As billionaire rocket-builder and paper-towel salesman Jeff Bezos continues to absorb blowback for his dismantling of The Washington Post, another, smaller civic drama is bubbling up in Beverly Hills — over why he’s not trimming his hedges.
“The city requires hedges to be capped at 42 inches, and they have a thousand-dollar monthly fine if you go over that,” grumbles producer turned Compass real estate agent Tyler Neale, who noticed Bezos’ oversized topiary while driving past the 9.5-acre estate that Bezos purchased from David Geffen in 2020 for $165 million. “There are these towering hedges there. Why are they so tall when everyone else has to trim theirs?”
For someone with Bezos’ green — roughly $240 billion — paying a thousand bucks a month to keep his greenery tall wouldn’t be much of a strain. It’s a little more than four-ten-millionths of 1 percent of his net worth, the financial equivalent of lint.
But it turns out Bezos isn’t even paying that. When Rambling asked a Beverly Hills city official about the hedges, we were told that the property was “granted a variance to allow over-height hedges” in 1997, years before Bezos bought the place. And it’s not like he’s the only one with sky-high shrubbery in the neighborhood. Taylor Swift, who lives a few streets away, received a similar waiver.
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Also in Rambling Reporter:
Diane Warren reacts to being mistaken at the Globes for Ghislaine Maxwell; A look into how New York is deadlier on TV than in real life.
This story appeared in the Feb. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
