Howard Stern's Palm Beach Mansion Is Worth At Least $300 Million (Based On His Next Door Neighbor's Sale Price)

Trust me. This article will eventually be about Howard Stern's Palm Beach mansion, but first, please follow me on a journey through time starting in the early 1990s…

In 1992, lifelong tinkerer John Sylvan set out to solve a common problem at offices around the world: Full coffee pots sit untouched for hours, growing cold, bitter, and stale before being dumped down the sink.

Sylvan's idea to solve this problem was to invent a coffee machine that could brew single-serve disposable "pods" of coffee. In 1992, John and a college friend co-founded a company that would manufacture and sell his machines and pods. They called the company "Keurig." Why? They looked up the word for "excellence" in a Dutch dictionary. Why Dutch? Because, as John would later explain, "everyone likes the Dutch."

About a decade before Keurig was founded, a guy named Bob Stiller was served a cup of coffee at a cafe in Vermont called Green Mountain. He loved the taste so much that he didn't just buy another cup… he bought the whole coffee shop.

By 1992 (the same year Keurig was founded), Green Mountain had grown from a single cafe in Vermont to seven locations. Over two thousand wholesale retailers sold Green Mountain beans, and the company generated $10 million in annual revenue. In 1993, Bob Stiller took Green Mountain public on the NASDAQ under the ticker GMCR.

In 1993, a year after Keurig was founded, Bob Stiller's Green Mountain became the first outside investor in John Sylvan's coffee pod company. In 1994, Keurig took on a second investment round, raising $1 million from a venture capital firm. With that investment, one of the principals from the VC firm was installed as Chairman of Keurig.

Unfortunately, John Sylvan did not get along with his new corporate bosses. Within a year, he was booted from the company he founded.

In 1997, John sold his entire stake in Keurig, which owned his invention – a product that would eventually generate hundreds of billions in revenue – for a grand total of…

$50,000

Over the course of several transactions between 1993 and 2006, Bob Stiller's Green Mountain acquired 43% ownership of Keurig. In 2006, Green Mountain acquired the remaining 57%. The price Green Mountain paid for that 57%?

$104 million

The company was renamed Keurig Green Mountain.

By 2014, 95% of Keurig Green Mountain's revenue – $4.3 billion – came from selling Keurig pods and machines. On December 7, 2015, JAB Holding Company acquired Keurig Green Mountain for…

$13.9 billion

The acquisition made Bob Stiller a billionaire. Today, his net worth is $1.2 billion.

A year before the $13.9 billion JAB acquisition, Bob paid $25 million for a 1.6-acre, oceanfront property in Palm Beach, Florida. The property features a 24,000 square foot mansion. In April 2023, Bob Stiller sold his property in an off-market deal to luxury car dealer Michael Cantanucci for…

$170 million

That set a new record (which still stands) for the Palm Beach area and is one of the most expensive real estate transactions in Florida history.

Howard Stern's Mansion

A year before Bob bought his Palm Beach mansion, Howard Stern and his wife, Beth Ostrosky Stern, paid $52 million for the 3.25-acre property right next door. Stern's property features several structures that have a combined 40,000 square feet of living space.

Now consider what Bob's sale means for the value of Howard and Beth's property.

In the photo below, Howard's property is the larger one on the left. To reiterate, Howard's buildings have 40,000 square feet of living space. Bob Stiller's former property has 24,000 square feet. Howard's property is on 3.25 acres. Bob Stiller's is on 1.6 acres.

So Howard's property is just under twice the size of Bob's in terms of both living space and acreage.

And if Bob Stiller's house sold in 2023 for $170 million, what does that make Howard's estate worth? Conservatively, one must assume…

$300 million

By our count, before the Bob Stiller sale, Howard Stern's net worth was $650 million. And that was based on an assumption that his Palm Beach house was worth $50 – 80 million. If it's truly worth $300 million, one could make the argument that Howard Stern's net worth is actually in the $800 million range.

What Happened to John Sylvan?

Today, John Sylvan lives in a perfectly nice home in Needham, Massachusetts, which he bought in 2007 for $530,000 and today is worth around $1.2 million.

Perhaps to make up for the environmental destruction caused by his invention, Sylvan now runs a solar company.

Speaking to The Atlantic around the time of Keurig's $14 billion sale, John Sylvan had the following to say about his invention's destructive impact on the world:

"I feel bad sometimes that I ever invented the K-Cup… I don't have one. They're kind of expensive to use. Plus it's not like drip coffee is tough to make… It's like a cigarette for coffee. A single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance… No matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable. The plastic is a specialized plastic made of four different layers."

An estimated 10 BILLION pods are sold each year. The vast, vast vast majority end up in landfills.