Bill Gates Paid $38 Million To Buy An Entire Street In Palm Beach For Daughter's Equestrian Hobby — 'Gobbled Up Properties Like Pac-Man'

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Bill and Melinda French Gates back in 2011 dropped half a million dollars just to rent a house in Wellington, Florida—for four months. Why? Their then-teenage daughter, Jennifer Gates, was training to become one of the top show jumpers in the country. And while that alone sounds like a rich-kid fairytale, the next chapter is pure billionaire.
By 2016, Bill Gates had completed what one observer summed up perfectly to Daily Mail: "He gobbled up properties like Pac-Man." According to property records, Gates didn't just buy a home—he strategically snapped up nearly an entire street in the exclusive equestrian village. Starting with a $8.7 million horse farm purchase in 2013, he expanded piece by piece, ultimately spending around $38 million to claim 18 acres on and around Mallet Hill Court.
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The spree included a newly rebuilt mansion, a 20-stall barn, vacant lots, and multiple homes. Gates often paid two to three times the appraised value just to secure neighboring lots. As one seller, Stuart Roffman, put it, the street may have had a gate, but there was still too much buzz. "Between trucks, stable hands, grooms and house staff, that's a lot of people on a small street," he said.
So Gates did what only Bill Gates could—buy his daughter the privacy of her own equestrian neighborhood.
Jennifer's horse haven included:
A 4.5-acre ranch bought in 2013 for $8.7 million
A neighboring 4.5-acre property purchased for $13.5 million in 2016
Two vacant lots acquired for nearly $5 million
A 5.2-acre estate with barns and a home for $8.7 million
And a final 1.3-acre lot snapped up for $2.5 million
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But don't mistake this for unchecked indulgence. Melinda Gates made it very clear in a 2024 New York Times interview: "We absolutely did not just buy them things." She added, "It was much more of an upbringing like I grew up in. A very middle-class household where money did dictate whether I got an extra pair of shoes that year or not."
That might raise eyebrows when your daughter is training on one of the most elite circuits in the world with access to barns, paddocks, and a freshly renovated mansion. But Melinda stood firm. Their kids got allowances. They did chores. And they were explicitly told not to mention private jets to their classmates—because, apparently, that's where the line gets drawn.
Then again, maybe real estate didn't count. If horses were Jennifer's hobby, collecting multimillion-dollar homes may have just been considered part of the uniform.
Of course, the perks extended beyond Florida. When Jennifer graduated from Stanford in 2018, she didn't just get a diploma—she got a 124-acre equestrian estate in North Salem, New York, reportedly valued at $15.8 million. Spread across three parcels, the property offered both wide-open pastures and a convenient home base near New York City, where she'd eventually begin medical school.Jennifer, now 29, is married to Olympic show jumper Nayel Nassar and has officially traded in her med school scrubs for a residency badge. After graduating from medical school, she matched into the Pediatrics Research pathway at Mount Sinai—her first choice.
"Pediatrician incoming!!!" she wrote in a celebratory Instagram post, calling it a dream come true. So yes, she got the horse haven, the Harvard-level education, and now a shot at helping kids full-time—all while still staying active in the equestrian world.
As for Bill? He's been known to downplay the flash, once saying that beyond a certain point, "It's the same hamburger." Though in this case, that hamburger came with its own arena and a few million dollars' worth of paddocks on the side.
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This article Bill Gates Paid $38 Million To Buy An Entire Street In Palm Beach For Daughter's Equestrian Hobby — 'Gobbled Up Properties Like Pac-Man' originally appeared on Benzinga.com