The Pomp Podcast - Grant Cardone Reveals How Much Bitcoin He Owns

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This many people understand Bitcoin. Almost everyone understands real estate. You combine those two together and I get that volatility, but the stability, combining it with the stability,

Starting point is 00:00:38 we think we have a great investment. And I had 1,500 people invest with me that have never invested in Bitcoin. How many Bitcoin you got? Let's talk about real estate and Bitcoin. You have what, $5 billion of real estate? Yeah, 5.3 billion. Who's counting? I am. Yeah, I know. And how much cashflow do you get off of that we have uh the noi on that that asset class let's see we got 2.2 billion dollars worth of debt that's fixed on all but three deals at around sub five across the portfolio and you know we probably got an noi on that portfolio of 240 million dollars all right so let's say you get

Starting point is 00:01:19 240 million dollars uh you were just taking that cash and then you were getting a bunch of cash from all your other businesses i don't think actually i don't think people realize how big the grant cardone uh uh empire is can you what numbers can you share with us we we'll do almost a billion dollars of revenue this year across all the companies yeah uh there's an education company that's about uh one 150 in revenue 40 million in net we have a 10x health company that's only four and a half years old we'll take that public in the next 24 to 30 30 months that's probably worth two or three billion dollars it does we got 250 000 customers started with 60 customers i took it renamed it branded it blew the guy up online used my social media

Starting point is 00:02:07 following and we went from 60 customers to 255 000 customers on supplements and biohacking stuff we have a consulting company that does about 180 a year and growing it's a great business that started four years ago, it'll net 40 or 50 million. And then we have Cardone Capital that raises money. We've raised $2 billion for our real estate transactions. So combined, they all fit together. They're not really different businesses. I can touch on one and it'll benefit the other ones. They're all privately held. We kind of do what we want to do. We're renegades. We're looking for ways to disrupt spaces that are cashflow positive. And so when we started playing with bitcoin uh and adding it to our real estate last year we did a our first deal was 85 million dollars

Starting point is 00:02:58 our second big deal was 230 million hold on go back to the first one for a second people don't know what you're doing with the bitcoin so you've got a real estate asset and you buy some bitcoin so did they send the did they pop that little i don't know uh if you guys got something pulled up if not just talk yeah they're not gonna be able to see your phone oh they can't see it no Oh, I know they're not going to be able to see my phone. Thank you, man. I've been in front of more people than you have. I'm just saying, you know.

Starting point is 00:03:24 I wasn't in the Epstein files either. So we were in the back, and three of the six people were in the Epstein files, but none of them for a bad reason. So everyone was trying to figure out who were the three. Well, some chick came out and said, if you're not in them, you're not even cool. So I was invited to a Diddy party, though. Were you? Did you go? No, I did not go. Yeah, so what we did was, look, I'm a real estate investor. I'm a very conservative investor. I cash flow my companies. We don't take a lot of risk. I own no

Starting point is 00:04:01 stock. I've never done a call. I've never done a margin, even though the internet says I had to sell my plane because I'm doing margins in Bitcoin. It's not true. And I'm extremely conservative. so i was given my first bitcoin in 2013 i was given 500 115 pieces i didn't know what it was i said look is this like a is this going to make me sick is there something bad going to happen the only way they could pay me for this event was in bitcoin so i said look i'll take it you know i don't know what it is i took the 115 pieces still have them today uh so it's probably the best speaking gig i've ever done about 11 million bucks maybe not maybe seven million dollars now uh because of whatever's going on and uh and then i started playing with it because i was

Starting point is 00:04:49 i didn't read the the white book the what's it was white paper the white paper or the bitcoin standard i didn't know who michael saylor was and so i just took it and watched it and then i started playing with it every once in a while i'd buy some or you know buy a piece and uh and then last year i said what if i could start combining real estate and bitcoin together because i was on a debate you might have been on that debate on a space i remember it was a what's better bitcoin real estate or gold gold and i said well you know i don't think it was gold actually i think it was something else anyway um and so last year we took we bought a 230 million dollar asset from blackstone we it was 130 million dollars below replacement costs instead of stealing the real estate simply

Starting point is 00:05:39 stealing the real estate, we said, hey, we bought discounted real estate. And a discount is invisible. There's really no value in a discount except that it's a lower price. You had a lower entry. But when you sell it, all you're going to do is make the difference between what you stole it at and what the market value is. Well, instead of just taking the discount, I already have $5 billion worth of real estate. We just stacked $100 million of Bitcoin on top of it. And I'm still cash flow positive. And I'm still below replacement costs. Now, the benefit of that is that when I go sell my real estate off or I sell the Bitcoin off, I still have one of the other assets. So we did this. I brought it to my audience. I said, look, I just bought an asset

