Gabe Newell has splashed out $70.8 million on a Florida super mansion that comes with its own tunnel to the sea.
The billionaire Valve boss acquired the roughly 20,000-square-foot home in Manalapan, Florida, the Wall Street Journal reported. Newell bought it from Cindy and Ron McMackin, founders of the mechanical subcontracting company Pan-Pacific Mechanical, who paid $39 million for it in 2020.
According to the WSJ, Newell’s new home includes a tunnel connecting the waterfront estate with the ocean via a beach. We can see what this looks like via a 2020 promotional video published to YouTube by Premier Estate Properties, which handled the sale. A perfect fit for the odd headcrab? I’d bring a crowbar… just saying.
Elsewhere, there’s an outdoor pool, a dock, and a boat lift. There’s also an eight-car carage, a wine cellar, guest quarters, and even a wellness wing.
Valve is a privately held company, which means its finances are not public, but we know Newell is one of the richest people in the video game industry with an estimated net worth of $11 billion. He founded Valve, brought Steam into being, and released iconic video games such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Dota. Steam dominates the PC sales market and earns Valve a cut of revenue with each game sale.
In recent years he’s lived at sea, rather than close to Valve’s Bellevue, Washington headquarters. He owns a number of luxury yachts. The flagship of his fleet, called Leviathan, has an onboard hospital, lab, spa, and of course gaming stations. He’s bought a shipyard, and owns a research organisation called Inkfish.
In July last year, Newell offered a rare insight into his life, talking about his days living, working, and enjoying life on a boat. In conversation with a YouTuber called Zalkar Saliev, who had just 19 subscribers at the time the interview clips went live, the 63-year-old Newell said he worked seven days a week from his bedroom on his superyacht, because it was “fun” and he still “likes working.”
Asked to describe his daily routine, Newell said: “I get up, I work, I go scuba diving, work some more. I either go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym and work out. Then I work. I live on a boat, so I just hang out with everybody on the boat.”
“I work seven days a week,” he added. “I’m working from my bedroom, as you can tell. I like working. It’s fun. To me, it doesn’t feel like work. The kinds of things that I get to do every day are super awesome. I’ve said it before, but when you retire, you want to stop doing your horrible job and then go do what is most fun and entertaining. And so in that sense, I’ve been retired for a long time.”
Expanding on the types of work that keep him busy these days, Newell said: “Getting to work with Drew and Jeremy on AI stuff or Chris on Steam stuff… In one of the companies, we’re working on an aerosol pathogen detection device so you can see all the pathogens that are in the air. Brain computer interfaces are incredibly cool, and all of the associated neuroscience is incredibly cool. So, I just work all the time.
“But it’s not like, ‘Oh my God, I’m up late at night slaving away on stuff.’ It’s more like I can’t go to sleep because I’m having fun, you know?”
But the fact Newell has now bought a home on land suggests he plans to spend at least some of his time living in it. What does this mean for Half-Life 3? Nothing, unfortunately.
And just to highlight that Newell still has at least one toe dipped in the water, he recently began construction on a $230 million deep-sea research ship that will carry robots, labs, and 70 scientists to map the deepest oceanic trenches by 2028. Perhaps he’ll find Half-Life 3 down there somewhere.
Photo by Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
