Billy Getty was 24 when he bought the two apartments on the top floor of 1750 Taylor Street, a 24-storey co-op on Russian Hill, and set about knocking them into one. Three years of work, the designers who had done his restaurants, and a name from Harper’s Bazaar in March 1998: “The Cyber Palace.” He never moved in. He sold it that year, furniture included, for $15 million, which was then the most anyone had paid for a home in San Francisco. This August the same 5,000 square feet returned to the market at just under $20 million. Getty has nothing to do with the sale.
Cyber Palace
Royal Towers went up in 1964 and was, when it was finished, the tallest residential building in San Francisco; The Real Deal notes it remains among the city’s hundred tallest structures. There is a doorman around the clock, on-site management, a gym and a pool. It is the sort of building that people who already own houses buy an apartment in.
Getty purchased the two top-floor penthouses in 1995 and combined them into a single unit, working with Stephen Weaver and Craig Leavitt, the designers behind the restaurants of the PlumpJack Group. The merged flat was completed in 1997. Per the San Francisco Chronicle, cited by The Real Deal, he sold it the following year without ever having lived there.
The buyer was Charlton Buckley, a retired broadcasting tycoon, and the price was $15 million, fully furnished. Robb Report records that the transaction set the record for the most expensive home sale in San Francisco, comfortably clearing the reported $5 million to $6 million Danielle Steel paid in 1990. The best price in the city’s history, at that point, was attached to rooms nobody had used.
The Relisting
Kristin Cashin and Jenn Davis of Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno have the current listing, first reported by Mansion Global and picked up by The Real Deal on 26 August. Just under $20 million works out at $4,000 per square foot. Robb Report’s photo gallery describes the residence as having been owned for nearly a decade by the family of Charlton Buckley; the seller of record is not otherwise named in the coverage.
Twenty-eight years of San Francisco between the two prices, and the asking figure is about a third above what Buckley paid in 1998. In the meantime the record Getty set has been comprehensively removed from the conversation: in 2024, Laurene Powell Jobs paid $70 million for a home in Pacific Heights, the priciest residential sale in the city to date, according to The Real Deal.
Getty’s own subsequent San Francisco arithmetic ran along similar lines. Fox Business reported that he and his wife Vanessa bought a mansion in the city for $11.5 million in 2002 and sold it in 2015 for $12.5 million. The buyers resold it in 2019 for $27 million. Thirteen years of ownership produced a million dollars; four years of somebody else’s ownership produced fourteen and a half. Old money is not usually in the business of timing markets, and it shows.
PlumpJack Money
The Getty penthouse and the Getty business began in the same city, with the same seed capital and roughly the same cast. Encyclopedia.com dates the first PlumpJack wine shop on Fillmore Street to 1992, opened by Gavin Newsom and Billy Getty, friends since childhood, financed by Gordon Getty and named after a Shakespeare-derived opera the elder Getty had written. Hoodline, citing the San Antonio Express-News, places the founding of PlumpJack Wine & Spirits in Cow Hollow in 1995, with Gordon Getty’s seed capital, in the same year his son bought the two penthouses upstairs at Royal Towers.
The families were already braided together. William Newsom, Gavin’s father, had been at high school with Gordon Getty, and per EBSCO’s biography the Gettys were strong supporters of Newsom’s business ventures and his political ambitions. When Billy married Vanessa Jarman at an estate in Napa Valley in 1999, Judge William Newsom officiated, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Vanessa Getty was born Vanessa Louise Jarman in San Francisco in 1972, the daughter of the actor Claude Jarman Jr. and the ballerina Maryann Eve Opperman. W magazine’s 2007 profile of the couple reported that they had met on the walk to school, he 14 and she 12, and that they had two sons with czarist names, Nicholas and Alexander. The designers who built the Cyber Palace built the restaurants. The friend who co-signed the wine shop is now governor of California. Nothing in this story arrived from outside the address book.
The Arithmetic
The fortune behind all of it is measured at the top, not at the level of any individual heir. Gordon Getty, 92 according to his Bloomberg profile, sold the family’s Getty Oil for more than $10 billion in 1984 and now owns the mutual fund liquidity provider ReFlow and the largest shareholding in the PlumpJack Group. In March 2026 the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put his wealth at $8.15 billion, placing him 463rd in the world; the Forbes 400 estimated $5.5 billion and ranked him 276th among wealthy Americans. Celebrity Net Worth, a single and aggregator-grade source for the detail, reports that in 1985 he broke up the Getty Oil trust into six separate trusts, which still exist.
What Billy Getty is individually worth is not established anywhere in public. W magazine wrote in 2007 that he was the youngest of Ann and Gordon Getty’s four sons and likely to inherit a portion of what it then called a $2.3 billion dynastic fortune, a figure now nearly two decades old and superseded by the billionaire indices. That absence is the whole texture of the family: a name everyone can price and a person nobody can.
Two of those four sons have died. Andrew Rork Getty died in March 2015 at his Hollywood Hills home, aged 47; officials concluded the cause was intestinal haemorrhaging from ulcers, with no evidence of foul play. John Gilbert Getty, a musician, is survived by his daughter Ivy and his brothers Peter and Billy, Fox News reported. Property, in a family like this, is one of the few things that stays where you put it.
Highland Park
The Russian Hill listing surfaced in the same month as the other Getty transaction of the summer. Hoodline, citing county documents reviewed by the Dallas Morning News, reports that William Paul Getty and Vanessa Getty acquired 3515 Crescent Avenue in Highland Park through a trust, closing in June 2026 after the home’s listing was pulled from the market that May. The Real Deal put the figure at $20 million; the closing price has not been independently confirmed, and is elsewhere described as undisclosed.
The symmetry is neat enough to be suspicious, and it is nothing more than symmetry. One property is his; the other belongs to the family that bought it from him in 1998 and has been living in it. The connection between them is a name in a Harper’s Bazaar headline from twenty-eight years ago, and the fact that every outlet covering the listing has led with it. A designer’s flat with an heir’s story attached sells better than a designer’s flat.
The paperwork on Taylor Street carries no Gettys this time. The copy carries nothing else.