Starting point is 00:06:21 that was 230 million. It should have sold for 350 or 360. I stacked 100 million on top. Now I'm at 330. I'm going to get a loan for about 130 million. So I need to raise 200 million dollars. I funded it off my balance sheet. I've been doing this for six years now. I buy it and then I tell my audience. I fund it on my balance sheet and then we backfill it. I introduced it to my audience that these are not Bitcoiners. These people do not know what Bitcoin is. They don't know what the who Michael Saylor is. They don't know this dude. Okay. They're not in this event. They don't even know this event's coming here. They don't know what a coin or a token is. And I had 1500 people invest with me that have never invested in Bitcoin. They invested because the two were together. I had

Starting point is 00:07:03 half the audience did not invest with me in real estate, and they've been watching me for 20 years. But because I put the two together, it became a more attractive investment for them. Now, when you do this, one of the things I think is interesting is you made an initial purchase of Bitcoin, plus you got the real estate. But then when you're getting the cash flow, you're also taking some of the cash flow and buy Bitcoin? Yeah. The asset has to be below replacement cost and it has to still be cashflow positive. So that's our criteria. So with that cashflow, I'm either going to fund projects, CapEx, furniture, or I'm going to buy more Bitcoin depending on what's going on. So. And then you keep stacking the Bitcoin. When do you decide

Starting point is 00:07:45 to sell real estate? Do you ever sell? Well, I try not to sell. I hate selling anything like, you know, I mean, middle-class people sell stuff, but if you want to get wealthy, if you study wealthy people, they just never sell their shit ever. They refinance it, You know, so what I would typically, what I would do, would hope to do, we refinanced two deals last year that we had bought nine years ago. The average return, we still own these assets. The average return after this finance for the investors has been 47% a year for nine years without the Bitcoin. So that's what we want to do with the real estate. We want to wait seven or eight years, wait for rents to grow.

Starting point is 00:08:24 All I need is a $25 rent bump every year, every year. I don't need 250 or $500. I need 25 bucks across 15,000 units. $25 gets me 80 million in new values. It's a nice gradual thing. And then I put this volatile, crazy, whatever this Bitcoin thing is, this new technology of money combined this old asset, you know, this since the beginning of time, real estate, people understand real estate. this many people understand Bitcoin. Almost everyone understands real estate. You combine those two together and I get that volatility. But the stability, combining it with the stability, we think we have a great investment. Do you buy any real estate property today

Starting point is 00:09:07 without the Bitcoin as a component? No. No. So pretty much you have... Now, my guy back here that works with me, he's trying to talk me into it right now because some of our investors just want the cash flow. But I don't want to do that anymore. I don't think I ever buy real estate again without adding bitcoin to it and what has been the downside of adding the bitcoin maybe there's a few well i can tell you i can tell you you know we didn't know what was going to happen when it falls from you know 126 down to 65 how many phone calls am i going to get i have zero phone calls in three weeks because again they're not bitcoiners they're not looking at the price every day the way you guys do y'all get all freaked out and start tripping looking at

Starting point is 00:09:44 every three minutes addicted to your phones you got you know you got like oh god damn what am i gonna do you're gonna buy more that's what you're gonna do unless you're broke and if you're broke then you don't you don't understand the value of bitcoin the the value game for me is man go hustle the fiat go hustle fiat from all your businesses hustle as much fiat as you can be cash flow positive convert your fiat to something better as fast as you can convert it to something a shovel, anything, anything, convert it to anything, an education, an automobile, something that will get you transportation. Anything is better than cash. So that's what I've been doing for years. I'm just trying to convert other people's money. They bought a

Starting point is 00:10:24 product from me. That's other people's money. I gave them my product. They gave me cash. I take cash. I go convert it to concrete or glass or steel or rental income, or in this case, Bitcoin. When you think of the other- Peter Schiff thinks I should do real estate and gold. And I'm like, no, I would never do that, dude. It's stupid. Why? They're too similar.

Starting point is 00:10:46 Why would you put two light things together? You don't get a superpower like that, okay? The real estate's heavy. The gold's heavy, okay? I would personally never buy gold. I'm 67 years old, and I have never bought a piece of gold in my life. Most importantly, no one's ever offered me a piece of gold, ever. I've been offered more Bitcoin for products in my lifetime than I have gold.

