The New Gilded Age

Twenty-two-year-old Elvis Presley paid $102,500 for a home in Memphis for his parents and himself. That was in 1957. The purchase price was equivalent to about $915,000 in 2018. Today, Graceland is the second-most-visited house in the country. (First is the White House.) At 10,000 square feet and less than a million dollars, though, Elvis’s estate is almost laughable in the hierarchy of grandiose residences. In Los Angeles’s Bel Air neighborhood, anything less than 30,000 square feet cannot be taken seriously. And a million dollars? Hard Rock Café co-founder Peter Morton recently sold his Malibu home for $110 million.

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