Los Angeles fund manager Capital Group has completed its $210-million purchase of the Bunker Hill skyscraper it already occupied as a renter and vows to continue expanding its downtown presence.

Capital Group was an anchor tenant at Bank of America Plaza, which it will now operate as a landlord. The 55-story tower at 333 S. Hope St. was completed in 1974 and has long ranked as one downtown’s most prominent office addresses. Capital Group has been headquartered there since 1978.

The move to buy the building at a substantial discount to its previous value is part of a pattern of well-heeled tenants deciding to become owners instead of renters in recent years as office property values plunged due to the pandemic and a shift to remote work for many companies.

“We knew the best landlord we could possibly have would be ourselves,” said Capital Group Chief Executive Mike Gitlin when the sale was first announced in April.

Bank of America Plaza’s previous owner, Brookfield Properties, defaulted on a $400 million loan and put the building on the market instead of facing foreclosure.

It was the largest office sale in Los Angeles in 2026 and the largest in Los Angeles County since 2023, according to real estate brokerage Colliers, which marketed the property on behalf of the court-appointed receiver.

Potential buyers competing for Bank of America Plaza included both private and institutional investors from the U.S. and overseas, said Mark Schuessler, a broker at Colliers.

Capital Group has been headquartered in downtown Los Angeles since it was founded in 1931, according to Chief Operating Officer Rob Klausner . “We view it as the ideal location to invest in as we bring our Los Angeles based teams together,” he said.

Capital Group is the largest occupant in the building, taking up 350,000 square feet on 14 floors. It plans to gradually take over another five floors as it consolidates employees from other offices downtown and in Santa Monica.

“The best way to ensure a great environment in downtown L.A. is to create what we’re calling a vertical campus” with 2,100 employees, Gitlin said. “It was just this unique opportunity where the price was much lower than it had been historically, and it was for sale.”

Bank of America is also a large tenant in the building and will continue to have its name on top. Other occupants include economic consulting firm Analysis Group Inc., law firm Musick Peeler & Garrett and Alliant Insurance Services.

Capital Group has more than 9,000 employees in 34 offices in multiple countries. It manages $3.4 trillion in assets for millions of wealth management and institutional clients, a representative said. 

Owner-users have surged as key players in L.A.’s office market, now accounting for nearly half of all deals, according to real estate data provider CoStar , while institutional investors’ share of purchases has fallen from 45% to 26%.

Office users from the public sector are among the buyers. The city of Los Angeles plans to buy a 35-story tower downtown for use by the Department of Water and Power.

Manulife U.S. Real Estate Investment Trust said in April that it would sell its high-rise at 865 S. Figueroa St. for $92.5 million pending approval from Los Angeles officials. It has an assessed value of $248 million.

Another major public buyer of a downtown office building was Los Angeles County, which in 2024 bought Gas Co. Tower for $200 million, a steep drop from its $632-million valuation in 2020. County officials said at the time that the foreclosure sale was too good a deal to pass up.

The county is gradually moving workers into the 55-story skyscraper at the base of Bunker Hill that was widely considered one of the city’s most desirable office buildings when it was completed in 1991.

In the second trading day as a public company, SpaceX’s initial public offering still was being treated as an extraordinary event in Wall Street history:

The largest IPO ever, creating the first trillionaire in Elon Musk, its boss, and bringing the company’s market value to $2.28 trillion.

On Monday, the stock gained 19.6% on top of its first-day gain of 19%, closing at $192.50. But the IPO is extraordinary in other ways that are becoming more clear as the pre-IPO frenzy yields to the company’s post-IPO reality.

The SpaceX IPO raises unprecedented questions about Wall Street’s role in future mega-IPOs, what this event means for the current bull market in stocks, the wisdom of concentrating so much wealth in so few hands and the rise of wealth inequality. The answers to these questions may not be pretty.