Starting point is 00:11:11 What about your other businesses? Are you converting cash flow into Bitcoin? Yeah, we actually have some cash flow from those businesses that are buying Bitcoin. Yeah? How many Bitcoin you got? 2,000. Just over 2,000. 2,000?

Starting point is 00:11:24 Yeah. I thought you were the only person crazy enough to come up here and actually say it. Okay. I think this is a problem in this space that you guys don't tell people what you own. Okay? It's a massive problem. I don't get it. Michael Saylor will tell you what he bought.

Starting point is 00:11:37 It's going to be public. Like, if you're going to be a big boy, you're going to be public, and it's going to be transparent. I'll tell you how many I own. I'll tell you what my price was. I'll tell you when I bought it. And the people that aren't willing to do that, I just challenge the credibility of this space and the conviction that you have. It's easy to hear you guys say, man, I bought it in 2012. Okay, yeah, good.

Starting point is 00:11:58 How many did you buy? How many did you buy? I can't tell you that. Why not? Like, well, I don't want you to know I have money, bro. Like, what are you talking about? Come on. This is crazy. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra,

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Starting point is 00:14:41 public yeah well you you were saying it online yeah we will yeah so like explain the kind of what your thought process is you got all the cash flow private market you got bitcoin what is the the real estate the real estate bitcoin will there is a there's a when we started playing with this i discovered after coming up here and talking to the banks that the reits there's a reit industry real estate investment trust for the audience there's 190 reits they're underperforming and they can never hold a currency, any currency on their balance sheet. They have to distribute 90% of their money. So this is a, we basically stumbled into a glitch.

Starting point is 00:15:24 There's a glitch in the universe where the real estate investment trust, they have four and a half trillion dollars worth of real estate, can never, ever own Bitcoin. Starwood, Blackstone, I mean, all of them, none of them. the insurance companies that own a majority of the commercial real estate in America is owned by New York Life, the MetLife's. People don't even know that. Can never, ever have Bitcoin on their financial statement. The syndicators, people like me, I'm considered a syndicator in real estate, okay? Most of them are having trouble raising money for their real estate projects,

Starting point is 00:15:57 much less the real estate and the Bitcoin. So by me raising money for institutional, best in class, I mean, this is as good a real estate you can buy. We just bought this monster deal in Boca Raton from Blackstone out of bankruptcy, when we start stacking those together and all those properties now are branded Bitcoin properties called 10X brand. It's a brand that we have. And we have the combination of the real estate and the Bitcoin. We think we create a new vehicle, a new financial instrument. So you think you can take the real estate and the Bitcoin and put it in a REIT structure? Yeah, it'll be, it won't be a REIT structure because the REITs are required. REITs have not changed since 1965. They were created for a real estate hack,

Starting point is 00:16:40 for a tax hack, and they haven't changed in 65 years. So I think I'm going to be able to exploit and disrupt the real estate investment trust industry. And do you want to take your other businesses public as well, or just the real estate side? Well, we'll probably take the health company. The health company would be the next one to possibly go public. And what does that one do it's the the the uh regenerative you know stay young forever yeah but what are they what are they so they're selling like supplements supplements supplements yeah all right and then uh you now have gone from knowing live forever live forever look better like you and you look yeah no look like you look better look beautiful yeah like scarmici that you're going to bring up

Starting point is 00:17:23 here well he he's holding other things he's looking at what she comes out here i mean that guy. He hasn't aged since he was 18 years old. When you look at your kind of trajectory in the Bitcoin world, you now have very quickly, you've talked with Saylor, you've talked with a lot of different companies, you've talked with the bankers, like you've gotten very quickly up to speed. What do you think the areas as an outsider coming in, what are the areas that the Bitcoin industry should address that you think would make either more attractive to people like you or to your type of investor base? Yeah, I think, you know, look, in real estate, we always say the outsiders make the market right like new people come into a market and they make that market

Starting point is 00:17:59 the people that lived in scottsdale arizona didn't make the scottsdale market okay the people that came in from california made that market so new yorkers are making miami now like chicago is making miami miami didn't make miami outsiders make new markets okay so a guy like me comes along not paying attention what you guys are doing and boom the next thing you know i see the thing different than you see it you see all these dips it's seven years some bullshit four-year cycle that y'all talk about obsessively that nobody can explain to me um well every four years it goes down we whatever i like i'm like dude i ain't in it for four years it's like like i got so so i think that the bitcoiners need y'all need to learn how to talk to people different you know a third of

Starting point is 00:18:41 the audience is you know u.s dollars going to zero and this is a gonna replace money and the dollar is going to go away i'm like i don't want to hear all that shit it's all depressing to me you know so what what do you want to hear and bitcoin's going to solve every problem in the world and there's there'll be no pedophilia because of bitcoin and water problem i'm like dude i just want a good investment like i i can't i can't deal with all these other problems that you're dealing with i'm simply trying to convert my hard work to a good investment that i can pass on to my the next generation that's all i care about the rest of this stuff is crazy making to me. So what do I want to hear about? I just want to hear it's everything's going to be all right.

