A billionaire’s son sold investors on the ‘ultimate man cave.’ Was any of it real?

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On paper, “The Bunker” was an ideal playground for Southern California’s ultrarich.

Described as “the ultimate man cave,” a $14,500 monthly membership offered access to a fleet of high-end vehicles including Ferraris, Bugattis and Porsches, according to investor decks obtained by The Times.

Members were promised curated dining experiences, lavish private spaces, high-end wines and cigars. Founding members purportedly included venture capitalist Mark Cuban, fashion designer and L.A. oil fortune scion August Getty, NBA champion Kristaps Porzingis and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, according to a lawsuit filed by two investors.

The Bunker’s fleet of supercars would call Beverly Hills home, as soon as its ownership group completed an approximately $90-million takeover of Mr. C’s Beverly Hills Hotel, according to an executive summary of the business reviewed by The Times.

From 2020 to 2022, the man behind The Bunker hooked investors on his hyper-ambitious project, meeting with business owners in ritzy parts of West L.A. and hosting gatherings at Formula 1 Events around the globe, according to a lawsuit and investors interviewed by The Times.

Some said they decided to buy in based on the last name of The Bunker’s CEO, as it signaled a connection to the nation’s premier real estate baron.

But a litany of lawsuits filed in recent years accuse David Bren — the estranged son of Irvine Co. founder and billionaire Donald Bren — of conjuring The Bunker out of thin air to take millions from wealthy targets. One lawsuit said the younger Bren led a “charade designed to lure investors … to fund his own extravagant lifestyle.”

“The Bunker does not exist. There is no ultra-high end automotive club. There are no members. The business is a mirage,” one lawsuit alleged.

Some close to Bren say the 33-year-old’s plans were genuine, but suggested he ran into impossible headwinds trying to launch a high-end social club at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bren did not respond to messages and calls sent to emails and phone numbers listed for him in various court documents.

In response to a list of questions submitted by The Times, Donald Bren spared only a dozen words for his estranged son.

“We do not have a personal or business relationship with this individual,” said Paul Hernandez, a spokesperson for both the billionaire and the Irvine Co.

In several state and federal lawsuits, David Bren has been accused of misappropriating funds from The Bunker and another business to cover personal expenses. Other civil complaints accuse him of defaulting on lease agreements for high-end cars, homes and office spaces in Los Angeles, including a claim that he broke into a Beverly Hills residence and stayed there without paying the lease.

All told, judgments against Bren total roughly $2.6 million. Bren did not retain attorneys or provide a defense in any of the lawsuits related to The Bunker, according to court records.

An attorney Bren retained in the alleged Beverly Hills break-in declined to comment.

Bren was reported to both Los Angeles police and the FBI, according to emails reviewed by The Times. Both police agencies declined to comment. He has never been charged with a crime.

Most investors alleged in the lawsuits that they lost at least six-figure sums. One of those he worked with fled from California in shame.

And the man who was The Bunker’s most ardent supporter was found dead in San José in 2022.

The Bren name is synonymous with success in Southern California.

With an estimated net worth of more than $19 billion, according to Forbes, Donald Bren, 93, owns the Irvine Ranch and commands a real estate portfolio of hundreds of office buildings, resorts, shopping centers and apartment complexes. Intensely private, Bren has largely eschewed interviews and media attention.

But his personal affairs came into the public eye after the Irvine Co. founder’s ex-girlfriend, Jennifer McKay Gold, and two children that the billionaire fathered sued him for millions in retroactive child support in 2003. David was just 11 years old when the suit was filed. His sister, Christie, was 15.

The suit alleged Donald Bren’s out-of-court child support payments to Gold were well below what a family court would have ordered him to provide. The trial proved embarrassing for the billionaire — details about his love life and allegations that he was an absentee father were aired publicly — but a jury ultimately ruled in his favor in 2010.

Beyond the ruling, Donald agreed to pay for David and Christie’s education until each turned 25. He had already provided them with roughly $9 million in support before the trial, his lawyer previously told The Times.

McKay Gold filed for bankruptcy last year, listing significant credit card debts and few assets, records show. She declined to comment through her attorney.

The young David Bren “turned red,” according to The Times report covering the hearing when the jury rejected his claims in the child support lawsuit. But that fury didn’t stop him years later from invoking his father’s name in pursuit of his own dreams of a business empire.

Sometimes, he described his father as a close ally.

“He presented like he could have picked up the phone and called his father right away,” said Chris Rising, an associate of the Bren family whose L.A. realty firm was roped into David’s attempts to buy Mr. C’s Beverly Hills Hotel.