Last week, I pointed to some issues connected to the SpaceX IPO, including the utterly fantastical rationale for the company’s outsized market valuation and the prospect that billions of dollars of shares may be shoved into the retirement accounts of investors who don’t want them, thanks to the willingness of Nasdaq and other stock index sponsors to accept the shares into their indices well ahead of the customary “seasoning” delay.

But there’s more to think about. Start with the paucity of control that shareholders will get for their investments.

Law professor Ann Lipton, who monitors shareholder rights from the University of Colorado, reminds us of the traditional observation that “shareholders have three powers with respect to the corporations in which they invest: to vote, to sell, and to sue,” enabling them to “protect their investment and discipline management.”

Investors in SpaceX have none of those options.

The single votes that they acquire for every SpaceX Class A share offered in the IPO is swamped by the 10 votes per share of the company’s class B stock. As I reported last week, Musk will own a mere 12.3% of the Class A shares, but 93.6% of the Class B shares, which have 10 votes each. That gives him 85.1% of all shareholder votes.

As a result, the prospectus says, “Mr. Musk will be able to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval,” including the selection of directors and even whether he himself should step down.

Wall Street firms have enticed retail investors into buying into the IPO — Fidelity, for example, reduced the minimum account balance allowing clients to buy into an IPO from $100,000-$500,000 to $2,000.

But although those buyers can sell at any time, they will be punished for selling within the first 15 days after the IPO: The “first flip,” Fidelity warns, will result in their being blocked from future IPOs for six months; a second flip blocks them for a year and a third blocks them permanently.

On the other hand, insiders can sell a lot sooner than is customary. Typically, insiders of newly public companies have to wait at least six months before selling their shares, a period known as the lockup.

SpaceX insiders, however, can start selling their shares as soon as the second trading day after the company issues its second-quarter financial disclosure, expected around Aug. 11. (Musk and some other highly placed insiders have committed to holding their shares for at least 366 days.)

SpaceX reserved an unusually large tranche of its IPO for retail investors — 20% or more of the $75 billion raised. “The fact that Wall Street designed a deal that needed $20 billion of retail money to get it across the line tells you something about who they wanted in the building,” notes the former hedge fund operator and YouTube financial commentator Patrick Boyle.

Why did the company and its underwriters do that? It’s because, compared with institutions, retail investors are credulous, vulnerable to hype, and given to hanging on to a stock long after institutions have done the math on an underperforming investment and exited.

Shareholder lawsuits? Nope. The SpaceX bylaws require that any shareholder actions be brought not in court, but in arbitration — traditionally a management-favoring venue.

So no vote, no sales, no lawsuits. That might not matter as much if shareholders could count on the SpaceX board to protect their interests, but your old Magic 8 Ball, if it’s on the ball, might counsel: “Don’t count on it.”

Of the six board members listed in the IPO prospectus (not counting Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, who basically runs SpaceX as its chief operating officer), four are old cronies of Musk’s. They’re Ira Ehrenpreis, a longtime director of Tesla, which Musk controls; Antonio Gracias, a director of Musk’s private firms Neuralink and the Boring Co. and a former Tesla director; Steve Jurvetson, another former Tesla director; and Luke Nosek, a co-founder of PayPal, which was the original source of Musk’s wealth.

The boards of Musk’s companies have generally indulged his desires. Gracias and Jurvetson were on the board of SolarCity, which Musk merged into Tesla when the former was looking financially impaired in 2016. Ehrenpreis was on the Tesla board when it gifted Musk with a $1-trillion pay package last year.

That brings us to the question of whether it’s healthy for society to have so much wealth concentrated in the hands of mega-plutocrats such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Musk. These are people who are not at all shy about wielding their wealth to get their way, devil take the hindmost. Herman Melville put his finger on the issue in Moby-Dick, through Father Mapple’s sermon, in which he thunders, “Sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

Melville wrote that in 1851, but it echoes in Musk’s DOGE service, where his henchpersons ran roughshod through federal programs, stripping them of personnel and funds in what turned out to be a vastly overstated claim of budgetary savings. The wreckage included the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which could have played an important role in addressing the ongoing Ebola virus outbreak, the cause of illness and death for hundreds of victims in Africa.

