May 27, 2026
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home was targeted by an arsonist in April — a suspect who had allegedly traveled from Texas with the intent to kill him — it crystallized something already underway among the tech elite: wealth, particularly AI wealth, had become a liability as well as an asset.
The attack accelerated a trend that luxury real estate broker Ken DeLeon says has been brewing for roughly three years.
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DeLeon, founder of Palo Alto-based DeLeon Realty, told Fortune that a growing class of ultrawealthy buyers — particularly tech and AI executives — are now purposely hiding their home purchases behind limited liability companies, privacy trusts and “whisper listings” that never appear on the listings site MLS or on Zillow.
“Increased wealth brought about greater security concerns and a stronger desire for privacy,” DeLeon said. “Over the last year, AI has driven some of the greatest wealth creation Silicon Valley has seen in 25 years, while also becoming an increasingly controversial topic. As a result, the desire for privacy has grown even stronger.”
How stealth-wealth buying works
A whisper listing bears no resemblance to a typical home sale. There’s no open house, no yard sign, and no Zillow notification. According to DeLeon, a listing might quietly circulate among a handful of elite brokers before the deal closes.
That anonymity continues well past the sale itself. For higher-end clients, DeLeon said he usually recommends taking title through an LLC or privacy trust but with a crucial layer of separation: “Sophisticated clients want to structure things carefully, making sure the manager of the LLC is not someone directly associated with them, such as their personal attorney,” he said.
“The goal is to ensure that, even if someone digs into ownership records, they still cannot easily connect the property back to the principal owner,” he told Fortune.
Even day-to-day life gets routed through the same structures, including deliveries and utilities, DeLeon added.
Brokers themselves have taken on a new role in this ecosystem. DeLeon said he’s regularly asked to be a physical and informational buffer — meeting vendors, signing off on inspections and shielding clients’ identities from everyone else involved in the transaction.
“In some cases, both sides of the transaction conceal their identities,” he said.
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The market backdrop
The timing isn’t incidental. Silicon Valley home prices have continued climbing, with the billionaire enclave of Atherton posting a median sale price of $8.33 million in 2025 — a 5% year-over-year gain and a new all-time high, according to PropertyShark.
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The town’s biggest deal of the year: a $51.5 million estate once owned by tech executive Stephen Luczo — traded off-market, Palo Alto Online reports.
And off-market activity has surged well beyond Silicon Valley. Privately marketed residential sales jumped at least 30% year-over-year across Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens between 2024 and 2025, with Brooklyn alone accounting for roughly $5.4 billion in such deals, per The Real Deal.
The financial cost of privacy
Here’s the trade-off that most stealth buyers willingly accept: selling off-market almost always means leaving money on the table, something DeLeon confirmed. With fewer potential buyers in the room, competition drops, and so do offers.
Data shows this reality: a 2025 Zillow Research analysis of over 2.7 million home sales found that those sold off the MLS in 2023 and 2024 usually fetched nearly $5,000 less than comparable MLS-listed homes — a median gap of 1.5%, totaling more than $1 billion in lost proceeds for sellers nationwide. In California, that gap widened to 3.7%, or roughly $30,075 per home.
And regulators have taken note. The National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) already required agents to submit listings to the MLS within one business day of publicly marketing them. In March 2025, NAR introduced a “delayed marketing exempt listing,” an option for sellers only after they’ve signed a disclosure acknowledging the financial trade-offs of keeping their home off public platforms.
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A regular occurrence
DeLeon argues that many brokerages push off-market deals for the wrong motivations entirely, “not to protect sellers’ privacy, but to minimize marketing costs and increase the likelihood of double-ending their commission.” Double-ending means the agent represents both the buyer and seller in the transaction.
Whatever the reason these private sales are occurring, they’re fairly frequent, though numbers are tough to track. About 1.2 million U.S. homes were sold off-market from about January through August 2024, ResiClub Analytics reports. That’s out of about 4.06 million for that whole year, according to PBS News.
But whether the stealth-wealth trend outlasts its current moment remains to be seen, even for DeLeon. If sellers are fully informed about the price they pay for privacy, he suggested, things may eventually shift back toward full public exposure, security concerns and all.
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With a writing and editing career spanning over 15 years, Emma creates and refines content across a broad spectrum of industries, including personal finance, lifestyle, travel, health & wellness, real estate, beauty & fitness and B2B/SaaS/tech.
