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Add The California Post on Google The likely buyer of a jaw-dropping Bay Area estate inspired by Lake Como has been unmasked as an obscure 31-year old mega-millionaire who’s cashing in big on the AI boom.
“Tony” Yuhuai Wu, a co-founder of Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, has been linked to the $70 million, 12-acre property in the San Mateo County town of Hillsborough that shattered local sale records, the San Francisco Standard reported.
The property at 3000 Ralston Avenue is modeled after a lakeside Italian villa.
Images of the secluded property, dubbed Villa de Verano, show off its a vast front lawn, reflecting pool and lush trees shrouding the 12,000-square-foot, six-bedroom main home and 4,600-square-foot guest house.
Even more eye-popping is the sports complex featuring a tennis court, golf course, putting green, horseshoe pit, and pickleball, volleyball, and bocce courts. There even is a 150-seat amphitheater, a reflection pool, a koi pond, a large saltwater aquarium, and fountains inspired by the Bellagio casino.
The seller was private equity investor Ted Kruttschnitt and his wife.
Daikon no Hana Capital LLC is the new listed property owner, who was represented by an investment firm official named Jia Xu.
Xu is reportedly tied to only one other major property transaction, a $12 million Los Altos home bought by Wu.
The LLC’s manager, attorney Steven Anderson, is also tied to the Los Altos home. Anderson put that property into a family trust shortly before the Hillsborough sale closed on Aug. 6, the Standard reported.
Wu is a scientist who, despite his young age, has an impressive resume that includes gigs at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He then co-founded xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence project that spawned the controversial AI tool Grok, which is embedded in the social platform X.
In February, Wu and another co-founder resigned from xAI.
That was mere days after SpaceX acquired xAI at a whopping combined valuation of $1.25 trillion.
“It’s time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” Wu said then on X. He later joined the board of an aging-focused startup.
Wu was likely buoyed by SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO, which minted many new billionaires and made Musk a trillionaire.
The $70 million sale is among some of the highest-ever recorded in the Bay Area. Musk himself sold his Hillsborough mansion for $30 million in 2021.
Laurene Powell Job spent $71 million in 2024 to buy a home in San Francisco’s Billionaire Row, while SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son made a $117.5 million purchase in Woodside.