The PAW Patrol Billionaire Who Bought Martin Buber's House During a War

The philosopher's villa changed hands on April 10, 2025, for $21 million passing from a hedge fund legend to the co-creator of PAW Patrol, while air raid sirens sounded across Israel.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-04-19

The streets of Talbiyeh are old enough to remember when Jerusalem's wealthiest Christian Arabs built their mansions along them, before 1948 reshuffled everything. The neighborhood still carries that particular weight stone walls thick enough to muffle summer heat, fruit trees that outlasted their original owners, a sense that what happens inside its villas has always meant more than the transaction itself. On April 10, 2025, that history deepened again. At 3 Hovevei Zion Street, a preserved 1930s villa one that Martin Buber's family once called home was sold for NIS 79 million, roughly $21 million. The buyer was Ronnen Harary, the Canadian billionaire who co-founded Spin Master and gave the world PAW Patrol. The seller was Michael Steinhardt, the hedge fund pioneer who spent decades as one of the most consequential and controversial figures in American Jewish philanthropy. The deal was done during an active war.

The House Itself

To understand why this transaction carries weight beyond its price tag, start with the property. The villa at 3 Hovevei Zion was built in the 1930s during the British Mandate period, when Talbiyeh was a prosperous enclave of affluent Christian Arab families from Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Beit Jala who built homes along tree-lined streets on land owned by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The neighborhood's architecture Renaissance arches, Moorish flourishes, wraparound gardens reflected ambition and permanence. Those families left in 1948 and never returned.

The villa itself is 650 square meters of preserved structure on an 860-square-meter plot. It retains its original flooring, handcrafted wooden carpentry, exceptionally high ceilings, and walls built thick enough to regulate temperature without modern climate systems. A garden wraps around it, fruit trees included, maintained through decades of ownership changes. Renovations added Roman columns, stone arches, and a distinctive staircase built during the Mandate era improvements that amplified the home's original character rather than erasing it.

Martin Buber, the Austrian-Israeli philosopher whose 1923 work I and Thou is considered one of the most important books of 20th-century Western thought, lived at Hovevei Zion 3 during the final phase of his life in Jerusalem. He had fled Nazi Germany in 1938 to take a professorship in social philosophy at Hebrew University, and Jerusalem became the city where his philosophical output intersected with the practical and often painful questions of a Jewish state being built around him. Buber died in Talbiyeh on June 13, 1965. His I-Thou philosophy a framework distinguishing genuine human encounter from the treatment of others as mere objects proved influential far beyond Jewish thought, shaping Christian theology, humanistic psychology, and the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. cited Buber directly in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, writing that segregation substitutes an "I-It" relationship for the deeper human recognition that Buber demanded.

The house does not carry an official designation as a Buber landmark. But its address is known recorded on Flickr pages, academic blogs, and Jerusalem walking tour guides as a place where one of the 20th century's most consequential minds did some of his final thinking. When Prosperity Real Estate, the agency that managed the sale, described the property, they called it "a preserved villa once home to the extended family of renowned philosopher Martin Buber." That provenance, quiet as it is, was part of what was being sold.

The Seller: A Hedge Fund Pioneer With a Complicated Legacy

Michael Steinhardt, born December 7, 1940, in New York, is one of the most storied figures in the history of hedge fund management. In 1967, he co-founded Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz and Company the fund that would eventually become Steinhardt Partners alongside William Salomon, former managing partner of Salomon Brothers, and Jack Nash, founder of Odyssey Partners. Over the next 28 years, Steinhardt averaged annualized returns of 24.5% for his clients, a performance nearly triple that of the S&P 500 over the same period. A dollar invested with Steinhardt Partners in 1967 was worth $481 when he closed the fund in 1995.

Steinhardt's methods were unconventional for the era. He employed a mix of stocks, bonds, currencies, options, and time horizons ranging from 30 minutes to 30 days, and he pioneered the notion that down markets offered no excuse for losing money. Jim Cramer, himself a former hedge fund manager, once noted that Steinhardt set the bar for what active management could achieve. In 1995, after closing his fund on an up year, Steinhardt stated that he wanted to pursue something more virtuous than making rich people richer and redirected his energy toward Jewish philanthropy. In 1999, he co-founded Taglit-Birthright Israel with Charles Bronfman, a program that has since sent hundreds of thousands of young Diaspora Jews on free trips to Israel. He has donated over $125 million to Jewish causes.

His record is not without controversy. Steinhardt and his firm paid $70 million to settle SEC and Justice Department allegations of attempting to manipulate the short-term Treasury Note market in the early 1990s. In 2018, multiple women alleged sexual harassment by Steinhardt, allegations that led to his name being removed from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU. In 2021, he agreed to return 180 looted antiquities to the Manhattan District Attorney following an investigation into his collecting practices objects including Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern artifacts obtained through channels that investigators determined involved stolen goods. No reason was given publicly for the sale of the Jerusalem villa.

The Buyer: From Grass Heads to PAW Patrol

Ronnen Harary was born in South Africa in March 1971 and moved to Toronto at age five. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a degree in political science and, shortly afterward, partnered with childhood friends Anton Rabie and Ben Varadi to found Spin Master in 1994. Their initial investment was $10,000. Their first product was the Earth Buddy, a Chia Pet-style novelty that Harary's Israeli-born mother had discovered in a Yedioth Ahronoth article about a craze sweeping Israel. Recognizing that the concept was unpatented in North America, the three friends moved on it. The Earth Buddy generated $1.5 million in first-year sales.

