[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1nhb6q9/comment...
I honestly saw it was $15million and figured that's a bargain for the estate of one of the most esteemed directors of his generation. Relative to his level of fame and respect, his monetary assets do seem low.
But then this certainly matches the public perception of Lynch. He made the things that he wanted to make, not the things that were guaranteed to sell. I'm sure commercial success was important to him, but there were lots of paths he could have taken that would have lead to a lot more.
Many, many people in CA that live in expensive homes are in this situation. It's what Prop 13 wrought. Variously, in my neighborhood, old people are paying a small fraction of the property tax that I do, and their house is worth a lot of money, but they have almost nothing, living on their social security check, month to month.
I'm not saying Lynch was living on SSI, but given his movies and what we know of how much they made, the story told by his daughter is very plausible.
Assuming they own the house outright, that absolutely does qualify as wealthy.
> I didn't say it wouldn't. I said it didn't qualify as ready cash.
I think you did say it didn't qualify as wealthy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45301176):
> What people normally mean by wealth is easy access to cash. Someone that owns a $15M house and has very little other liquid assets is not poor, but they definitely don't qualify as wealthy.
Anyway, whatever it is, I think litigating Lynch's level of wealth on HN is probably not the most useful direction for this comment thread.
Anyone who gets a mortgage on a house is also investing other peoples' money. Using a credit card is spending other peoples' money. Buying a car on time is spending other peoples' money.
When I ask people this question most will respond with pay in cash so you don't lose money paying a mortgage. The real answer it exploit loop holes in the laws with your gain financial position.
1) Open a trust with the money. 2) Use that trust for banking and make it your mortgage lender. 3) Gain tax deductions for having a mortgage and put tax dollars in your own pocket just by shifting money around in a legal creative accounting method.
The wealthy use loop holes that can be exploited only with money to maximize the hoarding.
How does one accumulate wealth with hoarding it?
> The wealthy use loop holes that can be exploited only with money to maximize the hoarding.
You'll have to be more specific about that. Most deductions and credits phase out with increasing income.
You do realize that the rich loan out to themselves via shell corporations or trusts. The only mobility of money is putting tax dollars into the wealth hands.
Just because a wealth person bought it does not mean someone else wouldn't.
The wealthy can also use their buying power to reduce the value of the sale and harm the seller. Kroger has around 40% market share to throw their weight around a reduce the selling power of the farmer and increase cost to the consumer. So the farmer makes less all because of threat to not buy from in a market that keeps having less and less competition.
Have you had to give free labor in millions of dollars so your company could gain access to one of the big name companies on Wall-street. I have and it just highlight the inequality in wealth at a personal and corporate level.
Even Steve Jobs used his wealth of Apple to buy up companies cheap at discounted rates. I cannot find a the video any more but it talks about how a company was being bought by Apple. Steve Jobs, at the meeting, asked the company's CEO why am I buying your company for $XXX,XXX. I think it should only cost $50,000 less. CEO said there is an agreement again. Jobs, I could just not buy it.
How about the art scam loop hole.
1) Pay an artist $1000 to create a piece via trust or another organization you own. 2) Sell the at auction and buy it for yourself for $30,000. 3) Donate the art work to charity. 4) Turn a $1000 into a $30,000 tax deductible with more creative accounting.
This is not the only artwork scam. [1]
There are loop holes that wealth people pay lawyers, accounts, full time staff to do full time as a job. Exploit the laws for personal gain to hoard wealth. [0] Panama Papers even had their methods leaked and the names of their shell companies.
Another great use of a shell company is the ability remove liability from the wealth onto a corporate entity that can easily dissolve in bankruptcy and shed the liability. Laws often are designed to ease the burden of liability from companies while keeping on individuals.
Again how do you gain wealth with out hording it? Are stocks wealth, is property wealth, are bonds wealth?
Let say you own 40% of an industry and work to gain 70%. Have you not increased your industrial hoarding by 30%? Even though it is an investment it is till hoarding.
How about stocks, can you hoard those to consolidate and hoard wealth?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [1] https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f...
> Even Steve Jobs used his wealth of Apple to buy up companies cheap at discounted rates.
Meaning there was someone willing to sell it to him.
> Exploit the laws for personal gain to hoard wealth
They're still not hoarding wealth, they're investing it.
There are trillions of dollar hidden by the wealth to prevent paying taxes / their fair share.
There are no good wealthy people in the world because they hoard not share.
Investing means you must hoard. Keep owing an product or service that has a limit resource is hoarding. Want to invest in housing, one must hoard house to make a profit.
You must sell a house to make a profit.
Renting and leasing economics prove your statement to be a fallacy. Airbnb wealth is built on not selling houses. Retaining bought houses increases the value because it increases the rarity. By restricting home ownership the rental properties monthly prices can be increased to reflect a manufactured market.
