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Just across Lake Washington from Seattle sits a 1.4-square-mile zip code where two of the richest men on Earth live a few docks apart.
Medina, Washington doesn’t have a strip mall, a chain restaurant, or a single bar. What it has is Bill Gates on one shoreline and Jeff Bezos on another, tucked behind hedges, gates, and a tree canopy thick enough to hide a 66,000-square-foot house from the road. With fewer than 3,000 residents and an average home value north of $4 million, it’s one of the wealthiest municipalities in the country — and, as of this year, one that can’t quite pay its own bills.
- Medina (ZIP code 98039) sits on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, covers roughly 1.4 square miles, and has a population under 3,000.
- Bill Gates spent seven years and tens of millions of dollars building his lakefront compound, which includes a 66,000-square-foot main house, a 60-foot pool with an underwater sound system, and an indoor trampoline room.
- Despite average home values exceeding $4 million, Medina revealed a city budget deficit in June 2019 and put a property-tax levy lift on the November 2019 ballot.
Residents of the Hedges
The two headline names are unavoidable: Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon — the world’s two richest individuals — both keep waterfront property in Medina. Gates’ compound has been documented for years as a showcase of early-2000s tech-mansion ambition: motion sensors that adjust temperature and lighting room to room, a library with a domed ceiling, and that 60-foot swimming pool piped for underwater music. Bezos maintains his own multi-property spread along the same stretch of shoreline, expanding his footprint parcel by parcel rather than building one showpiece.
Neither man is Medina’s only notable resident. Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi, one of the key engineers behind Word and Excel, has ties to the town, as did former Costco executive Jeffrey Brotman. The pattern is consistent — this is where Puget Sound tech money settles once it’s made, not spent showing off in public.
A Town Built to Be Invisible
Medina is almost entirely residential by design. Zoning keeps out commercial strips, chain stores, and nightlife, while private docks — hidden behind gates — hold yachts that residents rarely take out in view of the road. The result is a neighborhood that reads as quiet and almost sleepy from the street, which is exactly the point for people whose net worth makes them targets for attention they don’t want. It’s a different flavor of privacy than the glass-and-marble spectacle you’d find in a Beverly Hills mega-mansion — in Medina, the luxury is that you can’t see it at all.
No strip malls. No chain restaurants. No bars. Just hedges, gates, and the two richest men in the world living a few docks apart.
The Money Problem in a Town Full of Money
Here’s the twist that made Medina national news in June 2019: a city with an average home price over $4 million couldn’t cover its own budget. Washington state law caps annual municipal property-tax revenue growth at 1% without a public vote, and Medina’s fixed, capped tax base wasn’t keeping pace with the cost of running the city — including payroll for its own police department. City leaders put a levy-lift measure on the November 2019 ballot specifically to close that gap, asking voters in one of America’s richest zip codes to approve higher property taxes just to keep basic services funded.
It’s an odd irony for a place that regularly gets compared to mansions with backyard waterparks and insane pools — the homes are worth a fortune, but the city government running the streets in front of them was scraping for cash.
Medina Maintains Geographical Secrecy
Part of what keeps Medina under the radar is that it was never built to be a destination. There’s no downtown to visit, no restaurant row, nothing to draw a tourist off I-90 except curiosity about who lives there. Compare that to sprawling one-off builds like a $200 million New York apartment project, which exist to be talked about — Medina’s money is arranged specifically so it isn’t.
The November ballot measure was Medina’s real test: a town stacked with billionaires deciding whether the people next door to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were willing to pay a little more in property tax to keep the lights on at city hall.
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