ORANGE COUNTY \u2014 The Business Journal\u2019s annual OC\u2019s Wealthiest list reveals six key insights:
\u2022 Orange County\u2019s 40 richest added roughly $70 billion to their fortunes in the past year, lifting their combined net worth 28% to $326 billion. It was their third straight strong year, following gains of 43% in 2025 and 25% in 2024. If their combined wealth were the GDP of a nation, it would rank next to Algeria and just behind Finland.
\u2022 We raised the cutoff from $1.25 billion to $1.5 billion. This new bar meant the elimination of previous members such as Anthony Hsieh whose loanDepot mortgage firm is suffering the wrath of high interest rates.
\u2022 The higher bar meant we didn\u2019t find anyone new to add to this list. We\u2019re keeping an eye on a few that we believe may get closer if the economy booms this coming year.
\u2022 As the old saying goes, the richest are indeed getting richer. In 2016, the rich\u2019s worth totaled $72.5 billion and we found 45 entries above that year\u2019s $250 million cutoff. Only 14 were above $1.5 billion a decade ago.
\u2022 It would have been quite difficult for any wealthy person to lose money in the past year, since the S&P 500 rose 21% for the year ended June 30. Our list only has two members whose wealth declined due to falling stock prices.
\u2022 The people on this OC list are not the idle rich. Out of 40 ranked, 34 are active in some form of business. And we believe the other six are active in the nonprofit world.<\/p>\n
The Calculus
We know the wealthy have many sophisticated portfolio or private equity managers who may have outperformed the S&P 500. Still, we were conservative, applying a 10% increase to several entries, assuming they have diversified into a variety of classes that are safer and more tax-efficient than the S&P 500. For those who own publicly traded companies, we were able to get a better sense of their year. As usual, we estimated a smaller increase for real estate-heavy entries, since real estate REITs only gained around 5% over the past year.
If they are active in business, we would increase those percentages to over 10% unless they had a notable setback. We compared our rankings with those of Bloomberg and Forbes.
This week\u2019s issue ranks 40 billionaires who either reside or have homes in Orange County \u2013 or run a business here. We count 12 as \u201cweekend wealthy,\u201d who, while they don\u2019t reside in Orange County full-time, have homes here. See page 34 for the start of our special report.<\/p>\n
The Oddest Valuations
The wackiest story about the rich in the past year is the worth of Kingston Technology. Are the two founders and owners, John Tu and David Sun, each worth $12.3 billion as we said on last year\u2019s list? Or have they soared to $30 billion each, according to Forbes, or an astronomical $70 billion, according to the usually reliable Bloomberg?
Read our front-page story as we lay the groundwork for what we believe the Kingston duo is worth.
Other notables on our list:
\u2022 Henry Samueli retained the top spot as shares of Broadcom Inc.\u2014the successor company to the Broadcom he co-founded with fellow billionaire No. 7 Henry Nicholas III\u2014continued to soar on demand for AI chips.
The company\u2019s market cap in May touched $2 trillion, making it the world\u2019s seventh\u2019s most valuable publicly traded company.
\u2022 \u00adPerennial No. 1 Irvine Co. owner Donald Bren, the real estate mogul who has led our list almost every year since it began in 2001, fell to No. 3 last year and is now down to No. 5. Not to worry that he\u2019s suffering from office tower fallouts. We still believe his worth climbed 5% this year because of his big exposure to apartments and Class A offices in hot spots like La Jolla and Silicon Valley.
\u2022 No. 28 Bill Gross, the Bond King who retired in 2019, is intent on building the wealth of his family foundation to $1 billion from last year\u2019s $865 million.
\u201cI said last year that I was working to grow the assets of the William, Jeff and Jennifer Gross Family Foundation, and promised \u2018$1 billion here it comes.\u2019 Well, almost there,\u201d Gross told the Business Journal.
\u201cWhile the size of assets was never the goal, the important thing is that it allows myself, my son Jeff and daughter Jennifer to expand our giving further. Crossing the $1 billion milestone is an important part of that since it means more to share and makes us one of the largest family foundations in Orange County and California.\u201d
Gross said the foundation donated $27 million to 53 charities last year, a record annual amount of giving for the foundation, much of it distributed in Orange County to the Hoag Hospital Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Orange Coast, Orangewood Foundation, and other local causes.
\u2022 No. 10 Palmer Luckey\u2019s Anduril Industries was valued at $61 billion in May, double the valuation it received last year. While we estimated Palmer\u2019s wealth grew by 50% to $11.2 billion, that doesn\u2019t stop him from preferring commercial coach seats to private planes.
\u201cWe only cover coach travel for our employees,\u201d Luckey said earlier this year on a videocast. \u201cIf I\u2019m going to ask my own employees to do it, I\u2019m going to do it too.
\u201cI love the back of the plane on the window. Nobody bothers you.
\u201cMy grandpa was a pilot for 40 years for United. I grew up around commercial airlines. There is a certain romanticism to mass market, mass available air travel. What an incredible thing. America did it. We figured out how to make it economically viable and we build everyone\u2019s airplanes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORANGE COUNTY \u2014 The Business Journal\u2019s annual OC\u2019s Wealthiest list reveals six key insights:\u2022 Orange County\u2019s 40 richest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-413861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}