John Arrillaga, Billionaire Silicon Valley Developer, Dies

(Bloomberg) -- John Arrillaga, who transformed California’s Silicon Valley as the force behind some of its most famous corporate campuses, has died. He was 84.

He died on Monday, “being held by his loving wife, Gioia, and his two loving children, John Jr. and Laura,” his daughter, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, wrote in a blog post. She is married to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Arrillaga and his business partner, Richard Peery, were little known outside of Silicon Valley, but their impact on the region has been immense. The two worked together for 50 years at their firm, Peery Arrillaga, and built more than 20 million square feet of corporate campuses for Apple Inc., Google and Cisco Systems Inc., among others. 

In 2019, to cite one example, Google paid almost $139 million for a Peery Arrillaga development near its Mountain View, California, headquarters. At the time, the firm was also planning a 2 million square foot development in San Jose.

Arrillaga “was one of the premier, almost inventors of the campus,” said Phil Mahoney, executive vice chairman at Newmark, who was introduced to the commercial real estate business by Arrillaga in the 1980s. “He understood that these companies grew fast and needed head count.”

According to his daughter, Arrillaga “was the creative visionary,” while Peery the “financial and legal mastermind.” She said her father was known as “the toughest dealmaker in Silicon Valley.”

“Silicon Valley transformed from agricultural land, orchards, into office parks, and John Arrillaga was one of the people who enabled that transformation,” Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington, said in an interview.

‘Distinctive Landscape’

O’Mara, author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” said Arrillaga helped create “this distinctive landscape where tech was the main business.” 

Bloomberg estimated Arrillaga’s net worth to be $2.5 billion as of 2019.

He was a prominent philanthropist, mainly giving to his alma mater, Stanford University. In 2013, he gave the school $151 million, the largest gift of its kind at the time.

The school’s Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center carries the name of his late wife, who died in 1995.

According to a 2001 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Arrillaga was admitted to Stanford on a basketball scholarship and came “from modest means, his Basque parents having immigrated from Spain and his father earning a living as a grocery wholesaler in Southern California.”

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