00:00 Indian Creek is a 294-acre man-made barrier island with just 41 homes all on one road,
00:06 Indian Creek Island Road.
00:08 The population is tallied at a total of just 84 people in the last census,
00:13 which includes a host of high-profile residents and billionaire landowners.
00:17 Hi, everybody. I'm Giacomo Tonini, a reporter here at Forbes.
00:23 Today, I'm joined by my colleague, Phoebe Liu,
00:25 who recently penned an article about Indian Creek Island,
00:28 a luxurious billionaire bunker in Miami.
00:31 Hi, Phoebe. Welcome. How are you?
00:32 Hi, Giacomo. I'm good. Thank you for having me.
00:34 So, Forbes has published various articles about millionaires and billionaires on Indian Creek.
00:41 Can you tell me a little bit more about the article and sort of what prompted it?
00:45 Yeah, so I guess Indian Creek is a man-made island, as you said, off the coast of Miami.
00:50 It was originally, I guess, built in the early 1900s
00:55 when they dredged the bay that it's bordering.
00:58 And no one really lived there for a long time.
01:01 Then, during the Great Depression, all these really wealthy people from out of town were like,
01:06 "Let's go make a retreat for ourselves when everyone's suffering on this island."
01:11 So, in the 1930s, they kind of built it out with the 41 homes.
01:16 They made like a country club and a golf course and incorporated it in 1939.
01:22 So, ever since then, it's kind of been branded this exclusive getaway
01:27 for really wealthy people/famous people kind of looking for a place to be, I guess, if that makes sense.
01:36 Yeah, so I guess the reason we decided to look into this again right now
01:41 is because Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who's currently the world's third richest person,
01:47 announced earlier this month that he was moving to Miami
01:52 and had recently purchased two really expensive properties in this very exclusive island.
01:58 Can you kind of say more about why specifically this place?
02:01 Yeah, so, you know, we wrote this article together,
02:04 and the privacy, I think, is the biggest draw, right?
02:08 There's only one road, one small bridge in and out of the island,
02:13 which is guarded by the police force of the island, which is very small.
02:16 And another potential reason could be taxes, right?
02:19 Florida has no state income tax, has no state capital gains tax,
02:23 unlike the state of Washington, where Bezos has obviously resided for a long time.
02:28 However, you know, a lot of these very wealthy billionaires are so wealthy,
02:32 they don't necessarily see the tax benefits as a reason.
02:37 But when you look at Bezos, right, you know, who does sell stock in Amazon from time to time,
02:42 the capital gains tax burden is definitely a consideration.
02:46 And so while we're on the topic of Jeff Bezos, Phoebe, that was sort of the reason for this article.
02:52 What are some of the other reasons he moved there?
02:54 Sort of what else is surrounding this decision?
02:56 Yeah, so I guess I think on November 2nd, he made this really sentimental Instagram post
03:02 showing the first place he moved to when he founded Amazon in Seattle,
03:06 and saying that it had basically been really good to him,
03:10 but he was moving because he was essentially returning to his roots.
03:15 He went to high school there, and his family, he said his parents live there,
03:18 and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, spends a lot of time in Miami and loves Miami.
03:23 So he made this really sentimental post saying that he was moving for personal reasons,
03:27 which of course is a factor, and people have been like, "Oh, we really respect someone who wants to be with their family."
03:34 But of course, other people have speculated that it's because of tax reasons.
03:40 Interestingly, I guess, I think exactly a week after he announced that,
03:45 he registered to vote in Florida, which is, I guess, a way of proving that you live there,
03:50 and that's one of the things that would make you pay Florida taxes.
03:56 Not saying that this is necessarily the reason, but speculation-wise,
04:00 like Washington State recently implemented a, I think, 7% capital gains tax.
04:06 Over the course of Bezos' lifetime, he had sold, I think, $27 billion worth of Amazon stock,
04:14 and if that capital gains tax had been in effect that entire time,
04:17 that's like $2 billion in taxes that he would have had to pay.
04:22 And that new 7% tax went into effect at the beginning of 2022,
04:28 and I guess, interestingly enough, this could be coincidence,
04:32 but the last time Bezos sold Amazon stock was at the very end of 2021,
04:37 and he's basically only gifted stock since then.
04:40 And I think CNBC reported citing anonymous sources,
04:45 but saying that Bezos could be, or is thinking about selling more Amazon stock soon,
04:51 which kind of the timing all coincides, so that definitely could be a reason.
04:56 But again, at the end of the day, he has so much money that taxes really shouldn't matter,
05:02 but that's like something people have been speculating.
