Billionaire Bassam Alghanim Buys Bel Air Manse for $8.7M From Uncle Sam, Bringing the Value of His Compound to Over $100M

Joe Francis—of ‘Girls Gone Wild’ infamy, et al—lost this Bel Air mansion to the U.S. government in 2018. Uncle Sam sold it this month.

Francis bought the place for $5.5 million in the early 2000s, shortly before the decade became, for him, a legal quagmire capped with a seemingly endless series of embarrassments. When it sold this month, it fetched well over $8.5 million.

The buyer, according to Variety, was Kuwaiti Bassam Alghanim, who owns a stake in family company Alghanim Industries, a large corporate entity in the Persian Gulf.

Alghanim is extremely fond of Bel Air, at least as an investment opportunity, and owns a cobbled-together estate that could easily stand in for Bel Air State Park.

In Bel Air, he’s thus far accrued ten formerly disparate properties into a rapidly expanding real estate mass that at present extends to over 20 acres. Many of the properties he’s purchased have come by way of former neighbors, so there is a series of houses to accompany the acreage.

The estimated value of Alghanim’s Bel Air compound is more than $100 million. His net worth is about $1.4 billion.