Back in 1980, Mark Reynolds Hughes, a high school dropout with a gift for hustling, launched Herbalife, a line of weight loss products, out of the trunk of his car. In impressively short order, Hughes managed to parlay his humble one-man medicine show into an iconically successful multi-level marketing juggernaut with a well-known catchphrase — “Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How!” — and an international network of distributors in 95 countries. 

 

When Hughes passed away in 2000, he had achieved a net worth believed to be somewhere in the vicinity of $500 million, a sizable chunk of which was consigned to a trust for Hughes’ only child, Alex, a son Hughes shared with his third/penultimate wife, Suzan. As has been reported in numerous outlets, Alex, only nine at the time of his father’s death, would receive the bulk of his inheritance (the exact amount is unknown, but consensus points to a figure in the $300 million range) upon reaching his 35th birthday, a day that is rapidly approaching.

 

Unlike his salesman father, a fervent spotlight-seeker, 33-year-old Alex Hughes prefers to keep a low profile. The few photos of him floating around online date back to the early 2000s, and the only recent biographical data the reporter of a 2022 feature in Vanity Fair managed to unearth is that he’s an independent film producer and founder of a production company called Spacemaker. However, one trait Alex would appear to have inherited from his Herbalife guru dad is an affinity for real estate. In 2013, Hughes plunked down $13.4 million to pick up Jim Carrey’s longtime home in guard-gated Malibu Colony, then subsequently acquired a $9 million oceanfront cottage on Carbon — a.k.a. “Billionaire’s” — Beach, a Frisbee’s throw from the homes of such well-known .0001 percenters as Larry Ellison, Eli Broad, and Michael Milken. Hughes appears to co-own the properties with his mother Suzan, who has herself long maintained an 11,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion that is likely worth about $20 million today.

 

More recently, Hughes has diversified his real estate portfolio with the purchase of a landmarked mid century modern high in the hills of Los Feliz, just outside Griffith Park. Known as the Jacobson House, the two-story post and beam is located a few doors down from another Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, Richard Neutra’s celebrated International Modern-style Lovell Health House, currently in the midst of an extensive and much-needed restoration at the hands of owners Iwan and Manuela Wirth, the Swiss power couple behind the global art gallery empire of Hauser & Wirth.