Newly minted millionaires raid LA real estate market after stock sale bonanza as desired neighborhoods revealed
New-money millionaires — particularly those buoyed by their involvement in Elon Musk’s rising commercial success of SpaceX — are opening their newly filled purses for the LA real estate market, putting already highly desired neighborhoods under an even brighter spotlight.SpaceX’s recent historic initial public offering (IPO) debuted June 12 at $135 a share, briefly topped $200, created nearly 4,400 new millionaires, made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, and raised almost $86 billion.Now, those fresh LA millionaires are eyeing homes in the South Bay’s affluent beach cities — Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach — according to The Ankler.Hawthorne, where the majority of SpaceX’s thousands of employees still work at the company’s original campus (despite the company moving its headquarters to Texas in 2024), is also expected to see a jump, along with the Palos Verdes peninsula and Westside neighborhoods like Playa Vista, Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu and Brentwood.Per a Hill.com report, of the 4,400 freshly minted millionaires, around 400 of them are projected to earn a whopping $100 million or more.A former SpaceX employee who spoke with The Ankler anonymously to to his NDA told the outlet that even prior to the initial record-breaking IPO, he and his fellow employees at the time felt “that if the company were to go public, then it was definitely going to be house-buying money.”Despite SpaceX’s IPO falling in recent weeks — reaching a record low of $132.50 apiece in mid-July before rallying again — LA real estate professionals are still seeing a burgeoning interest in those with suddenly heavier pockets procuring homes in the area’s notoriously ritzy neighborhoods, as observed in real time by co-founder of Smith & Berg Property Group, David Berg.“We’re doing a deal right now where the prospective buyer is a longtime [SpaceX] employee and is making a big step up from a modest house on the Westside to a pretty...