This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Luis Noguera, whose father is selling a luxury home in Miami and accepting shares in Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX as payment. It has been edited for length and clarity.
My father owns a modern waterfront home in South Florida that’s currently on the market. Most sellers are hoping for cash offers or conventional financing.
We’re open to something different.
If the right buyer came along and wanted to use shares in OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX as part of the deal, we’d seriously consider it.
A mix of cash and private-company stock would probably make the most sense. We still have practical things to think about, like paying real-estate commissions and handling the transaction itself. But we’re willing to be creative because we think owning a piece of these companies could be a better long-term investment than continuing to hold the property.
Maria Corina Martinez
My background is in technology and data. I spent several years working on data teams, including in San Francisco, and I’ve followed the AI industry closely. My father and I recently formalized the structure of our family office, and we’ve been thinking more intentionally about where we want to invest our capital over the long term.
The house no longer fits that strategy.
We bought the property years ago as an investment. It was a new construction home in a gated community with a lake view, a pool, and a nearby golf course. We rented it out for several years and earned a solid return.
After the tenant moved out recently, we refreshed the property and started thinking about what came next.
No one in our family planned to live there. We weren’t particularly interested in continuing to manage rentals. As we looked at the asset, we began to wonder whether there were better opportunities elsewhere.
That’s what led us to consider AI stocks.
A lot of people talk about the hype surrounding companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and I understand why. Valuations have skyrocketed, and there’s plenty of speculation.
But I also think AI is a transformational technology.
I’ve worked in data long enough to see how dramatically these tools are changing the way people work. My colleagues use AI every day. I use it every day — I don’t even write much code anymore. AI agents handle a lot of that for me.
I use AI for everything from administrative work to building systems for personal accounting and reporting. Tasks that used to require multiple tools can now be handled through AI workflows. The productivity gains are real.
That’s why I believe the opportunity extends beyond the current excitement.
Could these investments go down? Absolutely. There’s risk in any emerging technology. That’s one reason we’d likely prefer a combination of stock and cash rather than an all-stock transaction.
We’re still in the very early stages of exploring this idea. The home has received multiple showings, but we haven’t received an offer involving AI-company shares yet.
Even if nobody ultimately buys the property this way, I think the fact that we’re having the conversation says something about where investing is headed.
My generation looks for opportunities differently from previous generations. We’re more comfortable exploring unconventional structures if we believe the underlying investment thesis is strong.
Years ago, people might have looked at a rental property and assumed it was the obvious asset to keep. My family looks at that same property and thinks we’d rather own a piece of the companies building the future.
