Twitter’s Omid Kordestani Buys the $13.5 Million House Next Door

James McClain
·3 min read

A secluded estate in the tiny yet ultra-desirable Silicon Valley town of Atherton, Calif. was recently sold for $13.5 million, and records indicate the off-market buyer is the tech billionaire next door: Omid Kordestani, the Iranian-born, recently-departed executive chairman of Twitter and one of Google’s very first employees.

Built in 1995 and tucked away at the very end of a whisper-quiet cul-de-sac, the 6,300 sq. ft. home sports oddball architecture that is best described as ’90s modern, with a vaguely mausoleum-like twist. Out front, the structure’s forbidding façade shields five bedrooms and a total of 5.5 baths, according to public records.

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Because the house was never publicly offered for sale, further details are mostly non-existent, but the property was long owned by a local non-famous family and also includes a backyard swimming pool, poolside cabana, and grassy lawns. Like many Atherton estates, the lot is surrounded by a mature, forest-like wall of evergreen trees.

Since early 2008, Kordestani’s main residence has been the Atherton estate immediately next door, a 9,000 sq. ft. contemporary mansion on a flat acre that he bought for $15 million. Combined, math experts may note that the two side-by-side parcels offer two acres of land and more than 15,000 square feet of living space — all in one of the country’s most expensive towns.

Now in his late 50s, Kordestani made the bulk of his billion-dollar fortune from his time at Google, which he joined in 1999, becoming the then-fledgling Internet startup’s its 11th employee. In 2015, he joined Twitter as the company’s executive chairman, a position he has held until earlier this summer. The veteran tech whiz has been married to philanthropist and former Google director Gisel Kordestani since 2011.

Nice as Kordestani’s Atherton compound may be, it still pales in size comparison to the estate of his ex-wife Bita Daryabari. That property, tucked away in a different corner of Atherton, spans more than 5 acres and includes a titanic Mediterranean-style compound that was acquired in two separate transactions in the mid-2000s for nearly $40 million, according to records. Upon the couple’s 2009 divorce, Daryabari was granted full ownership of the estate, which now ranks as one of Atherton’s most valuable properties.

And besides his newly-expanded, $30 million Atherton compound, Kordestani also owns a penthouse at 15 Central Park West, famously one of New York City’s most desirable residential buildings, where some of his neighbors include hedge fund mogul Daniel Loeb and Garmin founder Min Kao.

Kordestani is also one of the only American homeowners at the infamous One Hyde Park, an extraordinarily pricey gated complex in London’s Knightsbridge neighborhood, where many of the 80-or-so units are owned by a multitude of Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and Nigerian oil magnates. The high-security enclave, where prices start around £20 million and whose shadowy homeowners were the subject of a extensively-researched Vanity Fair story, has frequently been labeled the “world’s most expensive residential building.”

The DeLeon Team at DeLeon Realty handled the Atherton transaction.

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