Santa Barbara’s most notorious house flipper is at it again! Barely two years after Ellen DeGeneres dropped $70 million on two side-by-side properties in the exclusive seaside enclave of Carpinteria, the former talk show host and her wife Portia de Rossi have already sold the neighboring parcels of land, which rest atop a bluff overlooking the Pacific. As first reported by , the clandestine off-market deal was inked for a whopping $96 million. Records reveal the buyer is billionaire mining tycoon Robert Friedland—chairman of Ivanhoe Mines and a business mentor of the late Steve Jobs—who is widely reported to have an estimated net worth topping $3 billion.
Avid real estate watchers will recall that this isn’t the first real estate transaction in the Santa Barbara area between DeGeneres and Friedland. Earlier this year Friedland and his longtime wife Darlene paid DeGeneres and de Rossi a lofty for a rebuilt 1919 estate in Montecito known as Pompeiian Court, only to repurchase the 8-acre spread a few short months later for the same exact amount. When DeGeneres and de Rossi paid retired hedge-fund manager and billionaire Bruce Kovner a speck under $70 million for the two neighboring parcels of land in Carpinteria in 2022, they doled out $41.
7 million for a Tuscan farmhouse-style mansion set on 3.4 acres and concurrently paid another $28.2 million for the mostly vacant 6.
6-acre plot of land right next door, which presently contains a small lake and vast lawns. Together, th.