What followed was one of the more improbable success stories in the global toy industry. Spin Master launched Air Hogs, the radio-controlled airplane that became a worldwide hit in the late 1990s, then moved steadily into entertainment. PAW Patrol an animated series about a boy and his team of rescue dogs, now airing in more than 160 countries became the company's defining franchise. Spin Master went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2015, and the company now employs more than 2,500 people across nearly 20 countries, generating over $2.2 billion in annual revenue as of 2024. PAW Patrol: The Movie, released in 2021 with Harary as executive producer, grossed more than $144 million worldwide.

Harary stepped down as co-CEO in 2021 but remains chairman of Spin Master's board. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.1 billion in 2022. He has also been increasingly visible in Israel, particularly since October 7, 2023, when he was on the ground within days of the Hamas attack distributing 25,000 toys to displaced children, buying hospital beds for Hadassah, driving supplies to army bases. His foundation has donated over $2.3 million to the Jerusalem Municipality. The Ronnen Harary campus at the Naggar School of Art and Society in Jerusalem is named after him.

The Jerusalem villa is not Harary's first Israeli property. In October 2023, just days after the October 7 attack, he purchased a penthouse at 12 Mazeh Street in central Tel Aviv for approximately NIS 23 million. The timing of that purchase during the opening hours of the war established a pattern that the Talbiyeh villa confirmed: Harary buys in Israel when things are hardest.

Buying During a War

The April 10, 2025 transaction closed during the second full year of Israel's war in Gaza, in a housing market that was showing the stress of prolonged conflict. Overall residential transaction volume in Israel dropped through much of 2025. Construction was impaired: the industry had depended heavily on Palestinian Arab workers who were barred from entering Israel after October 7, a gap partially filled by thousands of Indian laborers brought in by the government. Housing prices nationally rose only 0.4% for the full year, down sharply from 7.8% annual growth at the start of the year.

Jerusalem moved differently. While Tel Aviv prices fell 1.9% over the same 12 months, Jerusalem prices rose 9.6%, driven in part by a demand profile that has less to do with conventional investment logic than with identity. According to Roie Kaner, CEO of Montifiore Real Estate Group, nearly 60% of luxury real estate transactions in Israel in 2025 were carried out by foreign residents a figure he called extraordinary, adding explicitly: "We are talking about a year of war." The buyers came primarily from North America and Europe. Harary, representing Canada, was among the most prominent.

The explanation offered by real estate professionals is consistent: rising global antisemitism has transformed the psychology of Diaspora luxury buyers. Where Israeli property once represented a vacation asset or a cultural connection, it now functions increasingly as an insurance policy a physical stake in a place where Jewish belonging is not contingent on the tolerance of a host society. A survey cited by the Times of Israel found that more than 60% of British Jews had considered leaving the UK since October 7, and more than half felt they had no long-term future there. That kind of insecurity has a real estate correlate, and Jerusalem with its particular combination of religious meaning, limited land, and stubborn prices captures it most acutely.

Oren Cohen, who has specialized in Jerusalem luxury real estate for more than 30 years, noted that the buyers he now works with are different from those of a decade ago. "We are talking about people that 10 years ago would have typically bought small apartments for vacation rentals," he said. "But now we're seeing these people buy big homes of 250 square meters or more, and spending a lot of money on interior design, because they want to live here with the same lifestyle they have abroad." What was once a sentimental investment has become, for some, a primary residence in waiting.

Marc Lugassy, owner of Barnes Israel, put the underlying logic plainly. For many buyers, he said, a home in Israel is not just a luxury asset but an expression of belonging and long-term security something that is difficult to find in other luxury markets around the world. In 2025, his firm completed 380 million shekels' worth of transactions in eight months despite the war.

What Gets Transferred

There is something almost allegorical about the lineage of this particular house. A property associated with Martin Buber a philosopher whose entire system was built on the idea that genuine encounter between people, and between people and God, is the foundation of meaningful existence passed through the hands of Michael Steinhardt, the hedge fund pioneer whose career was built on extracting maximum return from financial markets, and eventually arrived with Ronnen Harary, the man whose greatest creation teaches toddlers that a group of cartoon dogs can always be counted on to show up and help.

That lineage is not a neat moral progression. Buber was a complicated figure: a Zionist who opposed Jewish statehood in favor of a binational arrangement, a philosopher of dialogue who was by some accounts a difficult human being in practice, nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize but never given it. Steinhardt's philanthropy, however consequential, coexists with the SEC settlement, the sexual harassment allegations, and the return of 180 looted antiquities. Harary's wartime purchases have earned him both admiration and political controversy in Canada, where advocacy groups challenged the charitable status of his foundation over its donations to the Jerusalem Municipality.

What connects these three men to a house on Hovevei Zion Street is not virtue but gravity the kind of gravitational pull that Jerusalem, and in particular this neighborhood, exerts on people for whom Jewish identity is not abstract. Steinhardt co-founded Birthright to close what he saw as a dangerous distance between Diaspora Jews and Israel. Harary flew in days after October 7 and started delivering supplies. Both men, at different moments, bought the same preserved villa on the same Mandate-era street.

In a real estate market where nearly 60% of luxury transactions are now driven by foreign buyers, where Jerusalem prices rise while Tel Aviv's drift down, and where a hedge fund legend and a toy billionaire both chose the same historic property during an active war, the Hovevei Zion sale is not simply a transaction. It is a document about where wealth, identity, and belonging are converging in a city where Martin Buber once spent his mornings thinking about what it means to truly encounter another.