UES Co-op Tied To Former Warner Bros. CEO Sells For $45M

Former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel’s unit in an exclusive Upper East Side co-op has traded for $45 million. 

An entity tied to Semel, also previously the chairman and co-CEO of Warner Brothers, sold the seventh floor of 820 Fifth Avenue in an off-market deal, according to public records. The buyer is an anonymous trust, The 2024 M Trust, which lists Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison attorney Ira Gilbert as the trustee. 

Semel bought the 7,000-square-foot apartment in 1996 from Gordon Getty, the billionaire son of an oil tycoon, and his late wife, Ann Getty, for $12.3 million. Semel allegedly almost lost out on the pad after a member of the co-op board, the late philanthropist and art collector Jayne Wrightsman, “voice[d] reservations about the deal,” according to a the Observer reported in 2002. 

Wrightsman, the widow of oil executive Charles Wrightsman, died in 2019 at the age of 99. Her estate sold her third-floor co-op in 2025 for $27.5 million, nearly half of the $50 million it asked when it hit the market in 2019. 

The East 63rd Street co-op, built in 1916, is one of the city’s most exclusive buildings. Besides Semel and Wrightsman, former residents include socialite Lily Safra, who sold her apartment to hedge funder Ken Griffin for $40 million in 2009, and designer Tommy Hilfiger. 

The deal for Semel’s co-op comes after a bitter dispute between his family members over his care following his 2011 Alzheimer’s diagnosis. In 2018, Semel’s son, Eric Semel, filed a petition for temporary conservatorship for his now 83-year-old father, and in it, accused Semel’s wife, Jane, of “causing serious harm to [his] health and safety, potentially rising to elder abuse and neglect.”

In court filings, Jane, Semel’s wife of almost 50 years, pushed back against Eric’s depiction of her, arguing that Semel is “sometimes confused and sometimes upset, but those are functions of his disease, not anything anyone has done to him.”

The two later reached a confidential settlement agreement.

Last July, Access Industries’ Len Blavatnik paid $115 million for Semel’s estate in Amagansett, marking the most expensive deal in the Hamptons in 2025 and the first nine-figure trade since 2022. Semel bought the eight-and-a-half-acre property from Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman for $43 million in 2005.

While Semel owned the estate, he and his then-neighbor and investor, Jonathan Sobel, repeatedly sued each other over issues with their respective properties, including landscaping disputes and fence removals. In one lawsuit, Sobel claimed Semel’s plans to build a mansion and guest house on his property violated local zoning laws.

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