05:04 Right. And of course, Bezos is not the only very wealthy resident on the island.
05:11 You know, when we were reporting the story, we looked at several other people
05:14 who are very wealthy that we know live on the island, perhaps most famously
05:19 Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Tom Brady.
05:22 But if we're looking right at the sort of the higher end of the net worth scale,
05:25 we have Carl Icahn, car dealership tycoon Norman Braman,
05:30 whose wife Irma actually serves on the four member town council on Indian Creek.
05:36 We have the Emir of Qatar also reportedly lives there and several other billionaires,
05:43 you know, airline mogul, Rakesh Gangwal as well, several other billionaires.
05:49 And they all own, you know, about, you know, one property each.
05:54 Generally, we have Bezos too.
05:56 Then we have Jaime Galinsky-Bacal, who is a Colombian billionaire
06:01 who owns the highest number with five properties and has sort of gradually built up his holdings
06:07 on the island over the years.
06:09 And I think one thing we found with Bezos as well, right,
06:14 is that frequently in almost actually all of the cases,
06:18 these properties are not owned directly in their names, right?
06:21 They're owned through LLCs, through trusts.
06:24 And when we were reporting on the story, right, we were trying to figure out,
06:29 okay, we believe these properties are owned by Bezos, but how do we actually prove it?
06:33 Because the name isn't in the documents.
06:36 But we use sort of a combination of deed records, right, in Miami-Dade County,
06:43 corporate registries, right, in Florida and offshore entities for some of the other billionaires
06:48 and wealthy people who own homes there.
06:50 And then also sort of just good old-fashioned reporting, right,
06:53 talking to sources who know the island well and others who helped us together,
06:59 put together the fact that all these individuals own these homes, right?
07:05 There are others that we're still looking into.
07:08 And it's really interesting to see sort of the breadth, I think,
07:12 of the kinds of people who own homes here.
07:14 You have the billionaires we mentioned.
07:15 We also have, you know, wealthy Haitian businessmen, corporate BGOs.
07:19 We have a Serbian media tycoon, Dragan Šorlak, and other people who, while being wealthy,
07:28 probably aren't on our list of billionaires, right?
07:30 So it's really interesting to see the kinds of people who own homes there, when they bought it, right,
07:36 people who bought 10, 20 years ago paid a lot less than Bezos did.
07:41 And, you know, I also wanted to talk a little bit about sort of what are the reasons, right,
07:50 that people might own these through LLCs or trusts.
07:55 Yeah, so you can definitely say more about this as well,
07:58 but from talking to some real estate sources in the area and otherwise,
08:04 they've been saying that these kind of really wealthy, really famous people
08:10 trying to buy this increasingly expensive property,
08:13 I think property prices on the island have more than doubled in the last 10 years, something like that.
08:19 They've, like, increasingly wanted privacy, I guess, in part to prevent people like us from writing about,
08:26 like, where they live and tracking them in that way.
08:30 So I think at least one of Bezos' property sales on Indian Creek Island was reportedly off market.
08:40 And people who work in the industry have said that it's been increasingly common to,
08:45 like, as you said earlier, like not list someone's name at all, like anywhere in the documents.
08:52 And it's just making it harder to track because it's tying in with the theme of the island
08:57 being kind of a private and exclusive getaway.
09:00 Yeah, and sometimes it takes, in one case, we look at court filings to be able to confirm
09:05 because there was a court case between a contractor and the LLC that owned it.
09:09 We can figure out that way. And obviously, right, LLCs have the privacy, right, that we talked about.
09:14 And I think with the trusts, from what we found in our reporting,
09:18 depending on what kind of trust they are, can also have some other benefits for the owners, right,
09:23 in terms of potentially shielding the asset from creditors or anyone else who might, you know,
09:28 be able to take over that asset or something to go wrong.
09:31 And also potentially some tax benefits, right, in terms of inheritance and the like,
09:35 if they're passing it on to their children.
09:38 So it's been great talking to you, Phoebe, and talking more about the story.
09:42 Likewise.
09:43 My last question is, you know, given everything we've talked about in the story and what we found out,
09:48 would you want to live on Indian Creek Island?
09:50 Yeah, absolutely not.
09:53 I, for one, could not afford a house on the island.
09:56 Yeah, me neither.
09:57 And I guess not really looking for privacy.
10:01 It would be cool for reporting in terms of getting to see what these people that we cover do on the island.
10:08 But yeah, other than that, no.
10:10 [ Silence ]
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