It was posted on Barstool Sports on X "Who the Fxxk is the Old Man Named James Goldstein Who Is At Every Big Time NBA Game Surrounded by Smokes (apparently a slang term for blonde models)"? Well, I know who he is. He's a fellow mobile home park owner. Here's what AI has to say: James Goldstein is a mobile home park owner in California who has been involved in numerous lawsuits with municipalities over rent control and land-use regulations. So how can a "trailer park" owner be the NBA's #1 fan, and live in the Hollywood Hills home used as the set in the Big Lebowsky? Here's the story, as published on-line:
Goldstein has another reputation, though—one that's perhaps less known to the celebrities he calls friends or the elite NBA circles he runs in—as the owner of at least five mobile home parks in Southern California, who, his tenants say, has spent decades going to great lengths to squeeze every drop he can out of them. The mystery man was open discussing his childhood, his NBA fandom, his girlfriends, and his iconic Beverly Hills home. But when asked about the fortune that affords him his life of luxury, Goldstein said he didn't want to talk about business. "Tell him I have nothing to add," he instructed his assistant via email.
James Goldstein wasn't always fabulous or mysterious. His story traces the classic outline of the Hollywood starlet. He came from Midwestern roots, outgrew his hometown, and followed Horace Greeley's calling to go West and grow up with his country.
Goldstein's father owned Zahn's department store in Racine, Wisconsin—the roots of his fascination with clothing. While his father was a conservative dresser, Goldstein went the other way. He says a pink suit, purchased in high school, was an early statement buy.
Goldstein's parents introduced him to tennis, a game he still tries to play every day, but his true love was basketball. His first team was the Milwaukee Hawks, which moved to Wisconsin in 1951; their chief rivals were the George Mikan–led Lakers of Minneapolis. Goldstein started going to games at age ten. By 15, he was the scorekeeper for the radio and television broadcast crews, until the team left for St. Louis in 1954-55. (Goldstein is notoriously reticent about his age, but that puts him in his mid-to-late 70s.) In those days, Goldstein says, the Hawks drew only about 2,000 fans to their games. In their last season in Milwaukee, they went just 26-46.
"They used to play doubleheaders," Goldstein told me. "Or they would have the Harlem Globetrotters playing first, in order to bring fans to the games."
Goldstein moved to California to attend college at Stanford, in Palo Alto, and then followed Highway 1 down the coastline to get his Masters of Business from UCLA. Even on a grad student's budget, he continued going to basketball games, buying Lakers tickets from the box office or a scalper: $15 to sit on the court, or $10 a few rows back.
By 1964, he was finishing his studies and living near the Whiskey A Go Go, a hotspot for celebrities and their friends on the Sunset Strip. It was there that Goldstein met the first of his famously glamorous, beautiful, and wild girlfriends: Jayne Mansfield, the movie star second only to Marilyn Monroe in the pantheon of Hollywood's blonde sex symbols.
"The Whisky had just opened up and I used to go there every night," Goldstein says. "It was full of celebrities. She was in there and I was a big fan of hers. I got up my courage and asked her to dance and the rest is history."
After graduating from UCLA in 1964, Goldstein joined the newly formed Rammco Investment Corporation, which bought farmland on the outskirts of Los Angeles and flipped it for millions. Rammco's chairman, the 31-year-old Arthur Carlsberg, was widely recognized as a savant in the world of Southern California real estate. He pioneered an algorithm for land valuation, according to a Time Magazine cover story in 1965. The company would buy properties and subdivide them, selling plots at a 10 percent commission to those looking to join in on Southern California's latest development boom.
Goldstein became one of the firm's acquisitions men, finding promising vacant land around Riverside and San Bernardino. By 1972, he had risen to the level of vice-president and could afford to purchase a home in Beverly Hills—his Afghan hound, Natasha, whom he has called the love of his life, needed a yard to run around in. The residence, designed and built by John Lautner in 1963, cost Goldstein $185,001—about $1.06 million in today's dollars.
Goldstein worked with Lautner from 1979 until the architect's death in 1994 to completely redesign the house. (After Lautner's death, Goldstein worked with Duncan Nicholson, Lautner's assistant, and after Nicholson's death last January, he began to work with two of Nicholson's former assistants.) He made the glass panes frameless, he ripped out the green shag carpeting, he redid all the concrete, and he completely replanted the landscaping. He even worked with Lautner to design built-in concrete furniture down to the placement of the leather stitching on the couches.
The Sheats Goldstein residence consists of three buildings nestled behind whisper-quiet silver gates. The driveway, overlooked by a single basketball hoop, is typically packed with cars: for the near-daily modeling shoots, the seemingly endless construction, or the visitors on architectural tours. The house has appeared in The Big Lebowski, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, and innumerable shoots of both high and low fashion.
"His life, and his use of the house, is very multifaceted. He loves film shoots, he loves the events and magazines with fashion," says Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The museum will inherit the house when Goldstein—who has no children, ex-wives, or other obvious heirs—dies. "We agreed from the beginning how important it was to keep the house alive through programs, through renting it for films and shoots."
Museum estimates place the value of the gift around $40 million, not including a $17 million endowment for upkeep. Goldstein said he considered that figure "conservative," which is probably the only time that word will ever be associated with James Goldstein.
In many ways, it's appropriate that he's giving the house to LACMA, since it already functions, more or less, as a museum to himself. Almost every available surface is covered with pictures of Goldstein and his celebrity friends. On the walls hang multiple portraits of Goldstein in his iconic leather with a hand in pocket, hip jutting jauntily out, high-fashion grimace on his face. In person, Goldstein walks slowly and talks deliberately. As he moves through his home, he constantly adjusts things. He'll center a thermometer here, or flip a couch cushion there. He does this reflexively, with the practice of someone who doesn't want to leave a single element unimproved.
Goldstein controls his image in a similarly obsessive fashion. His Instagram, for example, which has nearly 55,000 followers, alternates between shots of supermodels in his home and photos of Goldstein with basketball or fashion luminaries. It is as glamorous as it is inscrutable, and it all continues to raise the same question: Who the hell is James Goldstein, really?
So could you be the next Jimmy Goldstein? As Wayne Gretzky once said "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take".
If you want to learn more about the science of investing in mobile home parks – including how to find them, evaluate them, negotiate them, finance them, turn them around, and operate them – then you should consider attending our Mobile Home Park Investor's Boot Camp. Jimmy Goldstein was too early stage to attend, but a third of the Top 100 largest owners in the U.S. did.