As Los Angeles hydrants run dry while firefighters battle devastating wildfires in the city, billionaire art collectors Lynda and Stewart Resnick are facing criticism online for their water-use practices and private aquifers.
The Resnicks own the Wonderful Company, a conglomerate valued at roughly $6 billion that includes Wonderful pistachios, POM pomegranate juice, Halo mandarins, Fiji bottled water, and the Telefora flower delivery service. With their $13 billion fortune, the couple is California’s richest farming family, with some 185,000 acres of land and a majority stake in the Kern Water Bank, a nearly 20,000-acre reservoir of water surplus in the San Joaquin Valley, roughly two hours north of L.A.
Since building their multi-billion dollar farming empire, they have also become known as some of the biggest art patrons on the West Coast. Particularly known for their European and Old Master holdings, the walls of their Beverly Hills home are lined with works by Picasso, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher and they’ve been named among Artnews’s top 200 art collectors.
They are also generous donors to L.A. museums. The Hammer Museum has received around $30 million from the Resnicks over the years, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has received some $90 million, the New York Times reported in 2024. The latter museum’s Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, designed by starchitect Renzo Piano and opened in 2010, is nearly an acre in size, making it the largest purpose-built, naturally lit, open-plan museum space in the world.
Lacma Broad and Resnick Pavilion by Renzo Piano, 2010. Photo: View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
A 2016 investigation by Mother Jones revealed that the Wonderful Company uses more water than any other in California. In 1994, the couple secured a favorable deal, acquiring a 57 percent stake Kern, which was then a failing public water bank on the verge of shuttering, in exchange for state water deliveries. Critics allege secretive negotiations took place with state officials and water district leaders. Today, the bank grants the Resnicks near-unmatched access to water, enabling them to irrigate 130,000 acres of farmland in the state. On occasion, they have also sold extra water to the state.
As the effects of climate change have become more visible in recent years, and droughts in Southern California more common, there have been public protests against the Resnicks’ philanthropy at both LACMA and the Hammer. Following historic destruction over the last week from several wind-fueled wildfires in L.A., which have depleted fire hydrants, critics have renewed efforts to highlight the Wonderful Company’s high water usage.
“The Resnicks are powerful and their control of so much water is ridiculous,” filmmaker Yasha Levine, co-director of the forthcoming documentary Pistachio Wars, told the Daily Mail over the weekend.
On January 14, Collecteurs, an online art platform that bills itself as the world’s first “collective digital museum,” shared a post on Instagram citing the Resnicks’ art-world connections and claiming they own “almost all the water in California” and “built a business empire by selling it back to the rest of us.”
A representative for Wonderful discredited concerns raised about its water use as “disinformation and ignorance on social media” in a statement, noting that the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, so its own workers have lost their homes and been displaced by the fires.
“There is zero truth that any individual or company, much less ours, owns or controls most of the water in California,” the statement reads. “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.”
Wonderful claims that it uses less than 1 percent of the state’s water as part of a farming community in California that produces more than a quarter of food in the country.
Addressing claims that Wonderful has bought up needed water stores, the company confirmed it owns a 57 percent stake in the Kern Water Bank, and said it conserves water that would otherwise be lost to the sea. And, while Wonderful sold water to the state in the past, the representative for the company said in their statement that was part of a state-sponsored program.
Los Angeles receives its water supply from a network of 114 tanks in total, of which Kern is not a part, all of which were fully filled before the fires broke out last week. In an interview with Fortune, Jay Lund, the vice-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis, said that Kern’s water wouldn’t have been used for firefighting efforts anyway as the bank is separated from Los Angeles by the San Gabriel Mountains.
Firefighters coordinate their efforts, aiming hoses at a house with flames consuming its roof in Pacific Palisades, California, on January 8, 2025. Photo: Jason Ryan/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Considered the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, the recent blazes have killed at least 24 people, destroyed thousands of structures, and forced approximately 180,000 people to evacuate. Officials say the city’s rescue response was hampered not by lack of water but instead by a residential water system that simply doesn’t have the capacity to deliver such large volumes of water over several hours, let alone days. “The system has never been designed to fight a wildfire that then envelops a community,” said Martin Adams, the former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
On Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom ordered an independent investigation of the L.A. Department of Water and Power over the loss of water pressure and the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir in the Pacific Palisades, where the largest fire has yet to be fully contained.
Of the claims that the Resnicks’ stake in the Kern Water Bank has anything to do with the L.A. fires, Seth Oster, chief corporate affairs officer for the Wonderful Company, told Fortune 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,” adding that the false claims against the company are “often openly rooted in anti-Semitism.”
The Resnicks have previously come under scrutiny for their support for the Israeli military amid the war in Gaza. Pistachio Wars director Levine alleged on their Substack that the art collectors are “big fans of the occupation” and have been “funneling millions to various charities connected with Israel’s occupation apparatus, including specifically the Israeli Defense Forces.”
Levine based their allegations on tax records from their foundation reviewed by Artnet, which show they have given $200,000 to $500,000 to the Israeli military every year through the American Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, on top of Israeli lobby groups in the United States like the AIPAC.