But DOGE helped the Trump administration reduce USAID to an empty shell. “About two weeks into the Trump administration, Musk tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” recalls former USAID health official Nicholas Enrich, who was present at the destruction.

The siren song of Musk’s wealth and the prospect that investors would buy in despite the fantastical claims being made for SpaceX’s future allowed Musk to bully the biggest Wall Street investment banks into capitulating to his vision, and to his personal IPO design. (The IPO prospectus lists 32 banks as underwriters.)

In a normal IPO, the banks’ role is to test the waters for an upcoming issue, determining the right opening price. In this case, Musk decreed an opening price of $135 per share and the banks went along. They also accepted what may be record-low fees for what turned out to be their order-taking role.

Traditional IPO fees run as high at 7% of the issue, though fees have been trending toward 1% on mega-deals. For SpaceX, the fee was 0.7%; that number is small but it still came to about $500 million, to be doled out by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the lead banks.

This may be the right moment to consider that even the most high-flying investment crazes generally end in tears. AI is beginning to have that acrid smell. It’s proper to note that the driver of SpaceX’s valuation isn’t its space launches or its Starlink orbital wifi satellites, but its commitment to AI.

(Part of what may be driving the SpaceX frenzy my be the gains collected by early investors in Tesla, which have lent Musk a visionary’s halo. That said, however, Tesla wasn’t added to the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and therefore into large-cap index funds until 10 years after its 2010 IPO.)

That’s what accounts for almost all of the $28.5 trillion “total addressable market” the company claims for its services, never mind that it’s a distant also-ran in the AI business. Never mind that for SpaceX, AI does little but burn money, accounting for $12.7 billion of its $20.7 billion in capital expenditures last year while losing $6.36 billion on $3.2 billion in revenue.

Does the SpaceX IPO signal a bull-market top? That question was raised Sunday by Michelle Celarier, one of the nation’s most percipient financial market reporters. “The laws of economics say there has to be a break someday,” she wrote. “How brutal it will be and how effective governments and central banks will be in controlling the fallout is the unknown.”

Celarier quotes Erica Payne, the founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, observing that “86 percent of Americans are worried about the price of food. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. These two things are deeply, inherently connected.”

The SpaceX IPO may eventually stand in retrospect as a monument to this moment.

The lord of the rings works behind a nondescript door in a Beverly Hills office building, not far from the UCLA campus where he once sold hair clips and trinkets from a folding table. Jason Arasheben was $28,000 in debt back then, running low on options. Now, eight of the last 11 NBA champions have worn his jewelry on their fingers.

Super Bowl winners have his rings, too — the Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Philadelphia Eagles and the Seattle Seahawks, whose players opened their ornate jewelry boxes at a private team party Thursday night to find the prize every NFL player covets.

The Seahawks ring, large as a child’s fist, is encrusted with 20 carats of white diamonds and blue sapphires. It’s a miniature Lumen Field, featuring the hawk-head logo and two Lombardi Trophies. The top lifts off and converts into a pendant. Inside is a cowhide segment of a game-used football. Twelve flags on the sides nod to the “12th Man” fan base; one is a secret button — push it and the arches pop out to reveal the words “World Champions.”

Even the box performs. Three tiny spotlights shine on the ring as it rotates on a mechanical platform. Each weighs about a third of a pound.

“It’s a memento to a certain period of time,” said Arasheben, whose company is Jason of Beverly Hills. He concedes the rings are closer to trophies than wearable jewelry. He competes for ring contracts with Tiffany & Co. and Jostens, both much larger operations. “It celebrates this time that these players and these fans will remember forever.”

His rings appraise for $50,000 to $250,000, though the market can push them higher. In 2024, Kobe Bryant’s 2000 Lakers ring sold at auction for $927,000, the highest price ever paid for an NBA title ring, topping Bill Russell’s 1957 ring at $705,000.

