Julia Koch, widow of the late David Koch and currently the richest woman in the United States, has placed the Manhattan luxury apartment that she and her late husband owned back on the market, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. And she's reportedly looking to get at least $60 million for the place.
That's a reasonable expectation given both the luxury, living space, and exclusivity of the 18-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue, which WSJ describes as being "one of New York's most exclusive addresses." According to a spokesperson for Koch, the reason for the listing is that she's been spending most of her time at two of her other residences, located in Southampton (a mansion valued at somewhere between $40-50 million which David purchased before he and Julia were married) and Palm Beach (Villa el Sarmiento, a mansion dating back to the 1920s purchased by the couple in 1998 and currently estimated to be worth more than $70 million).
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How exclusive is 740 Park Avenue? Well, it's not every address, even in the ritzier areas of Manhattan, that get books like "740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building" by Michael Gross written about it. But in that book it is revealed that the late David Koch purchased the apartment from the Japanese government, which had been using it to house its UN representative. Koch paid $17 million for the duplex back in 2004, which will make for a tidy profit if that $60 million asking price is reached (or surpassed).
Julia Koch inherited a fortune of about $50 billion when David Koch died in 2019, just a year after retiring as executive vice president of Koch Industries. At the time, that made her the richest woman on Earth and one of the ten richest people overall. Since then, her fortune has grown to some $62 billion, but her spot on the list of the world's richest people has sunk somewhat. Today, she has to content herself with being merely the richest woman in America and the third-richest woman on Earth – as well as one of the 25 richest people in the world.
