Does a billionaire couple own almost all the water in California? Here’s why that’s False.

As wildfires raged in Southern California, social media posts speculated over who or what was to blame.

One persistent claim was that the owners of a massive California farming operation control most of the state’s water supply.

The progressive media and activism organization More Perfect Union made such a claim in an Instagram post that showed a 2-year-old video playing over an image of a wildfire.

"One billionaire couple owns almost all the water in California," the Jan. 8 Instagram post said. 

The video named Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of the Wonderful Co., and said they own "a massive share of the state’s water system." The company owns brands such as Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Wonderful Halos and the popular bottled pomegranate juice known as Pom Wonderful. Forbes estimates the couple’s net worth to be around $8 billion.

The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

The couple’s company has a majority stake in a water bank in the San Joaquin Valley and uses vast amounts of water to manage its nearly 130,000-acre California agriculture operation. But the claim that the Resnicks own nearly all — or even a large portion — of California’s water is a massive exaggeration. 

"No one would ever say, if you have a huge water bank in the San Joaquin Valley, and you have a lot of groundwater rights in the Salinas Valley, that someone would say you control most of the water in California — that’s preposterous," said Mark Gold, the water scarcity solutions director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a Southern California Metropolitan Water District board member. 

(Screengrab from Instagram)

In a Jan. 12 press release, the Wonderful Co. denied the trending social media accusations, calling them "uninformed, discredited, and false claims." 

"There is zero truth that any individual or company, much less ours, owns or controls most of the water in California," the company said. "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 reason for the Los Angeles wildfires, and the difficulties fighting them, has nothing to do with who owns water further north or how it’s managed, as we previously fact-checked. Southern California has plenty of water stored, and local infrastructure problems are what hampered firefighters’ access to water in the Pacific Palisades.

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stated on January 8, 2025 in social media posts

Image shows the Hollywood sign was on fire as of Jan. 8.

"In the context of 10,000-plus homes being lost in the Eaton and Palisades fire, it’s completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with what just happened, and what's continuing to happen," Gold said. 

More Perfect Union spokesperson Georgia Parke said the statement "could have been more precise, but the scope of the Resnick’s ownership of water in California is explained in the video."

The Instagram video is clipped from a longer video and story that More Perfect Union published in 2022. However, that original reporting did not include the claim that the couple owns "almost all" of the state’s water. 

California’s water generally comes from two sources: surface water from rain and snow that is managed through reservoirs and canals, and groundwater from underground aquifers. The federal government, state government, local governments and private entities operate these systems to varying degrees. Landowners can also own the rights to water on their land.

Through a subsidiary called Westside Mutual Water Co., the Resnicks own a 57% stake in the Kern Water Bank, a groundwater storage project operated by public-private partnership in the San Joaquin Valley’s southern end. The bank is about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and supplies nearby areas with water for agricultural, municipal and industrial uses. In 1994, the Resnicks obtained a majority share of the bank, which was previously run by the state, through a series of negotiations that critics have derided as secretive. The Wonderful Co. also owns water rights across its farmland.

But those sources amount to a tiny percentage of California’s overall water, experts said. 

The Kern Water Bank can store up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water — close to 500 billion gallons — underground. As of 2021, the basin held 1 million acre-feet, about two-thirds of its capacity, Forbes reported, and the Resnicks don’t own all of it. An acre-foot is about 325,851 gallons.

By comparison, all the state’s groundwater basins combined can hold between 850 million and 1.3 billion acre-feet — more than 400 trillion gallons — according to the California Department of Water Resources. The state’s surface reservoirs can hold more than 40 million acre-feet, and they held about 24 million acre-feet at the end of September, above the historical average.

No one knows exactly how much water is actually stored in the state’s groundwater basins, and much of the water isn’t easily tapped, said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in water policy at the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank. But the Kern Water Bank represents only a tiny percentage of the state’s overall water, he said.

"This is vastly overstated," Mount said of the claim.

The Wonderful Co. said in its press release that it accounts for less than 1% of the state’s water usage each year. In 2021, Forbes estimated the company used about 150 billion gallons of water annually. The Wonderful Co. did not respond to an email request for details on its water usage.

In comparison, the state uses about 39 million acre-feet — more than 12 trillion gallons  — of water annually on average, with about 80% going to agriculture and 20% going to urban areas.

A social media post claimed that the Resnicks, the Wonderful Co.’s owners, own "almost all the water in California." 

The water bank the Resnicks majority own is a tiny fraction of all the state’s water. Combined, California’s groundwater basins alone can hold more than 566 times as much water as the water bank that the Resnicks majority own — and that doesn’t account for how much the state’s surface reservoirs hold. Wonderful Company’s water holdings have no connection to the wildfires raging in Los Angeles. 

We rate the claim that the Resnicks own almost all California’s water False.