Losing another Seattle-area billionaire? Valve’s Gabe Newell is reportedly the buyer of the Florida estate
Is video game industry leader Gabe Newell getting ready to leave Seattle’s hot South Florida neighborhood like some of his billionaire contemporaries? Reports of luxury property purchases raise a question.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Newell, CEO and founder of Valve Corp., is the buyer of a $70.8 million waterfront property in Manalapan, Fla., north of Miami. This newspaper this week revealed people who are familiar with the event.
Sellers Cindy and Ron McMackin paid about $39 million for the 2.06-acre property in 2020, and listed it for $85 million in December, according to the WSJ. The couple, founders of subcontractor Pan-Pacific Mechanical, declined to comment on the buyer’s identity.
The estate is featured in a 2020 YouTube video from Premier Estate Properties, above, and among its features is a tunnel that connects the house to the sea. It has about 20,000-square-foot living space, an outdoor pool, a dock and a boat ramp, the WSJ reported.
Newell, 63, has led Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve since he co-founded the video game company in 1996 with former Microsoft colleague Mike Harrington. Newell spent 13 years at Microsoft and is said to have helped build the first three versions of Windows before he left.
Valve is known for creating the PC gaming platform Steam, and its game franchises include “Half-Life” and “Portal,” among others.
With a net worth of $11 billion, Newell is number 293 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people.
The move to Miami will put Newell in the same company as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who announced his move from Seattle in an Instagram message in November 2023. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz also recently announced on LinkedIn the move to Miami, and last month he wrote a critical op-ed in The Wall Street Journal blasting Seattle’s anti-business climate and Mayor Katie Wilson.
Seattle businessman Rich Barton, founder of Zillow Group and Expedia Group, revealed his reasons for moving to Las Vegas recently.
All those moves come amid a heated debate over taxes in Washington state, where lawmakers have raised taxes on wealthy residents while some business leaders have warned the policies could drive businesses elsewhere.
Although Newell’s exit from the district is not guaranteed, Bellevue real estate developer Kevin Wallace is already mourning the loss of another Washington billionaire. In a post on LinkedIn, Wallace shared a chart that tracks the country’s building “flight log” — listing the country’s wealthiest people and whether they are still residents.
“Assuming Newell changes his residence, that’s $15,000,000,000 of wealth going to states with no capital, capital gains or estate taxes, and only 96 days after the income tax bill was passed,” Wallace wrote. “This will leave a mark.”
