Former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel’s unit in an unique Higher East Facet co-op has traded for $45 million.
An entity tied to Semel, additionally beforehand the chairman and co-CEO of Warner Brothers, offered the seventh flooring of 820 Fifth Avenue in an off-market deal, in line with public information. The customer is an nameless belief, The 2024 M Belief, which lists Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison lawyer Ira Gilbert because the trustee.
Semel purchased the 7,000-square-foot house in 1996 from Gordon Getty, the billionaire son of an oil tycoon, and his late spouse, Ann Getty, for $12.3 million. Semel allegedly virtually misplaced out on the pad after a member of the co-op board, the late philanthropist and artwork collector Jayne Wrightsman, “voice[d] reservations concerning the deal,” in line with a the Observer reported in 2002.
Wrightsman, the widow of oil government Charles Wrightsman, died in 2019 on the age of 99. Her property offered her third-floor co-op in 2025 for $27.5 million, practically half of the $50 million it requested when it hit the market in 2019.
The East 63rd Avenue co-op, in-built 1916, is likely one of the metropolis’s most unique buildings. In addition to Semel and Wrightsman, former residents embody socialite Lily Safra, who offered her house to hedge funder Ken Griffin for $40 million in 2009, and designer Tommy Hilfiger.
The deal for Semel’s co-op comes after a bitter dispute between his members of the family over his care following his 2011 Alzheimer’s analysis. In 2018, Semel’s son, Eric Semel, filed a petition for short-term conservatorship for his now 83-year-old father, and in it, accused Semel’s spouse, Jane, of “inflicting severe hurt to [his] well being and security, probably rising to elder abuse and neglect.”
In court docket filings, Jane, Semel’s spouse of just about 50 years, pushed again towards Eric’s depiction of her, arguing that Semel is “typically confused and typically upset, however these are features of his illness, not something anybody has accomplished to him.”
The 2 later reached a confidential settlement settlement.
Final July, Entry Industries’ Len Blavatnik paid $115 million for Semel’s property in Amagansett, marking the costliest deal within the Hamptons in 2025 and the primary nine-figure commerce since 2022. Semel purchased the eight-and-a-half-acre property from Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman for $43 million in 2005.
Whereas Semel owned the property, he and his then-neighbor and investor, Jonathan Sobel, repeatedly sued each other over points with their respective properties, together with landscaping disputes and fence removals. In a single lawsuit, Sobel claimed Semel’s plans to construct a mansion and visitor home on his property violated native zoning legal guidelines.
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