By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief
The Yottas are not coming to town: social media reports that the European “party house people,” who have irritated Hollywood neighbors with loud events, mixing up the beautiful and the homeless with an elephant, were looking to buy or rent on Amalfi are not true.
Apparently Pacific Palisades is “too family friendly, too many kids,” said a Realtor who had been advising Bastian and Maria Yotta since they relocated from Germany to Los Angeles in 2014, specifically to throw parties.
They caused waves last year when they leased four massive homes built by developer Danny Fitzgerald to hold events promoting their “cosmetics and lifestyle empire” back in Germany.
The four homes create one 46,000-square-foot complex on Weidlake Street in Lake Hollywood, which had previously been rented by Justin Bieber, Playboy models shooting a TV series about swingers and other fleeting celebrities.
Neighbors called the houses “the abortion on the hill” but Fitzgerald told them: “Pay me $50 million. I will leave and you can tear them down.”
Instead, earlier this year, the Yottas arrived with an ambition to outdo the Playboy Mansion for wild parties with celebrity guests.
The parties were, according to neighbors, pretty wild.
Apart from the traditional bikini-clad, would-be actresses, Speedo-clad men, imported wines and a few beers from Yotta’s native Munich, the host also invited a caged lion—which was then confiscated by the Los Angeles Police Department—and arrived at one event riding down the street on an elephant. For which he had a permit.
Yotta, who once told the New York Post he was a “fat kid raised on ‘Baywatch,’” said that LA used to be a crazy party town but now needed someone like him to wake it up.
He said he has banned people because he does not want 10 ugly people staring at his wife’s breasts, but, perhaps to make up for that or add to the party atmosphere, has employed homeless people as help during the marathons.
Fans of the “Yotta Life” take to Instagram and Twitter to deny charges it is superficial narcissism. Critics suggest its closer to “Jersey Shore” than “Baywatch,” the TV show where lives were occasionally saved—or something more sinister.
Reports suggested he has been spending $100,000 a month in Hollywood, but wants to expand his empire—partly because the 38-year-old German loves the Californian lifestyle and partly because it’s a tax-efficient promotion for his cosmetics company.
He first looked at Malibu, said the Hollywood-based Realtor, but felt the houses were not big enough, so turned his gaze to Amalfi so he could get “as close as he could to Tom [Hanks] and Steven [Spielberg] because they look like they would enjoy a private party.”
But the Yottas, recently described in Curbed LA as deeply tanned moguls who enjoy 24-hour piped-in music and neighbors who don’t complain about their friends, could not find anything large enough, apparently.
For the record, neither Hanks nor Spielberg have been photographed at such parties for many years. And, for those who feel they have had enough of the Yottas, here is a fun fact: a yotta is currently the largest decimal unit prefix in the metric system, denoting a quadrillion units. The mass of the earth of 5.7 yotta.
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