In February, Jeff Bezos and his wife were special guests at the annual dock party of the Indian Creek Country Club. Members in white played croquet on the lawn above Biscayne Bay. Bezos worked the room — small talk, handshakes, a line of people who wanted to meet him. He had one goal, according to people who were there: to persuade the board to let him join.
Six months later, the Journal’s Deborah Acosta reports, he still has not received an invitation.
This is a man who owns three properties on the island, bought for about $234 million combined. The island is called the Billionaire Bunker. It has 300 acres, one gated bridge, its own police force, and a golf course that belongs to the club. If you live there and are not a member, you can look at the course. You cannot play on it without an invitation.
How the gate works
Indian Creek Country Club was founded in 1929 and has about 350 members. Initiation runs close to $1 million; dues about $44,000 a year. To apply you need sponsorship from two current members and letters from five more, and then you have to mingle — show up at events, drink at the meet-and-greets, tee off with people whose families have been there for generations. Six committee members pick the nominees. A fifteen-person board, led by the former chief executive of AutoNation, votes them up or down.
And here is the part that makes it a story: too much wealth or notoriety has become a deterrent. The old guard — many of them retirees, many of them doctors, lawyers, developers and financiers whose Miami roots run back decades — is mounting what the Journal calls a last stand against what it views as billionaire interlopers.
The island’s more recent residents include Bezos, the Kushners, the Qatari royal family and Mark Zuckerberg. None are members.
The Kushner campaign
Jared and Ivanka Kushner bought 1.26 acres and rebuilt a Spanish-style mansion into something more modern. Mary Anne Shula, widow of the Dolphins coach, sponsored them and threw a cocktail party at her home to introduce them to the board. When the Kushners hosted their own housewarming, about half the board showed up. Some were out of town. The signal was read anyway.
So the Kushners went to work the only way that seems to count there: slowly. Jared took a seat on the village council. The island’s obsolete septic systems had been leaking into Biscayne Bay for years; a new pump station is now going in across from his house, in a compromise with the club. Ivanka plays golf with members. According to a person familiar with the club’s thinking, they are edging closer.
Not everyone has the patience. Dr. Aaron Rollins, a celebrity plastic surgeon, tried for four years, gave up, listed his unfinished estate for $200 million, and told the Journal it “wasn’t the right place for me to raise a family.” Four months later Zuckerberg paid a record $170 million for the in-progress fortress. He is not a member either.
The one who got it right
Carl Icahn paid $7.5 million for his Indian Creek house in 1997. For the legendary value investor, the island was not a status symbol. It was an undervalued asset. In late 2019 he told his employees to pack for Florida, and the rest of the billionaire migration followed him: between 2019 and 2023 the state took in $137 billion of income from out-of-state movers, nearly four times the runner-up.
Icahn got in early, got in cheap, and got in before the gate closed. That is an investing sentence and it is also a social one.
The planning version
We meet a smaller version of Indian Creek constantly. A client sells the business, moves to the place they always wanted, and discovers that the thing they were actually buying — belonging, a table at the club, a community that knows their name — was never for sale. It was earned by the people already there, over years, by showing up.
Money buys the house. Time buys the neighbors. The retirement plans that go well are the ones that budget for both, and the second one cannot be front-loaded. If your plan has a move in it, start the courtship before the closing, not after. Half the board shows up to a housewarming for a stranger. The whole board shows up for a friend.