To other potential investors, David painted Donald as a deadbeat.

“He was slick. He played this, like, victim; that’s how he pulled people’s heartstrings. ‘My Dad didn’t give me nothing; I could do this, but no one believes in me,’” said Mike Tran, a close friend of one investor.

Projections of wealth, influence and power like the kind his father holds were core to Bren’s pitches and lifestyle.

In a 2021 promotional video for The Bunker, Bren speaks about his passion to create a curated space for car lovers between images of expensive watches, a Formula 1 racing vehicle and liquor swilling in a decanter. He tells a story about a helicopter chasing a Ferrari at an event he staged.

An investor presentation for The Bunker said it would boast a fleet of cars valued at more than $50 million. Promising to deliver a “supercar” lifestyle, the presentation reviewed by The Times was replete with mantras that presented The Bunker as not merely a haven for car enthusiasts, but a home for the superelite.

“Our house is sacred and we defend its integrity mercilessly,” read one slide describing the business. “A supercollider for brilliance and passion. A haven from a mundane world.”

Some who did business with Bren soon started to question how “mercilessly” he ran his company.

Nanxi Liu, a tech entrepreneur who now serves as the co-founder of Blaze, invested $100,000 toward The Bunker in 2021. During their initial meetings, Liu said she was impressed by Bren’s pitches as he casually name-dropped celebrities and swore he already had a contract in place to buy Mr. C’s Beverly Hills Hotel to house The Bunker, she said.

He even took her to a swank West Hollywood event that Bren claimed The Bunker was “co-sponsoring” with Louis Vuitton, though when Liu got there, she saw no branding related to the car venture.

Liu said she would have never given David Bren a single cent if it weren’t for the enthusiasm of one of her mentors, Tony Chen. A Bay Area entrepreneur, Chen was obsessed with the idea of The Bunker, according to Liu. She said Chen often touted Bren’s connections to the Irvine Co. and promises of exclusivity as sure signs of success.

Liu was apprehensive, but Chen had invested in her first company, and she felt obliged.

“He really pressed me on it. He said you have to invest in this. Put in half a million … do it for me. I’m involved in this business. I’m advising them … it’s going to be so awesome. It’s the SoHo House for car lovers,” Chen said, according to Liu, aping the pitch language Bren used on others.

But a few months later, Liu said, Chen showed up at her home in “massive, massive crisis.”

Her mentor was guilt-stricken, remorseful that he’d pushed Liu and others to invest. While she’d only given Bren $100,000, Liu said it seemed Chen was in far deeper.

Chen — a tech investor who friends say built his fortune by betting on startups — decided to fight back. He reached out to Joshua Ritter, a former L.A. prosecutor turned private attorney.

Ritter connected Chen with an FBI agent, according to emails reviewed by The Times, but an investigation into Bren never seemed to go anywhere.

The lead agent, Kyle Schultz, referred all questions to an FBI spokeswoman, who declined to comment.

Ritter said he’s represented approximately eight people, including Chen, who invested in The Bunker. Most lost at least $100,000 and one invested “just shy” of $1 million, according to Ritter.

“There’s nothing happening. The Bunker isn’t becoming anything,” he said. “There’s no locations opening. It’s all just talk.”

Most did not want to file lawsuits or involve police out of fear that the public attention would hurt their reputations, according to Ritter.

“They would rather walk away from it than cooperate with law enforcement, rather than file a lawsuit and get their name out there,” he said.

Those who did go after Bren in the courts found success.

In 2022, Elham Alsulaiman and Zainal Alireza offered Bren $1 million in seed money for The Bunker and made plans to open a second franchise of the concept in Dubai, according to court records.

But as months went by, and nothing resembling an exclusive car club materialized in the U.S. or abroad, Alsulaiman and Alireza grew restless and demanded a meeting.

Bren was “extremely apologetic” and wrote a check for a half-million dollars, according to the lawsuit. But “when Plaintiffs attempted to cash the check in the United States, it bounced,” they said.

Lawyers for the investors did not respond to requests for comment. A default judgment for more than $1 million was entered against Bren last year.

The pattern described in the Alsulaiman case played out other times for those who did business with Bren, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews. When Liu tried to pull her money out, emails show Bren offered a complimentary membership to The Bunker, whenever it opened.

“Although financially we are parting ways, which I think is best all around, we would still love for you to enjoy The Bunker and appreciate you stepping up to back the concept in the first place,” Bren wrote to Liu in July 2022.

Bren only ever repaid $10,000 of her initial investment, according to Liu, who sued and won a default judgment last year.

