On Christmas Day, 1964, he married Ann Gilbert (1941–2020) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He joined the oil business to please his father; however, he eventually sold the family’s Getty Oil to Texaco in 1986 for US$10 billion. In 1983, Forbes magazine ranked him the richest person in America with a net worth a little over $2 billion. His net worth was cited as $2.1 billion in 2020, making him the 391st richest person in the United States.

A noted philanthropist, in 2002, he donated US$3 million to the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, a charitable trust. He is also a fundraiser for local and national Democratic Party candidates, and has contributed to the campaigns of Nancy Pelosi, Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and John Kerry.

In 2002, Getty founded ReFlow, a company which temporarily purchases shares in mutual funds to save funds taxes and commissions.

Among a number of professions, Getty is a classical music composer whose compositions include the opera Plump Jack, Joan and the Bells, piano pieces and a collection of choral works. His one-act opera Usher House was performed by the San Francisco Opera in 2015. Aspiring to become an opera singer, Getty studied in the mid-1970s with Louise Caselotti, a mezzo-soprano who had been Maria Callas’ voice teacher (1946–47). He and his wife have supported the fine arts, especially underwriting productions of the San Francisco Opera and the Russian National Orchestra.

Getty’s opera The Canterville Ghost was premiered on May 9, 2015, at the Leipzig Opera.

On April 1, 2015, it was reported that Getty’s son Andrew Rork Getty died at his home in Hollywood Hills of what was initially classified as natural causes, although coroner’s officials needed to wait for the results of further examination and toxicology tests before making a final determination. The coroner eventually ruled the death as accidental.

Gordon Getty’s life as a composer was chronicled in Peter Rosen’s documentary Gordon Getty: There Will be Music which premiered on February 5, 2016, at Cinema Village in New York City and has been broadcast on PBS in the U.S. and in Europe on ARTE, and also appeared in film festivals and programs across the country.