The Safety Illusion

What the L.A. Fires Reveal About Wealth, Risk, and Vulnerability

Image Credit MAXAR

The sun had barely set over the Pacific, as the sky glowed with a muted orange from the fire raging in the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood situated along the Westside of Los Angeles. Paris Hilton was sitting with her family to watch the news. As the screen flickered, Hilton saw her multimillion-dollar Malibu home, the one where she had built so many memories, consumed by flames. It wasn’t a still image or a report from hours ago, but live footage of her life’s past and present vanishing in real time.

In another neighborhood, the famous comedian, Billy Crystal, lost his home of 45 years. Mandy Moore drove through Altadena, past the remnants of her children’s school and favorite restaurants, all reduced to ashes. These were not isolated incidents—entire communities in Los Angeles, including some of Hollywood’s most familiar faces, had been wiped out by wildfires.

For most of us, the idea of celebrities losing their homes evokes a fleeting kind of sympathy. We assume that, like kings losing castles, they will simply rebuild—after all, they have the money, the connections, and the resources. But what if that assumption is misguided?

What if, instead of demonstrating their resilience, these losses expose a sobering reality—that even those with immense financial means are not as insulated from loss as we assume? What if their experiences challenge the idea that financial success guarantees stability, revealing that even the most seemingly secure foundations can be shaken in an instant?

Money Can’t Buy Enough Protection

We imagine that the wealthy exist in a different plane of reality. If a fire threatens, surely they have private fire crews or elaborate sprinkler systems. If their home burns down, they have insurance. And if insurance fails, there’s always another multimillion-dollar mansion waiting to be purchased.

But in the case of these fires, many celebrities found themselves just as helpless as their neighbors across town, who were not living in multi-million-dollar homes. They were forced to flee with only what they could carry, watching from a distance as the flames consumed everything they had built.

Insurance companies had already deemed large swaths of California uninsurable due to the escalating frequency of wildfires. No amount of wealth could change that. Even those who had invested in state-of-the-art fire suppression systems or followed the latest recommendations for fire-resistant materials found that nature was indifferent to their precautions. Their carefully curated sanctuaries, the tangible markers of years of hard work and success, vanished within hours.

The realization hit hard: money could provide many things, but it could not stop a firestorm from tearing through entire communities, leaving ruin in its wake.

Eugene Levy, the honorary mayor of Pacific Palisades, found himself in gridlocked traffic, unable to escape. Melissa Rivers, daughter of Joan Rivers, grabbed only a few cherished possessions—her mother’s Emmy, a photo of her father—before fleeing. Even in their wealth, their reactions were the same as anyone else’s: panic, loss, and the desperate hope that something might be left standing.

The Fragility of “Making It”

For many, including me, the dream of reaching financial success is a dream of security. The thinking goes: If I can just reach that level—if I can earn enough, buy the right home, live in the right place—then I will be safe. But the reality of these fires challenges that idea to its core.

Consider the actor Cameron Mathison, who stood before the smoldering remains of his home, unable to comprehend what had happened. “We’re starting from scratch,” he said. And that’s the heart of the issue: even those who have spent decades accumulating wealth, building their dream homes, and securing their futures can find themselves, in an instant, with nothing. In one CNN interview, I watched actor James Woods describe what it was like to flee his Beverly Hills home.

“Every single thing that I own is in this room,” Woods said, motioning to the hotel room they were staying in. “We got a basket of laundry, pills, and the keys to our car; and that’s it.”

It’s a striking realization. We often think of wealth as a kind of shield, protecting those who possess it from life’s most brutal realities. But what happens when even the most secure homes, built on the ridges of California’s most coveted landscapes, are suddenly gone or worth nothing? When wealth itself cannot buy the safety we thought it could?

If They Can Lose Everything, What About the Rest of Us?

If multimillion-dollar homes owned by Oscar winners, musicians, and business moguls can be reduced to rubble overnight, what does that mean for everyone else? The answer is unsettling.

If celebrities cannot get fire insurance, what about middle-class families? If stars like John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, who were forced to evacuate, experience financial strain from rebuilding, what happens to the average Angeleno or someone living in another area that used to be insurable, but no longer is?

We like to think that wealth scales proportionally to security. But the fires expose a darker truth: sometimes, the risks we face are absolute. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if the system itself—insurance, emergency response, climate policy—is failing.

The Uninsurability of Disaster

The loss of homes and property is a catastrophe on a giant macro-and microeconomic scale for celebrities and the surrounding communities. But the deeper issue isn’t just that celebrities lost their homes. It’s that California’s wildfires have become so frequent, so devastating, that insurance companies are pulling out of entire regions.

In 2023, major insurers like State Farm and Allstate stopped issuing new policies in California, citing increased wildfire risk. This means that when homes are lost, they are truly lost—there’s no financial recovery.

Imagine this: You’ve spent your entire career building something—a legacy, a reputation, a fortune. You’ve finally arrived. You buy the house, the one with the sweeping ocean views, the infinity pool, the private driveway winding up into the hills. It cost you $40 million, but that’s fine. You’ve been smart with your money. You still have $11 million in the bank. More than enough, you think.

Then, one night, the fire comes. It moves fast. Faster than you expected. You have minutes, maybe seconds, to grab what matters. The house you poured your success into—the one that was supposed to be your forever home—is gone.

Now, let’s do the math. Your $40 million home has been reduced to ash, and your net worth just plummeted overnight. That $11 million in the bank? That’s all you have left. And by most accounts, it’s a lot of money. You could rebuild, but where? In Los Angeles, where insurance companies are pulling out, where the land itself is now seen as a liability? Or do you start over somewhere else? Somewhere safer, but unfamiliar?

And here’s the part we don’t often consider: not everyone, even among the rich and famous, has that safety net. Some bought their homes in the prime of their careers, back when money was flowing. Others may have inherited their home from a wealthy family member. Then they retired, assuming they had enough to last. But real estate isn’t just an investment; it’s where your wealth lives. And when it’s gone, so is everything you built.

In the past, homeownership was seen as one of the safest investments a person could make. But what happens when entire regions become financial dead zones, where insurance companies refuse to operate and rebuilding becomes an impossibility? Or when millionaires and middle-class families alike suddenly find that their homes—their biggest investments—physically gone, as well as their net worth?

The fires reveal two uncomfortable realization:

1. We are in an era where homeownership, once a bedrock of security, is becoming a gamble against forces beyond our control in certain regions. This is especially true in one of the most star-studded and expensive locations on the planet to live and work.

2. No one is impermeable. We assume that with enough planning, with enough resources, we can control risk. But as the fires in Los Angeles have shown, even the wealthiest and most well-known among us—our childhood idols even—are affected in a way we could not fathom.

The people who lost their homes were not reckless. They were not unprepared. Many of them, like Diane Warren and Ricki Lake, had lived in their homes for decades, believing them to be safe. But what they—and we—are now confronting is the unsettling truth that safety itself is becoming harder to buy.

The New Reality of Risk

The lesson of these fires is not just that devastation is universal, but that security is more fragile than we think. The belief that financial success can insulate us from life’s worst moments is an illusion. It’s not that money doesn’t help—it does. But the fires reveal that some forces are beyond even the deepest pockets.

So, what do we take away from this? Perhaps that we need to rethink how we measure security. Perhaps that we need to question whether homeownership in high-risk areas is truly sustainable. Or perhaps, most importantly, we need to recognize that disaster does not discriminate—and that all of us, no matter our resources, can succumb to more than we realize, faster than we realize.

Because in the end, it wasn’t just houses that burned in Los Angeles. It was the illusion of safety itself.