Billionaire Tom Gores, owner of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and founder of global private equity firm Platinum Equity, has just listed his unfinished Bel Air mansion for $50 million. This lavish partly-finished estate sits on 3.13 acres just above the Bel Air Country Club. The house itself is currently at 28,619 square feet but could go up to about 40,000 square feet. The site plan show a gated main entrance, a second (also gated) service entrance, a prairie-sized motor court, and at least one ancillary structure of considerable size. There looks to be an existing, sizable pool house next to the existing swimming pool, various garden areas, meandering pathways, and, nested into the steep slope below a soccer pitch-sized patch of grass, a half-court basketball court.
Gores apparently purchased the first of the two parcels that comprise the existing property in November 2008 for $18 million. In early 2009 he splashed out another $38 million for the neighboring property and its 11,400 square foot Mediterranean mansion.
He already own property in Los Angeles. In 2010 he paid fitness guru Bill Phillips $21 million for a 3 acre estate with an 18,000 square foot mansion in the guard-gated and architecturally steroidal Beverly Park community.
The Israeli-born billionaire graduated from Michigan State and launched an ultra-successful private equity firm in 1995, acquiring non-core divisions of various Fortune 1000 companies. In 2012, Gores landed on Forbes’ 2012 List of World’s Billionaires valued at a net worth of $2.5 billion.
