The Waggle: The greatest mansion mystery on Billionaire Row has been solved
Tongues are always wagging in San Francisco — and The Waggle is always listening. You can get your favorite San Francisco gossip column in your email, so sign up for the newsletter here. And while you’re at it, use this special link to become a Standard subscriber for just $1 for the first month. Please send your tips to [email protected]. Solved: The Larry Ellison mansion mystery There’s always some kind of billionaire mystery happening in our fair city. But this time, The Waggle has solved it. For nearly a year, neighbors have been wondering who bought the $45 million Billionaires Row mansion previously belonging to Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. The sale of the 11,000-square-foot home at 2850 Broadway — next door to Laurene Powell Jobs’ $71 million manse — was 2025’s biggest real estate deal. But the buyer’s identity has remained a mystery, leading to rampant speculation that it could be Elon Musk — who’s a friend of Ellison — or Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber. But the Waggle has confirmed that the buyer is a trust tied to Chuck Esserman, cofounder and CEO of private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners. While Esserman maintains a low profile, his company has held stakes in Vitamin Water, Planet Fitness, and CorePower Yoga, as well as Crumbl, which is known for celebrity collabs with Benson Boone, the Kardashian-Jenners, and Olivia Rodrigo. (In other cookie ties, TSG’s first claim to fame was turning around Famous Amos in the 1980s, reportedly earning 20 times its original investment.) The Esserman clan has a habit of buying homes from the rich and famous. In 2023, an LLC connected to Chuck and his wife, Ivette, bought Celine Dion’s Las Vegas mansion for $30 million. In 2013, they bought the Upper East Side apartment of hotel heiress and boutique owner Peri Arenas for a little over $18 million. In 2018, an LLC connected to the couple bought Peter Thiel’s former San Francisco home, across from the Palace of Fine Arts, for $7.4 million. The former Thiel home seems to have been a buy for the Esserman’s daughters, Christine, a partner at the venture capital firm Accel, and Carolyn, a lifestyle influencer married to Chicago Cubs pitcher Drew Pomeranz. The sisters were plaintiffs in a 2024 suit against their neighbor, who they claimed was impeding access to their driveway and planning to build another monster home that would block their views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It settled last month. The trusts used to purchase the Thiel home were represented by real estate attorney Laura Strazzo, a partner at Patterson & O’Neill in San Francisco, who also represented the buyers of the Ellison property, according to public records. Even at $45 million, 2850 Broadway apparently needs some work. The owners recently had permits for a $630,000 renovation approved by the city. It includes kitchen and bathroom remodels, plus a courtyard overhaul and new landscaping. The symphony’s curtain raiser Thursday’s San Francisco Symphony Gala was an awkward middle ground for the 114-year-old institution, which has been bedeviled with infighting and controversy in recent years. Awaiting the arrival of the highly anticipated new music director Elim Chan, and the chance to move on from the drama of the last few years, the gala had a placeholder feel. Still, one attendee observed — at least they’re not the opera! Thursday’s gala attracted the familiar big names: philanthropists and society figures Joaquim Bechtle, Dagmar and David Dolby, Dede Wilsey, and Mimi Haas; mayoral advisor Ned Segal; and state Sen. Scott Wiener. (Mayor Daniel Lurie swanned around at the VIP reception in the Wattis Room, but The Waggle did not spot him at the performance or the dinner that followed.) There were also some welcome entries from the tech crowd, who often eschew these types of events. The Waggle overheard Isa Fulford, a prominent research engineer at OpenAI, chatting with friends about — what else? — AI. We spoke to an AI startup founder who couldn’t have been more than 24. Tom Henighan, an early Anthropic researcher, was in attendance. The symphony seems to be moving toward a better place with the hiring of Chan, but it has a ways to go. Despite repeated invocations from board chair Priscilla Geeslin of the “full house,” some of the seats in the second-floor balcony were suspiciously un-full. And guests groused about the lack of glamour at the VIP after-party in an industrial-looking rehearsal hall. (“They’re broke!” one exclaimed theatrically, before sitting down for a dinner of lobster and caviar.) Still, nothing could contain the enthusiasm for the music. Visiting violinist Hilary Hahn received an ovation so long she walked on and off the stage three times before gracing the audience with a short encore. When the symphony concluded its final number, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio espagnol,” one audience member could be seen applauding from the orchestra aisle, apparently too overcome by the music to stay in his seat. Celebrity sighting speed round The woodland creatures and silent swayers of Dreamforce may have left town, but A-list celebrities were still finding reasons to hang around the Bay this week. Tom Holland and Zendaya were spotted Tuesday in Marin, at the Village at Corte Madera. Holland took a selfie with the staff at the (opens in new tab)Mill Valley Mixt (opens in new tab), ordering the elote salad and a Dave’s Taco Bowl. Were they in town to visit Lady Gaga and her new baby? The Waggle can only wonder. Keanu Reeves, who has named Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” the one song he’d take to a deserted island, spent Monday night (opens in new tab)hyping up (opens in new tab) the man who played bass on it. “The one, the only, Peter Hook & the Light!” he announced at the Warfield. Hook’s band dedicated the song to him. The next night, Keanu played the Fillmore with his own band, Dogstar. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spent Monday pitching Tesla, Sequoia, and a roomful of AI founders on his homeland. His most receptive audience turned out to be Dave Chappelle, whom he (opens in new tab)ran into at Kokkari (opens in new tab), before the comedian’s pair of stand-up performances (opens in new tab) at the Punch Line Comedy Club. Chapelle told the PM they’d landed at “the best Greek restaurant,” according to the Chronicle. Last but not least, White Stripes genius Jack White spent Wednesday afternoon looking through his long, black hair at a small, aged crowd of poetry fans, who had gathered at City Lights to hear him read from “Jack White Collected Lyrics and Selected Writing.” Though the event was in the middle of a workday, tickets reportedly sold out in minutes. Afterward, he sat down for a conversation with City Lights events coordinator Peter Maravelis, then signed copies of the book before playing a gig at The Fillmore (opens in new tab). “California, here I come,” White told fans Tuesday on Instagram. “I need you like a horse needs shoes, so before you choose a man, hear me out: i’m wild and loose, off track, but I need a caboose, for straightening my train out.” The Waggle doesn’t normally like to be called “a caboose,” but for White, we’ll allow it. Up all night with the Bagguheads The first four people arrived Thursday at 6:45 p.m., just as the Baggu store on Valencia Street was closing. They said a friendly hello to shopworkers leaving their shifts, then settled in for a long, long night in the Mission. The two pairs were strangers — UC Berkeley student Karen and her boyfriend Andres had come from Santa Rosa; Alex and her friend Vanessa are SF locals — but they were united in their devotion to Baggu, the cultish bag and apparel brand, which was having a sample sale starting the next day at 11 a.m. In order to guarantee they could get the Baggus they wanted — all four were most excited about the $72 puffy picnic quilt (opens in new tab) — they were willing to spend the night on that sidewalk. And it’s a good thing too, because by the next morning, the line snaked around the corner — twice. Cars and bicyclists driving past Friday yelled, “What is this for?” “Baggu!” the crowd yelled back. “OK, go off!!!” a young woman yelled encouragingly from a car window. As night fell Thursday, Karen and Andres realized they’d forgotten something important: chairs. But no worry, they DoorDashed a pair from Dick’s Sporting Goods. Though Karen had been a little afraid of sidewalk-camping in the city, she and her new line friend Alex were surprised at how safe they felt. “It wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t terrible. There were a lot of police officers wandering around,” Alex said. “It felt like it was a party. The city doesn’t sleep!” Gallery of 3 photos the slideshow Until 1 a.m., it was just the four of them, but then Haley and her boyfriend Jason showed up. They had driven all the way from San Diego. “I am obsessed with the Baggu colors,” Haley said. “I have a whole room devoted to Baggu in my house.” As the night slowly turned to dawn, more people slowly arrived. Mia took a half day off work and arrived around 7 a.m., dispatched on a mission for a friend in Sacramento who is obsessed with Baggu. That friend, Tessa, had helpfully sent Mia photos of the items she wanted. Now, one might ask: Are these bags expensive? Exclusive? Worth waiting in line for overnight? Eh, they start at $14 (that’s for the tiny bag, which a woman named Victoria, at the end of the line, proudly showed off). The priciest item is a leather satchel that retails for $160. Vanessa explained that the sale wasn’t about the discounts but about access to dead stock and discontinued patterns and colors that real Bagguheads covet. As The Waggle exited the line and hopped into a Lyft, the driver asked what all the excitement was about. “A sale on bags,” we answered. “What is in the bags? Gold? Diamonds? Only in SF do people have this much time!” Driver, if you only knew. A very scary preview of Vogue World Ever since The Waggle broke the news in June that Anna Wintour was in town to scout the next edition of her Vogue World extravaganza, it’s been one battle after another for the Conde Nast artistic director. First, she had to eat a messy piece of humble pie over Galliano (opens in new tab)-gate (opens in new tab). Now she’s facing down criticism that Vogue World is a humanoid hellscape. If models thought their jobs were safe in the age of AI, think again. A crew of scrawny robots walked the Vogue World runway Tuesday in Milan, raising their clanky arm attachments in an attempt to rile up the A-list crowd. “It’s fun because robots are fun. But it’s also terrifying and is meant to say, AI is not going away, and the robots are not going away,” Juan Costa Paz, the show’s creative director, told Vogue (opens in new tab). Ah yes, AI inevitability is fun! We get it now! J. Lo and Donatella Versace clapped gleefully during the painfully awkward robot segment, while Miuccia Prada and Versace’s Alessandro Michele seemed to be the only ones reacting appropriately, with unfettered Italian disgust (opens in new tab). The Waggle is now suitably terrified about what we’ll witness when SF hosts Vogue World next year. It can’t possibly get more mortifying — or can it, Anna (opens in new tab)? Overheard: A cafe in Potrero Hill Bestie 1: So, what’s the update on penis-gate? Bestie 2: Oh God. OK, so after I gave him the whole talk about how I love him, but I need to have, you know, penetrative sex, he went out and got this injection. Bestie 1: An injection? Bestie 2: It’s like a vial. He has to inject his own penis with this stuff and then it gets hard for, like, HOURS. Bestie 1: Oh, my God. Bestie 2: No, but it hurts him to inject it! Like it burns! But then he’s raring to go. Bestie 1: OK, so he’s willing to sacrifice for you! I mean, that’s good, right? Bestie 2: Yeah except … I hate him hurting so much, you know? Bestie 1: But you love him, and you love the money. Bestie 2: Yeah. I do.