De Beers is a great example of how hoarding wealth grows wealth. [0] They hoard diamonds to create an artificial rarity market. This gives the ability to increase prices. Say you have a type of diamond category with 10% natural occurrence. You hoard 90% and only release 0.5% or less of that category. You just increase the rarity artificially and drove that category in price like a rocket. Even if your competition will increase prices to match or be just a few dollars below. Competition has to because they do not have access to the diamonds hoarded by De Beers.
How would you take that 90% of the hoarded 90% category diamond and make it profitable instead of just sitting on the selves? How about grinding some of the them up and selling them for diamond edge saws and bits?
My definition of _Wealthy_ encompasses individuals (you, me, human HN users) and groups of individuals (trust, companies, Apple, Meta, HN, ...).
The first thing I'd do is sell.
Me too. And it looks like that’s what the heirs are doing too.
But for David Lynch, I can see why he might want to live amongst the people involved in financing, making, and distributing movies. Similar to how founders move to the expensive Bay area to be near VCs, talent, etc.
You can do something similar if you buy a house and keep buying any neighboring house that comes up for sale (and renting them out, perhaps).
You'd need a little over 9% of stable returns over that 40 year timeframe to hit that $15M target.
My calculation makes that about $9m over 40 years.
The entertainment industry is filled with a lot of more-famous-than-rich people. By these numbers David Lynch (at 78) was probably as wealthy as 1000s of random (and anonymous) successful Mag7 SWEs are at retirement.
See Will Smith.
Care to speculate on how many struggling actors sharing flats are fallen celebrities?
The Will Smiths of Hollywood are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
The phenomenon at play in “Hollywood standards” poorly reflecting the totality of the Hollywood population are winner-take-all income/attention distribution and cultivation of an illusion of opulence to satisfy audience demand — not licentiousness and depravity amongst entertainment industry personnel.
Why would suddenly famous actors be any more savvy?
See the documentary "Val" on Val Kilmer.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, Hollywood is not exclusively populated with rich and famous celebrities.
Hopefully whoever buys this gem doesn't tear it down to build some modern boxy McMansion.
What you don’t realize if you’ve never spent time around those ridiculous properties is the amount of upkeep everything takes if you don’t want the indoors to become gross and dusty and the outdoors a wild jungle.
When you have that kind of surface area, you’re not taking care of all the cleaning and maintenance yourself in a few hours once a week. There are countless gardeners/cleaners/repair workers/etc on the property. Nothing peaceful about it.
And you have to also be okay with the labor dynamics of employing such an army of personnel which in LA is… interesting.
Most of the maintenance is done when the owners is not in residence”.
Here, it's just an easy 1%, so the math isn't hard. I'm not sure if other states have highly variable rates on a county-by-county basis, or if other states also tend to have consistent rates within their borders.
The rate on my tax bill is 6.03%. But that's on a "net taxable value" that's about 40% of what I paid for the place 15 years ago, and maybe 25% of what I could get for the place now. So the rate is effectively 2.5% of what I paid, or 1.4% of what I could get. The total tax has also gone up 26% since 2020, increasing by more each year, but I don't know whether they've raised the rate each year or the valuation.
It's probably possible to find out how it works, but there's not much point. It is what it is, so you pay it or leave. No one lives in Illinois for the tax rates.
If there is not inflation and value compressions kicks in, then there are some people who will be ... burdened.
I dunno, I just find that a little bit cool and interesting.
This is 2.3 acres with 3 homes on it and its 15 million.
Although looks like it needs some work.
All of these dynamics can be figured out pretty easy thanks to prop 13, Californias insane income taxes, and the job market... if you can figure out a way to buy a house, hold on to it for dear life, never move, and work your entire life to pay for it. The only thing more consistent than people in the northeast wanting to move to California are death and taxes, which coincidentally prop 13 covers. lol
> A normal, dual income, middle class working family
> (Doctor + teacher, Lawyer and a Doctor, Business exec and Accountant, etc)
That’s not the middle class.
If we use only lifestyle indicators, such as making enough money to save and retire comfortably, having enough money to go on vacations and to restaurants frequently, and being able to buy a house, the middle class is shrinking.
Middle class is people who trade labor for money, but who sometimes have a (full or partial) ownership stake in the business they work for. They are what marxists might call the "petit bourgeoisie".
Doctors and lawyers are often middle class (petit bourgeois) but also can be part of the better paid, highly educated segment of the working class (proletarian intelligentsia). Economic class isn’t about job title or even really strictly income, though it correlates to both.
The main point I was making is that doctors and lawyers (and tech workers!) are not members of some "upper" or "capitalist" (depending on which terms you prefer) class, irrespective of their income, because the value they collect is primarily a result of their labor.
