Twelve years, $70m in, $70m asked: the cleanest available number on trophy property as a store of value Markus Persson · Beverly Hills · listing reported 30 October
- Who
- Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of Minecraft, who sold Mojang to Microsoft in 2014.
- What he did
- Listed his Beverly Hills house at $70m — the same nominal figure he paid for it in December 2014, when it set a Beverly Hills record. Listed with Aaron Kirman and Katia De Los Reyes of Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California, and Branden and Rayni Williams of Beverly Hills Estates. He added a recording studio and a private nightclub during his ownership.
- The document
- Trade report dated 30 October 2026. An asking price, not a sale. No listing agreement or price history beyond the 2014 purchase is reachable.
Consensus read
A famous owner puts a famous house on the market at the number everyone remembers. Trophy real estate holds its value: he paid $70m, he wants $70m, nothing lost. The coverage frames it as a landmark listing rather than a result.
Contrarian read
Nominal flat over twelve years is a severe real loss, and this is one of the few trophy holdings where both ends of the trade are public, so it is a measurement you can actually use. Against roughly 41.5% cumulative US inflation since 2014, $70m then is about $99m now. Asking the old price is asking for roughly 29% less purchasing power than he put in — before brokerage, before twelve years of property tax, and before the studio and the nightclub.
Evidence that discriminates
- $100 of December 2014 money is about $141.50 today. That single ratio converts a headline of “held its value” into a real drawdown of about 29% on the purchase price alone. It discriminates because the consensus reading depends entirely on comparing two nominal numbers.
- An ask is not a print. The consensus reading treats $70m as a valuation. It is a request. The discriminating test arrives when it closes, and until then the only hard numbers in this item are the 2014 price and the inflation ratio.
- One cost everyone assumes does not apply. Los Angeles’s Measure ULA transfer tax — 5.5% on sales above about $10.9m, paid by the seller — is a City of Los Angeles tax. Beverly Hills is a separate city. So the most-cited drag on an LA mega-sale is not in this stack, and saying otherwise would be the same sloppiness in the other direction.
Inference, labelled: at a Proposition 13 base set by a $70m purchase and the usual ~1.1% effective rate rising 2% a year, property tax alone runs on the order of $10m across twelve years. That is my arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a disclosed figure; the actual assessed value and rate are not reachable here.
What would falsify me
A close materially above $70m — which would mean the asset did compound, just slowly and lumpily. Or evidence that the 2014 price included furnishings, art or an adjacent parcel not in today’s listing, which would break the like-for-like comparison the whole item rests on. If either turns up, the real-loss framing goes.
PatternPaired with the Saghian entry above, the two items point the same way from opposite sides of the trade: the buyer got 38% off an underwriting, and the seller is asking for nominal cost after twelve years. Neither is a statement about where prices go next. Both are statements about what this asset class has actually returned to named individuals with dated entry and exit points — which is the only kind of evidence on trophy property that is not somebody’s index.