Larry Ellison reportedly paid $173 million for a Palm Beach estate, breaking the state record for priciest home ever sold

• Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison just made his second major real estate purchase in Florida.
• The $173 million deal sets a residential real estate record in the state.

Larry Ellison just set a new real estate record.

The Oracle billionaire recently dropped $173 million on an estate in Manalapan, Florida, a town just south of West Palm Beach. The deal sets a record for the largest residential real estate transaction in state history, The Real Deal reports.

The compound, which spans about 16 acres, has a long history of billionaire custodians: Ellison bought it from Jim Clark, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape. Prior to that, the estate belonged to the Ziff publishing family.

Clark paid $94 million for the estate when he bought it in March 2021. Like many other millionaires and billionaires, Clark and his family planned to spend the bulk of their time in Florida during the pandemic, but have since opted to stay in New York instead, he told The Wall Street Journal.

That decision, combined with potential economic turmoil ahead, prompted Clark to put the property back on the market, according to the Journal.

Ellison will inherit a sprawling compound that contains a 62,200-square-foot main house, a seven-bedroom guesthouse, two beach cottages, and a manager's house — connected via a tunnel system. The estate has 1,200 feet of ocean frontage and also contains a dock, pool, sports complex, and small golf course, the Journal reports.

The property is Ellison's second major real estate purchase in Florida in the last 14 months. In April 2021, Ellison bought an $80 million mansion, also in Palm Beach. But after news of the deal broke, Ellison informed Oracle employees that he planned to tear the house down and had no plans to move to Florida.

Ellison has been living in Lana'i, Hawaii — an island he mostly owns — since the early days of the pandemic, and it's a move that seems permanent. "I love it here and have no plans to move back to Florida, Texas, back to California ... or anywhere else," he told employees last year.

Worth roughly $84 billion, Ellison has built up an extensive real-estate portfolio that includes multimillion-dollar homes in San Francisco, Rhode Island, Japan, and Malibu, California, as well as one near Lake Tahoe.