Several months before Palantir moved its headquarters to Miami, an entity with ties to the company’s billionaire CEO, Alex Karp, put down roots in the city.
In June, Hibiscus East LLC purchased a home on Miami’s San Marino Drive for $46 million, according to property records.
Like several of Karp’s other properties, the LLC is registered in Delaware. It is connected to an attorney’s office in Manchester, New Hampshire, and an accounting office in Bedford, New Hampshire, both of which appear on documents from previous real estate transactions that are linked to Karp.
The nearly 10,000-square-foot newly built home sits on San Marino Island, one of the exclusive Venetian Islands in Biscayne Bay. A YouTube video of the home posted by listing agent Dina Goldentayer showcases the property’s waterfront and pool.
Goldentayer declined to comment to Business Insider. Representatives for Palantir and an attorney for Karp did not respond to requests for comment.
Last month, Palantir announced it was moving its headquarters to Miami from Denver. The company has not revealed publicly why it’s making the move. Before setting up in Denver in 2020, Palantir was headquartered in Silicon Valley.
“Our company was founded in Silicon Valley,” Karp wrote in an investor letter that year. “But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments.”
One of Karp’s Palantir cofounders, Peter Thiel, bought a home on one of Florida’s Venetian Islands in 2020, and his VC firm, Thiel Capital, later opened an office in Miami.
It’s not clear if Karp, who is worth $15.8 billion, according to Bloomberg, is moving to Miami full-time. He owns hundreds of acres of land in New Hampshire and, last year, made headlines for spending $120 million on a monastery outside Aspen, Colorado.
A handful of California billionaires have recently purchased properties in Miami, including Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg. The real estate shopping spree comes amid an initiative in the state to get a wealth tax on November’s ballot. If passed, California residents with a net worth of more than $1 billion would be subject to a one-time 5% tax on their wealth.
Florida famously has a no-income tax policy written into its constitution.
“California’s a beautiful state, but now, because of all the political situations and all the tax laws, it’s just coming in our favor,” luxury real estate agent Saddy Abaunza Delgado previously told Business Insider.
Similarly, Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, announced a move to Miami earlier this week — on the same day a millionaire’s tax passed Washington state’s House of Representatives.
The rush has caused prices to balloon in the 305. Zuckerberg’s $170 million purchase earlier this month on the island of Indian Creek set a Miami record.
“The influx of billionaires from California” will cause “escalation of the market,” Ana Bozovic, a founder of Analytics Miami, previously told Business Insider. “The market ceiling keeps rising,”
