As the Eaton and Palisades fires consume California, social media users have reignited controversy over Lynda and Stewart Resnick, two married Los Angeles collectors who have a significant stake in the state’s water.
The Resnicks own the Wonderful Company, an agribusiness conglomerate that includes Fiji Water, pistachios, pomegranate juice (the distinctly shaped Pom Wonderful), Halo-brand mandarins, and Telefora, America’s largest flower delivery service. Their $13 billion fortune is owed in no small part to their 185,000 acres of land and majority stake in Kern Water Bank, located in the southern swath of California’s Central Valley.
They’ve grown a vast art collection alongside that wealth, as well as a reputation for generous art and culture patronage. Their Beverly Hills home displays works by European and Old Masters, as well as pieces by Fragonard, Boucher, and Picasso.
Following a gift of $30 million, the Hammer Museum unveiled the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where Lynda is a lifetime trustee, dedicated a pavilion to the couple’s after receiving some $90 million, per a 2024 New York Times report. LACMA’s Renzo Piano–designed Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, which opened in 2010, is almost an acre in size.
They’ve also made a name for themselves as environmentalists. In 2019, they gifted $750 million to Caltech for a new center dedicated to sustainability research; the building will be dedicated in their name.
But the Resnicks have also received scrutiny over their water usage as years of climate change–fueled droughts have left in swaths of SoCal parched. In the past couple weeks, the Resnicks have also been the subject of condemnation on social media, where viral tweets resurfaced these allegations. In one X post that has received more than 37,000 likes, the progressive nonprofit newsroom More Perfect Union wrote, “One billionaire couple owns almost all the water in California.”
The Resnicks have since denied any culpability in the fires. On January 12, the Wonderful Company published a statement on its website responding to what it described as “viral conspiracy theories”
“It’s hard to be surprised anymore by the disinformation and ignorance on social media, but in this case, the hamster wheel has spun to a new level of absurdity,” the statement reads, adding that as they are headquartered in Los Angeles, some of its employees have lost their homes due to the fire.
“There is zero truth that any individual or company, much less ours, owns or controls most of the water in California,” the statement continues. “It’s also not true we have anything to do with water supplied to Los Angeles. Water intended for municipal use is not taken for agricultural purposes or food production.”
The company also claimed that it uses less than 1 percent of California’s water in its agriculture business, which is responsible for more than a quarter of the nation’s produce. Additionally, while Wonderful has sold water to the state, the company said that was part of a state-sponsored program.
These recent posts are the result of years of controversy over the Rensicks’ water usage. A 2016 Mother Jones investigation concluded that Resnick farmland was “thought to consume more of the state’s water than any other family, farm, or company.” The 2017 documentary Water & Power: A California Heist, meanwhile, explored how the restructuring of California’s water laws allowed the Resnicks to purchase the Kern Water Bank in 1994.
In the decades since the acquisition, California has faced lawsuits intended to force an environmental review of the closed-door purchase, known as the Monterey Agreement. Environmentalists and neighboring water districts have argued that the decision was made with insufficient knowledge of how ceding the public asset to private control would impact groundwater and water quality in the long term. The Kern Water Bank has an unparalleled capacity of 488 billion, which the Resnicks direct toward irrigation and their bottled-water business.
Their art patronage, too, has attracted critics. In 2023, two activists protested the couple at LACMA and the Hammer. One of the protestors, Yasha Levine, is set to release a documentary called “Pistachio Wars”. Hyperallergic reported at the time that she arrived at the museum with a sign reading “Hammer Celebrates Climate Criminals.”
“The Resnicks are powerful and their control of so much water is ridiculous,” Levine told the Daily Mail on January 11.
The anonymous collective A New Art World and Collecteurs, an online art platform that describes itself as the world’s first “collective digital museum,” shared a post on Instagram that claimed the Resnicks own “almost all the water in California,” and added that they’ve “built a business empire by selling it back to the rest of us.” The account also negatively highlighted the couple’s support of Israel, for which they were previously scrutinized amid the war in Gaza.
Local experts have added that blame isn’t easily assigned for the wildfires, which have destroyed landmarks, displaced some 180,000 people, and killed at least 20 more.
The Kern Water Bank is not among the 114 water tanks which provide Los Angeles with water and, as Jay Lund, vice-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis, told Fortune, the bank would not have been capable of providing aid to the fire as it is separated from the city by the San Gabriel Mountains.
Per reports in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, the Pacific Palisades hydrants ran dry due to a host of problems including the skyrocketing water demand—which, in turn, lowered pressure needed to refill the three local storage tanks—and a municipal system designed to combat house fires, not wildfires of that scale. The three tanks connected to the hydrants can hold one million gallons of water, but that reserve was depleted within 12 hours, according to local officials.
“Tanker trucks on hand, more backup power in places they need it, probably more water sitting in reservoirs, having more of these tanks and spot checks on these hydrants—all of these things could make a difference,” Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, told the Post. “How much of a difference, I don’t know.”
