Under-the-Radar Floor Mat Billionaire Buys $75 Million Former Billy Joel Property, Now Owns $170 Million Worth Of Florida Real Estate

There are endless exciting and flashy ways to become a billionaire nowadays. Crypto, the AI craze, betting apps, health hacking, modern warfare, and even social media are minting paper fortunes at a dizzying pace. Just last week, two Stanford dropouts were anointed the youngest billionaires on Earth thanks to their wildly polarizing bet-on-everything prediction app, Kalshi.

As exciting and futuristic as these paths to billionaire status may be, it is still entirely possible to join the three-comma club by running a business that is as boring as it gets. A business that never raises venture capital. A business that never burns cash in pursuit of "hypergrowth." A manufacturing business that sells a product for a bit more than it costs to make. A product that everyone needs and doesn't promise to make us smarter, richer, sexier, cooler, or live longer. A product whose sole purpose is to keep our cars clean by protecting them from our own filthy feet.

That product is the humble automobile floor mat. And the company is WeatherTech. You probably step on a WeatherTech product every time you get in the car.

WeatherTech is owned by a guy named David MacNeil. You've probably never heard of him, and you probably wouldn't recognize him if I showed you a photo. And I can't even show you a photo because there are no photos of David on Getty Images.

A college dropout, David was working as a car salesman in the late 1980s when he took a vacation to Scotland. During this vacation, he rented a car. Upon stepping into the car, he was immediately impressed by the quality of its thick rubber floor mats, which featured a raised lip to trap water and debris. That sparked an idea.

When he got home, he tracked down the manufacturer in England and negotiated a deal to import a 20-foot container of the mats to the U.S., taking out a second mortgage on his house to finance the purchase. He called his new business WeatherTech. In those early years, he operated the business out of his garage in Clarendon Hills, Illinois. The company's 1-800 number routed through his home line, so when a call came in from Europe, he answered, even if it rang at 3 am.

• He made $40,000 in 1991
• He made $160,000 in 1992
• He made $400,000 in 1993

As the business grew, David pivoted from importing someone else's product to making his own. And that's where he struck gold.

In 2025, WeatherTech will earn $800 million in revenue and generate around $200 million in profits. And as the company's sole owner, 100% of those profits flow to David. Based on any reasonable multiple of EBITDA, there's no doubt that David is a billionaire. By our count, David MacNeil's net worth is a MINIMUM $2 billion. And yet, you won't find him profiled by Bloomberg or Forbes as a billionaire.

Despite his under-the-radar success story, there have been some signs of David's success over the years.

In 2018, MacNeil made international headlines when he purchased a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO for $70 million. The purchase set a world record for the most expensive car ever sold at the time.

And then there's this week's news.

The Wall Street Journal just revealed that David paid $75 million for a sprawling ocean-to-Intracoastal megamansion in the tiny, ultra-wealthy town of Manalapan, Florida. And this wasn't just any random estate. The property sits on land once owned by Billy Joel, who sold the 1.94-acre parcel back in 2018 to a retired businessman named Frank Mennella. The Mennellas spent several years and a small fortune constructing a 16,000-plus-square-foot, hotel-style modern compound complete with a bowling alley, movie theater, spa wing, billiards room, 1,000-bottle wine cellar, private dock, and a tunnel that runs under Highway A1A to an oceanfront cabana.

They listed the finished property this past May for $84.888 million. And now David MacNeil is under contract to buy it, fully furnished, for around $75 million. Here's a video tour:

And here's the wild part: This is not David's only footprint in Manalapan. Not even close.

Over the last two years, he has quietly spent $94 million buying two other massive land parcels about a mile away. His original plan was to combine them into a single megamansion build.

Add it all up, and David MacNeil now owns roughly $170 million worth of real estate in Manalapan alone.

The reason for this latest purchase is surprisingly down-to-earth. David's daughter, who lives in nearby Wellington, is expecting a baby. He wanted to be closer for the birth and the early years, and the Mennella estate offered something no ground-up construction project could match: the ability to move in immediately.

Most buyers spend years trying to secure even a single waterfront parcel in Manalapan. David MacNeil now controls three. One is a move-in-ready, hotel-style compound built on Billy Joel's former land. The other two are prime ocean-to-lake parcels so desirable that he's casually offering them for $125 million while deciding whether he even wants to sell.

Most billionaires announce their wealth through tech IPOs, viral apps, crypto booms, or splashy venture-backed moonshots. David MacNeil? He did it by selling rubber floor mats. And today, nearly four decades after answering WeatherTech customer calls from his garage, he's one of the most powerful — and least publicly known — real estate players in one of Florida's most exclusive ZIP codes.