Jeffrey Gundlach House: The Bond King’s Homes and His Stolen Art

Jeffrey Gundlach’s house entered the public record in the worst way. In September 2012, his Santa Monica home was burgled, and the thieves took paintings by Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Philip Guston and Richard Diebenkorn, along with jewellery, wine and a Porsche. The loss was reported at up to $10 million.

That is essentially the only reason anyone knows anything about where the bond investor lives, and it tells you what matters about his properties: the value is in what is inside them.

This guide covers the Santa Monica burglary and its aftermath, his subsequent Pacific Palisades base, the question the January 2025 fire raises about it, and why his company’s move to Florida did not take him with it.

Who is Jeffrey Gundlach?

Jeffrey Gundlach is an American investor, widely known as the Bond King, who founded the asset manager DoubleLine Capital in 2009 after leaving TCW. He grew up in the Buffalo area of New York and moved to Los Angeles after leaving a doctoral programme in theoretical mathematics at Yale.

He is also one of the more serious private art collectors in American finance, and that is not a decorative detail. His giving to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum began with a challenge gift of $42.5 million in 2016 and reached $65 million in total across the campaign, the largest private donation ever made to a Buffalo cultural institution. The museum’s new building, which opened in 2023, is named the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building.

A man who gives $65 million to a museum in his home city keeps a different kind of house from one who buys for square footage.

The Santa Monica burglary

Over the night of 12 to 13 September 2012, Gundlach’s Santa Monica home was broken into while he was away. More than a dozen artworks were taken, including pieces by Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Guston and Diebenkorn, along with jewellery, wine and a car.

Reported values differ. Contemporary coverage put the haul at around $10 million; prosecutors later worked from a figure of about $3.2 million. Both numbers appear in credible sources, and neither can be reconciled against the other from public material, so both are given here.

Gundlach offered a substantial reward for the return of the art, reasoning publicly that the works were worth far more to him than to anyone who could not sell them openly. It worked. Police recovered nearly all of the stolen artworks. Six people were charged in connection with the case, and Darren Agee Merager, identified as the man behind the burglary, was sentenced to four years in prison.

This article deliberately does not identify where in Santa Monica the house was, and does not describe how the burglary was carried out. Both details appear in the original coverage. Neither belongs on a site like this, and republishing them for a burglary victim would be indefensible.

Pacific Palisades

Since around 2013, Gundlach has been associated with Pacific Palisades rather than Santa Monica. The Los Angeles Business Journal has listed his residence as Pacific Palisades in successive editions of its Wealthiest Angelenos rankings, including 2022, 2023 and 2024, which is the most reliable public indication of where he lives.

Beyond the neighbourhood, nothing solid exists. Some sites describe a gated estate bought in 2013, but no purchase record, price, or property description appears in any source with editorial standards. Given what happened in 2012, a person in his position moving to a gated property would be an entirely rational response, but that is reasoning rather than reporting.

The question the 2025 fire raises

There is an unavoidable complication with any statement about a Pacific Palisades address today. The Palisades Fire of January 2025 destroyed 6,837 structures and burned through large parts of the neighbourhood.

No reporting reviewed for this article establishes whether Gundlach’s property was destroyed, damaged or untouched, and he does not appear to have commented publicly. It would be wrong to assume either outcome. Some Palisades properties came through intact, including the estate described in the account of Dennis Tito’s house, while a great many did not.

The honest position is that the most recent reliable placement of his home predates the fire, and that what happened to it afterwards is not publicly known.

Why DoubleLine moved to Florida, and he did not

In 2022, DoubleLine Capital moved its principal office to Tampa, Florida, a relocation widely covered because of the amount of money involved and the tax contrast between the two states.

Gundlach did not move with it. He has continued to appear on the Los Angeles Business Journal‘s list of the wealthiest Angelenos in the years since, which the paper compiles on the basis of residency. He has spoken publicly about what would make him leave California, which is itself an indication that he had not.

Corporate relocation and personal relocation are separate events, and conflating them is a common error in coverage of finance figures. A firm can redomicile for tax and regulatory reasons while its founder stays where his life is.

Where does Jeffrey Gundlach live now?

Los Angeles, and specifically Pacific Palisades, based on the most recent reliable evidence, with the caveat above about the 2025 fire.

What supports it: repeated listing as a Los Angeles resident by a local business publication that tracks exactly this; his continued public presence in Los Angeles; and the absence of any report that he has relocated to Florida or anywhere else. What is not established: the specific property, what he paid, what it is worth, or its condition after January 2025.

For a collector at his level, the more meaningful answer may be the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where a substantial part of what he has accumulated is now permanently housed under his name, in the city he came from. Art-world figures often end up with their collections better documented than their houses, a pattern also visible in the coverage of Larry Gagosian’s properties.

Sources

• ABC News and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office on the 2012 burglary, the works taken, their recovery, and the charges brought.
• Santa Monica Mirror on the four-year sentence and the valuation used in the prosecution.
• Los Angeles Business Journal listing his residence as Pacific Palisades.
• Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Spectrum News on his gift and the building named for him.
• Citywire on DoubleLine’s move to Florida.