The sense in which they are a “middle class is quite distinct from the usual American sense of “middle class” which is usually an income-defined band centered around median income which is overwhelming part of the working class in the scheme in which the petit bourgeoisie are the “middle class”.
[0] But I think most people who use the scheme now would recognize more diversity, including the form probably most common to modern white-collar professionals, where rather than applying their own labor to their own capital, a lot of the petit bourgeiosie both rents labor out to other capitalists in the manner typical of the proletariat and has capital to which rented labor is applied in the manner of the haut bourgeoisie, with both being significant to their interaction with the economy (distinguishing them from workers with incidental capital holdings or capitalists who incidentally have a “paid job” which they could take or leave without meaningfully impacting their lifestyle or overall engagement in the economy.)
As an example, the effective rate when making $200k is 25% including federal taxes. That's great. You get to live in a productive and supportive society. The only issue I see is that housing is expensive and $150k, as much as it can support a comfortable lifestyle, would be insufficient to ALSO buy a home. But what we're talking about here is a separate issue from housing.
(your state taxes when making $100k would only be $2k, to preempt that retort)
That being said, California is an ungovernable mess where state-constitutional amendments dictate a huge percentage of taxation and spending. It'd otherwise be a great place to live if real estate prices were somehow brought into line, but alas...
Also you are never going to get the stale smoke out of there!
Nicotine yellow everything.
We pumped it full of ozone. That did a good job destinking. Then we painted everything with killz.
We also sterilized the basement with uv deathlights.
And just maybe it symbolized something for him. Low maybe.
> When I get up, I have a cappuccino - that's breakfast. I don't have any food till lunch. I get into phases where I'll have the same thing every day. Lately I've been having feta cheese, olive oil and vinegar, tomatoes, and some tuna fish mixed together. Before that I was having tuna fish on lettuce and cottage cheese, but I got tired of that in about three months. I once had the same thing for lunch every day for seven years - a Bob's Big Boy chocolate shake and coffee at 2:30 every afternoon.
Also, I think a lot of us can relate to this:
>If left alone, my natural waking hours would probably be I 0 A.M. till 3 A.M
My MCM kitchen is large enough to host but the cooking area is like this galley. I love to cook. Having lived in a home with with a huge open kitchen, I vastly prefer this galley style. It really does save time. When you’re doing a few things at once, a large kitchen with a lot of space between stations is a liability.
By way of contrast, this is listed for 2.5x the money on the other side of the canyon:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1851-N-Stanley-Ave-Los-An...
(Although I guess it isn't really Jackie Treehorn's place, given that the listing says it was built in 2023.)
note that mulholland dr is just up the street from the house. this overlook is worth a visit: https://maps.app.goo.gl/muMirzaSJsEt9YnR7
That is because some mid-century developer built it as middle-class housing. A middle-class family moved in and had kids. They continued to live there while property values soared. So the kids grew up in neighborhood where all the houses cost millions of dollars.
I used to know an elderly coupled who lived in one of the nicer parts of Malibu. Both were school teachers. They bought the house when Malibu was cheap because of the "horrible" commute along scenic Highway 1 and the lack of sewers in Malibu. Before the fires, their house was probably worth over $10 million (thanks, prop 13!).
When they passed, the kids couldn't afford to keep the house (even with the feudal property tax system in California, which allows inheritance of low property tax assessments like some kind of medieval title of nobility) because the kids were also just normal middle class people.
So, to answer your question: In some sense, yes, almost by definition, the family of person you're responding to does have generational wealth (in the form of the house). But in a different sense, no, because it's quite likely that they have nowhere near the amount liquid assets implied by the phrase "generational wealth".
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/johnny-carsons-...
The house and grounds are beautiful.
Scrolling down reveals a picture of it when Carson lived in it. Kind of a dump.
You’d be surprised how hard it is find houses like this. Many of them have been gutted and rehabbed into “open” floor plans, with a lot of white paint and white barn doors.
This is unfortunate because house builders back then really knew how to create distinctive spaces.
This home has a lot of beautiful light, feels very airy and open, and yet feels very distinctive and characteristic.
Probably the biggest drawback and challenge will be, as other commenters have pointed out, that Lynch smoked packs a day and getting that out will be tough.
Otherwise there absolutely buyers who would love this home.
Personally I prefer the Millard House which is similar and probably an inspiration. The Millard House is the archetype Minecraft House.
Personally I have always liked his style and Falling Water was my favourite house when I was young.
It belays a level of stupidity that is difficult to ignore. The reality is its an Incan Pyramid inspired home.
His client didn't listen, and in two years was forced to liquidate the house.
What you pay for a house is only the beginning of what you're going to pay.
In my personal opinion, this house ugly AF