Billionaire Heir Buys Playboy Mansion

The Playboy mansion—complete with Hugh Hefner—has been snapped up by a party-loving neighbor. Daren Metropoulos, a 32-year-old billionaire heir who lives in an $18 million mansion next door to Hefner's longtime abode, is believed to be paying around $200 million for the 29-room mansion, the Guardian reports. Metropoulos, whose private-equity firm owns Hostess Brands, wants to join the two properties together, but under the terms of sale, he will have to wait until Hefner dies. At 90, the Playboy founder is a year older than the mansion in Los Angeles' exclusive Holmby Hills area.

"The Playboy mansion has been a creative center for Hef as his residence and workplace for the past 40 years, as it will continue to be if the property is sold," Playboy CEO Scott Flanders said when the property went up for sale earlier this year. "The heritage of this property transcends its celebrity," Metropoulos tells the Wall Street Journal, which notes that property brokers haven't disclosed the exact sale price, though they say it sets a record for a residential property in Los Angeles. Brokers say the mansion, one of the few LA residences with a zoo license, is showing its age and needs major renovations. (In 2010, a former Hefner girlfriend described "squalid" conditions and seedy goings-on at the aging mansion.)