night, at his home in Miami, Rivani received a text from his architect, asking if everything was all right with the Carbon Beach house. He included a video of the burning area. In the distance, Rivani could see a fire in what looked like the back courtyard of the house. When he woke up the next morning, his neighbors sent pictures. The house was gone.

Rivani said his insurance falls under the state’s already-stretched Fair Plan, which provides only up to $3 million in coverage for residential properties, so, even if it pays out, he says he will be out more than $20 million. No other insurer would cover the property for its full replacement value, he said. Rivani had imported marble from around the world and spent $500,000 on a custom kitchen from Germany.

“The land that was once worth $15 million is probably worthless now, too,” he said. “What value do you put on an entire community where the land is burnt to a crisp, where you don’t have restaurants or grocery stores, gas stations or working power?”

At least for now, Rivani anticipated that he will still have to make mortgage and property tax payments totaling north of $100,000 a month, even though there is no house. Rivani said he expects there will be a default crisis in Los Angeles as onetime homeowners find themselves unable to meet payment obligations.

Entrepreneur Grant Cardone, the star of “Undercover Billionaire,” said his Carbon Beach home is still standing for now, though it sustained significant damage. Others weren’t so lucky, he said.

“The houses adjacent to me, all the way down Carbon Beach, the entire structures are gone,” Cardone said.

He paid $40 million in 2022 for his property, a 9,500-square-foot beach house with a built-in aquarium, a library and floor-to-ceiling glass doors that open onto the deck. Now, the inside is charred and at least one of the walls has been compromised. Cardone said his insurance will likely cover the loss as he’s covered under a larger umbrella policy that encompasses other properties he owns across the country.

Cardone said he anticipated that, depending on the level of damage, he might have to take the property down to the studs and rebuild, though he said it’s hard to imagine how much labor will be available to do so. “How are you going to get labor for this many homes?” he said. “It’s a big problem, but nobody’s going to cry for me.”

Cardone and Rivani aren’t alone in expressing frustration with local and state authorities, who they accuse of being unprepared for the fires.

“We pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes a year and yet we don’t have working fire hydrants? It’s mind-blowing,” Rivani said. “What preventative measures were done here to keep people safe, rich and poor?”

At a press conference Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass dismissed accusations of unpreparedness, saying the fire was the result of “eight months of negligible rain and winds that have not been seen in L.A. in at least 14 years.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said that state water and firefighting officials will independently investigate the cause of water pressure loss that rendered Los Angeles’ municipal utility’s fire hydrants unusable during the fire in the Pacific Palisades.

Cardone also criticized the California Coastal Commission for its strict regulations on what can be built on the coast.

“Many of these homes are 50 years old. They’re tinderboxes,” he said. “If the Coastal Commission was not so oppressive, those homes would have been redeveloped years ago and would be built of steel, glass and concrete.”

A spokesperson for the commission didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.