Ron Unz’s old enemy from the 1998 battle over bilingual public education in California, Univision-owner Jerry Perenchio, died recently. Now, his main house, the Beverly Hillbillies mansion, is said to go on sale for $350 million.

From Variety:

Word on the Platinum Triangle real estate street is that the epic Bel Air compound of recently deceased media tycoon A. Jerrold “Jerry” Perenchio is set to hit the market an elephantine asking price of $350,000,000, making it the most expensive property available on the open market in the United States.

The 10.3-acre spread, known as Chartwell, is anchored by an imperial, limestone-faced chateau-style mansion of about 25,000-square-feet designed by architect Sumner Spaulding in the 1930s for a property developer who built it as a gift for his wife who, unfortunately for him, hated its unabashed opulence and never moved in.

The exteriors were used as The Beverly Hillbillies’ house back in the 1960s. When I was a kid it was quite visible from Bel Air Road. “Hey, there’s the Beverly Hillbillies house. It’s in Bel-Air, not Beverly Hills,” we’d say as we drove past. There didn’t seem to be much more to say.

… The main portion of the property incorporates five contiguous parcels, one of which is the longtime residence of Ronald and Nancy Reagan that was purchased by Mister Perenchio June 2016 for $15 million, and there are two more non-contiguous properties located across the street. …

Presumably, some if not most of Mister Perenchio’s other residential real estate holdings will eventually be sold off. They include a nearly 5,000-square-foot penthouse atop the prestigious Museum Tower in Midtown Manhattan as well as a private golf course that abuts the guard-gated Colony enclave in Malibu wherein the media mogul owned more than half of a dozen of the homes including three directly on the beach.

… in the early 1990s he partnered with Mexican media mogul Emilio Azcárraga Milmo to buy the Spanish language Univision television network that they sold in 2007 for $13.5 billion to investor Haim Saban’s Saban Capital Group, Inc.

Haim is of course another perennial iSteve favorite.

Jerry was the main donor against Ron’s anti-bilingual education Proposition 227 in 1998 because he worried that if Mexicans learned English, they’d stop watching Sabado Gigante on his network and watch something better on English language TV. He managed to unload Univision on Saban at the top of the market in 2007 just before the Housing Bubble popped.

[Comment at Unz.com]