Beverly Hills jewler Jason Arasheben is

(Ric Tapia / For The Times)

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NFL franchises typically order two or three times what NBA, NHL or MLB teams request — as many as 3,000 rings in four quality tiers. Lower-level employees might get cubic zirconia instead of diamonds. A limited number of fan versions are available at smaller scale and lower price. Arasheben always builds two extra into his contract so each of his sons can have one.

A career in luxury jewelry was never the plan. He grew up in Granada Hills and Calabasas; his Iranian father and Norwegian mother envisioned a doctor, lawyer or engineer. At UCLA, he found himself more interested in bars than books.

“I was $28,000 in debt because I enjoyed going out far too much, like every other college student,” he said.

One day he tagged along with a friend to the wholesale district downtown and had a flash of inspiration. She was buying plastic hair clips and silver trinkets by the dozen. He figured he could sell them to girls on campus.

(Courtesy of Jason of Beverly Hills)

He pitched the idea of a folding table to the university, which agreed when he offered to split the profits. He bought $400 worth of tchotchkes. One table became two, then six locations across Southern California campuses.

Then came the motherlode. He built acrylic display cases holding 30 to 40 pieces and drove from Agoura Hills to San Diego, stopping at every nail salon he could find, splitting the profits with owners who let him put a case on the counter. By his senior year, he had agreements with roughly 350 salons and was clearing $25,000 to $30,000 a month.

After college, as a regular on the L.A. nightclub scene, Arasheben built relationships with professional athletes and celebrities. He would go home and sketch chain designs for players he’d met, knowing nothing about the jewelry industry.

“Finally, an NBA player said, ‘Why don’t you come to my hotel room tomorrow before we play the Lakers and bring all the jewelry you have? I’m going to buy something from you,’ ” said Arasheben, describing an encounter with the late Anthony Mason.

Problem was, he had no jewelry. He spent the night cutting pictures from magazines and downloading images to create a makeshift catalog, then promised Mason a custom $40,000 necklace. Mason put down $20,000.

Arasheben went downtown, knocked on doors and found somebody to make it for $37,000. A new business was born, growing by word of mouth. Eventually he had four employees and a small office downtown, outsourcing most of his work.

Through his friendship with Jim Buss, son of owner Jerry Buss, Arasheben landed the contract to make the Lakers’ 2009 championship ring. It was a mad scramble. He and his employees slept in sleeping bags on the factory floor the final two weeks of production.

“We delivered the very last player ring 20 minutes before the ceremony began,” he said. “The ring ceremony was on national television, and can you imagine if they had to announce the rings weren’t ready? My career would have been over before it started.”

He made the Lakers ring in 2010, too, and five years later — through relationships with several Golden State players — produced four championship rings for the Warriors.

Tom Brady saw LeBron James’ ring during the 2020 offseason and convinced the Buccaneers to go with Arasheben.

A lot of Arasheben’s rings have James Bond elements such as secret compartments or special elements. The top comes off the miniature SoFi Stadium on the Rams ring, for instance, and the field below is made of a melted-down patch of the actual artificial turf. The World Series ring of the Texas Rangers features a tiny circle of leather from a game-used baseball.

He first incorporated a special feature in the 2018 Warriors ring, when a star player objected to a blue face and wanted white, only weeks from delivery. Arasheben devised a mechanism allowing the face to switch colors.

Jason Arasheben poses with some of the sports championship rings he has crafted over the years.

(Ric Tapia / For The Times)

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“We started getting a lot of championship ring contracts after that,” he said. “Because we took it to a new level and showed some ingenuity. We wanted to be innovative.”

Push a button on the Eagles’ ring and wings pop out on the sides. Arasheben came up with that idea while shopping for a Buzz Lightyear toy for his nephew.

Buzz, too, has wings that pop out.

“I thought, ‘I can do that for the Eagles, but with amazing gold and diamonds,’ ” he said.

He will put a proposal together to make the medals for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Then there’s the one that got away.

“We lost out on the L.A. Dodgers,” Arasheben said. “… But you know, that’s part of the business. You take your lumps.

“But I’ll still pitch. Every year, I pitch.”