Jacob Helberg, President Trump’s pick for undersecretary of state for growth, energy and the environment, is shopping his bayfront Miami Beach, Fla., home for $65 million amid a move to Washington, D.C. - wsj.com
Helberg and his husband, venture capitalist Keith Rabois, paid around $29 million for the Venetian Islands property in 2020, records show. They have spent about $15 million renovating and upgrading the house, which includes a $1 million, 5,600-gallon aquarium imported from Japan, according to their agent, Julian Johnston of the Corcoran Group.
Helberg and Rabois recently purchased a seven-bedroom, circa-1912 home in D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood for about $7 million, property records show.
Their roughly 15,000-square-foot home in Miami Beach was developed by the late Andre Radandt, the onetime president of the food-and-beverage company Bolthouse Farms. Completed around 2019, it has six bedrooms, a dock and a roof deck with a hot tub.
The property also has an infinity-edge pool, an outdoor kitchen, and a 55,000-pound boat lift. The entryway features a bridge over a reflecting pool, and a two-story wall with cutout designs by the late sculptor Erwin Hauer. An open plan kitchen and living room has a large island for casual dining and twin glass-enclosed wine cellars. Rabois and Helberg added the cellars as well as restored wood floors and calfskin wall paneling, Johnston said.
The aquarium is so large it requires a scuba diver to maintain it. The diver enters through a hatch hidden in the primary bedroom closet.
Helberg is a senior adviser to Alex Karp, the chief executive of data-analytics company Palantir Technologies. He has yet to be confirmed in his new role in the administration. Rabois is a high-profile venture capitalist whose investments include Stripe and DoorDash. Along with Trump adviser Elon Musk and Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks, Rabois is a member of the “ PayPal Mafia,” a group of early PayPal employees, who have gone on to a number of Silicon Valley startups.
Helberg and Rabois married in 2018 on the island of St. Barthélemy, in a ceremony officiated by OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
The couple moved to Miami around 2020 from San Francisco, where they still own a home in the Glen Park neighborhood, amid an exodus of high-level executives from the Bay Area. At the time, Rabois openly criticized the city of San Francisco, saying it was improperly run, and became an evangelist for the South Florida city.
More recently, he has said that the rise of AI has pulled more of those executives back to the Bay Area.
“If anything saves the Bay Area, it’s going to be this AI wave led by OpenAI,” he said at a conference earlier this month.
The Miami-area market has posted several big-ticket deals in recent months, including a $100 million transaction on nearby La Gorce Island.
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