Grant Cardone by Grant Cardone (@grantcardone) via Instagram
CV NEWS FEED // A pair of high-profile investors have announced that they will move their business operations out of New York City in the wake of its $355-million judgment against former President Donald Trump.
Cardone Capital CEO Grant Cardone on Tuesday urged his team to “immediately” cease investing in real estate in the Big Apple.
“Immediately discontinue ALL underwriting on New York City real estate,” the entrepreneur wrote on X. “The risk outweigh the opportunities at this time.”
“Recent political decisions will continue to deteriorate price and benefit states that don’t have these challenges,” Cardone added. He told investors to instead “[f]ocus on Texas [and] Florida.”
“We thought this year was the opportunity to come into … New York City,” the real estate businessman said during a Wednesday morning FOX News interview. “I’ve been waiting for 40 years now to invest in that marketplace [and was] completely confident this was the year to come.”
“And when that ruling [against Trump] happened, it was like, pencils down,” Cardone noted. “Don’t touch it. Don’t go there.”
“We invest for 14,000 investors at Cardone Capital that depend on cash flow,” he went on, also mentioning New York City’s intensifying immigration crisis:
And if I can’t predict the cash flow because of some ruling, or because of the migrants, or because I can’t evict people, New York City just keeps doing every single thing they can to sell real estate in Florida, not sell real estate in New York
O’Leary Ventures Chairman Kevin O’Leary, known for his appearances as a host of the popular show Shark Tank, expressed similar sentiments.
O’Leary said he would reconsider investments in New York City after the controversial ruling against Trump.
“I’m shocked at this,” he told FOX Business Monday. “I can’t even understand or fathom the decision at all. There’s no rationale for it.”
O’Leary said that due to its leftist economic policies, New York “was already on the top of the list of being a loser state.”
“I would never invest in New York now,” he said. “And I’m not the only person saying that.”
O’Leary defended Trump during a CNN interview the same day.
“What fraud?” O’Leary asked. He suggested that from a businessman’s point of view, Trump did not do anything wrong or out of the ordinary.
“This is not about Trump anymore,” he added. “You get a developer that builds a building and he says it’s worth $400 million, and he wants to borrow $200 million from a bank, which happens every day, everywhere on earth.”
“That haggling has gone on for decades,” O’Leary emphasized. “That’s how it works.”
FOX Business reported Sunday: “Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that [Trump] and his organizations owe more than $354 million in damages, plus 9% interest.”
Per FOX, the judge “also barred Trump from running a business as an officer or director in New York State for three years.”
“The judge is expected to issue a decision on the amount that Trump will have to pay soon, and he may increase that amount to $370 million plus interest sought by New York Attorney General Letitia James,” FOX added.
In responding to Trump’s three-year ban, O’Leary said:
If we’re going to do that, let’s penalize all the developers all across America. They’ve all done the same thing. All of them should go to jail and we should stop building buildings. That’s what the message is from New York.
