Santa Monica, California, United States

🇺🇸 Santa Monica is a beach-front city in western Los Angeles County, California, United States. Situated on Santa Monica Bay, it is bordered on five sides by different neighbourhoods of the city of Los Angeles: Pacific Palisades to the north, Brentwood on the north-east, West Los Angeles on the east, Mar Vista on the south-east, and Venice on the south. Due to a favorable climate and close proximity to Los Angeles, Santa Monica became a famed resort town by the early 20th century attracting many celebrities to build magnificent beach front homes on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Santa Monica is a popular resort town, owing to its climate, beaches, and hospitality industry. It has a diverse economy, hosting headquarters of companies such as Hulu, Universal Music Group, Lionsgate Films, and The Recording Academy.

Santa Monica traces its history to Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, granted in 1839 to the Sepúlveda family of California. The rancho was later sold to John P. Jones and Robert Baker, who in 1875, along with his Californio heiress wife Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, founded Santa Monica, which incorporated as a city in 1886. The city developed into a seaside resort during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the creation of tourist attractions such as Palisades Park, the Santa Monica Pier, Ocean Park, and the Hotel Casa del Mar.

Economy Santa Monica is home to the headquarters of many notable businesses, such as Beachbody, Fatburger, Hulu, Illumination, Otter Media, Lionsgate Films, Macerich, Miramax, the RAND Corporation, Saban Capital Group, The Recording Academy (which presents the annual Grammy Awards), TOMS Shoes, and Universal Music Group. Atlantic Aviation is at the Santa Monica Airport. The National Public Radio member station KCRW is on the Santa Monica College campus. VCA Animal Hospitals is just outside the eastern city limit.

A number of game development studios are based in Santa Monica, making it a major location for the industry. These include: • Activision Blizzard (which includes Activision) • Cloud Imperium Games (Creators of Star Citizen) • Naughty Dog (Creators of Crash Bandicoot (1996–1999), Jak & Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us franchises) • PUBG Corporation (North American station, developed Miramar map in PUBG) • Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends, is just outside the eastern city limit. • Treyarch.

Recently, Santa Monica has emerged as the centre of the Los Angeles region called Silicon Beach, and serves as the home of hundreds of venture capital funded startup companies.

Former Santa Monica businesses include Douglas Aircraft (now merged with Boeing), GeoCities (which in December 1996 was headquartered on the third floor of 1918 Main Street in Santa Monica), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and MySpace (now headquartered in Beverly Hills).

Economy: Top employers According to a recent Financial Report, the top employers in the city were: 1 Santa Monica – UCLA Medical Center; 2 City of Santa Monica; 3 Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District; 4 Santa Monica College; 5 Snap Inc.; 6 Saint John's Health Center; 7 Activision Blizzard and Activision; 8 RAND Corporation; 9 Hulu; 10 Lionsgate Entertainment.