Starting point is 00:19:24 You know, and, and, and, and talk to me about the things I understand and agree with. Okay. Like, like I hear the, I hear people in these spaces talk about how Bitcoin is going to replace all the real estate. Okay. And like, it's like, yeah, no, did I still need a place to live? I got people online telling me I should get rid of $5 billion worth of real estate that took me 20 years to accumulate you should get rid of all of it and all the other companies you own and you should only own bitcoin i'm like fuck you're fucking crazy so if you did that you would have lost 50 percent the last couple months it'd been awesome you imagine the content i'd be wrecked dude i'd be fine i'd be mentally wrecked you know now if i would have converted all my cash flow

Starting point is 00:20:04 just my free cash flow from my real estate for the past 12 years when i got my first bitcoin I was I was distributed a million about a million six see I don't mind telling people what I what I was distributed let's let's say it was a million six a month every month for the last 144 months whatever that number is let's just take a million for simple math that would have been 144 million dollars which I had I had it in my hand half of it was not taxed because the first five or six years was not taxed and if I would have just converted that cash flow into bitcoin it'd be worth 40 billion dollars today even with the pullback and i'd be one of the richest men in the world instead i'm up here in a fucking hot room you know talking to a bunch of people i may

Starting point is 00:20:54 never see again you know and and with you yeah i'll make it and i did this as a favor because this guy's done it twice for me and by the way you're one of the best speakers that we had at both of our events so i really appreciate you know it's funny all that shit he said about uh You know how he said the Bitcoiners are talking about the dollars going to zero and all that shit? I went to his event and said every single one of those things to his audience. They were looking at me like I was crazy. They were like, oh, my God. All right, last thing is you said you don't know stocks.

Starting point is 00:21:25 Yeah. I own three stocks, and they're all relationship investments. They have nothing to do with the stock. Okay, but why not any stocks? Just I'm not a paper guy. I got a piece of paper. I'm like, why would I go sideways and convert to another piece of paper? I want to convert to something better than paper.

Starting point is 00:21:42 I've always been like this. I've been doing this for 37 years. Get a piece of paper for somebody, take paper, convert to something better. And in the beginning, it had to cash flow. If it didn't cash flow, I wouldn't do it because I needed a second drip because I didn't think I would last this long. Okay. I was 30 years old selling shit.

Starting point is 00:22:04 And I'm like, there's no way people are going to keep buying shit from me. Like, how many times can I do this before people are like, no, we're not going to buy anything from you again. But I grew up poor. So I grew up in a, you know, raised by a single mom. And, you know, you're just waiting for the wheels to fall off all the time. Like my dad died when I was 10. My older brother died when I was 20. And I'm just, when you're brought up and you have this, these losses, then you're like, the wheels are going to fall off again.

Starting point is 00:22:30 You know, I was brought up by a woman that was raised during the 1920s. So she had this 1932 depression mentality, food lines, the whole deal. And so the psychology of how you're brought up affects how you invest. And that can be good and it can be bad. My last question for you is you've gone into very diverse businesses. How do you decide what's the next business you go into? Well, look, I only invest in stuff I understand. like it takes me a long time to get my head wrapped around if i won't eat the dog food i

Starting point is 00:23:03 will not present the dog food so every all the companies that i have actually use the products i use the services um i've been offered a lot of stuff from a lot of people because of my i got about 20 million followers online and and and and people hey how about you promote this i'm like no bro i never promote that what's an example of something cannabis i'm like no i ain't smoking weed i'm not promoting weed to anybody okay like i'll promote my competition to smoke weed here have some okay but but and i know people that smoke weed but i'm telling you you cannot compete with somebody if you if you have two equal iqs and two equally ambitious people okay two artists because this is always the defense to the cannabis people oh yeah it makes

Starting point is 00:23:49 me more creative you put two artists one that's smoking and one that's not i guarantee the guy it's not, we'll smoke the guy that smokes. Epstein, cannabis, Bitcoin, real estate. I mean, where else can we go? Grant Cardone, everyone. Keep it up.

The Pomp Podcast - Grant Cardone Reveals How Much Bitcoin He Owns

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