Other lawsuits alleged Bren sometimes provided investors with a return, only to reel them in for a larger sum. One investor quickly earned 25% interest on their initial $100,000 cash injection into The Bunker, so they gave Bren an additional $150,000, according to a lawsuit filed last year. Bren only repaid the plaintiff $10,000, court records show.

In 2021, Bren tried to link The Bunker to a prestigious racing circuit. Bren signed contracts to place two Bunker-sponsored racing vehicles in the W Series, a performance racing circuit meant to serve as an all-female alternative to Formula One, according to term sheets obtained by The Times. Bren agreed to a multimillion-dollar deal to operate two teams, but never delivered his deposit, according to those documents and related emails reviewed by The Times.

The W Series went bankrupt in 2023. A high-ranking W Series official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the media, said Bren’s “failure to pay dramatically impacted cash flow” and hurt the business, which was counting on the projected revenue from his teams.

A spokesperson for the W Series did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Ritter said he often wondered why people gave Bren so much money when there was never a “brick and mortar” version of The Bunker to entice them.

But Bren actually did take steps to buy the building that The Bunker was supposed to call home.

Rising, the co-founder of Rising Realty Partners in L.A., said his late father sat on the board of the Irvine Co. for decades, so when Donald Bren’s son reached out through an intermediary looking for help buying Mr. C’s Beverly Hills Hotel, Rising didn’t blink.

“Anytime I questioned what his relationship was like with his dad, he was always like, ‘It’s really good and they’re tight,’ and blah, blah, blah,” Rising said.

Rising’s firm was contracted to consult on the purchase in 2021. Bren at one point sent Rising an image of a bank statement purporting that The Bunker had just shy of $100 million in an account for the purposes of buying the hotel, and Rising arranged a walk-through of the property.

Bren arrived in an “outlandish car” that Rising described as a purple Lamborghini. Throughout the tour, Rising said Bren seemed professional,”like an entrepreneur with a vision.”

But when it came time for Bren to put his money where his mouth was, Rising said, he disappeared. The hotel was eventually rebranded as the Cameo Beverly Hills in 2023 and is now operated by Hilton.

When Bren failed to deliver the deposit, Rising moved on. He hadn’t put any money into the hotel deal and his firm was at no risk of harm to its reputation.

Others, like Chen, had put too much money into the business to simply let things go.

By the fall of 2022, Tony Chen was at his wit’s end. Ritter said Chen started the group text of potential Bren victims, but was making little headway in getting his money back or enticing police to pursue the black sheep real estate scion.

In the months after his breakdown at Liu’s house, Chen and his wife separated and he started living at the San José home of a close friend, Tran. Chen may have also been dealing with undiagnosed mental health issues, according to Tran and Liu, who both sometimes described him as “manic.”

Tran feared that Bren was capitalizing on the disarray in his friend’s life.

He watched in horror as Chen wrote check after check for The Bunker. When he made investments, Chen put money into people, not projects, Tran said. For whatever reason, he believed in Bren.

“Tony built out this thing for this guy like, ‘Oh man, he’s this underdog. He’s this David. And if he gets this right, he’s going to become Goliath,’” said Tran, the founder of Laruce Beauty Products.

But eventually, even those who worked closely with Bren started to feel betrayed.

Desiree Medellin, former chief creative officer of The Bunker, said that while the COVID-19 pandemic severely hampered Bren’s legitimate plans to launch a car club, he also became “erratic” in 2022 as the business collapsed.

“Unfortunately, many people were negatively impacted, myself included … I will never be in a position to defend his actions or words as he personally doesn’t deserve that grace from me, nor will I ever understand where things went wrong while being so close to creating something great,” she wrote in an email to The Times.

A court document reviewed by The Times shows Bren was living last summer at a Bel-Air mansion. Since then, Bren appears to have moved to Miami, according to social media posts.

When it became clear in late 2022 that The Bunker was never going to materialize, friends say Chen became reclusive, rarely leaving his room except for meals.

Until one morning in September 2022, when Tran said he found Chen in his garage. Hanging from a noose. He was 46 and is survived by his ex-wife and daughter.

A spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County medical examiner’s office confirmed Chen’s cause of death was suicide. Chen’s widow did not respond to a request for comment.

Tran, Liu and Ritter all acknowledged multiple factors played a role in Chen’s death, including his marital strife, mental health struggles and other financial anxieties.

Liu said she would not have sued Bren if it weren’t for her mentor’s suicide, and she remains baffled that Bren has avoided serious consequences.

“Here in the U.S. we have what I feel is one of the strongest legal systems, and yet, this person is still able to do everything that he’s doing,” Liu said.

Times researcher Cary Schneider contributed to this report.