In this video, Scientologist Grant Cardone argues that shutting down businesses and the economy is far more dangerous than the Coronavirus itself. Cardone is not alone in his Darwinian-Capitalist call to allow Coronavirus to run rampant in a quarantine-free unrestrained mass kill so that the economy is not harmed and he is not inconvenienced in his personal movements and work. The argument here is to allow the Coronavirus to kill whoever is vulnerable so that the rest of us are not financially impacted or restricted in our movements by mandatory quarantines.
This is the argument of capitalists who don’t have to govern cities, states, and nations and take into account the welfare of entire populations including those who are most vulnerable and at risk. Cardone is certainly looking at what is good for himself, his family, and his company. These are called the First, Second, and Third dynamics in Scientology.
As far as the rest of the world goes, Cardone is essentially saying, let the Coronavirus kill off the weak so they don’t hurt his income or the larger economy. This is a Scientology mentality on so many levels. Indeed, Scientologists will argue that those who contracted the Coronavirus and got sick or died “pulled it in” and it’s their own fault. Grant Cardone appears incapable of understanding the horror of what he is saying. And yet, the Coronavirus is showing the powerlessness of the Church of Scientology claims that its OT’s, its Operating Thetans, are at cause over matter, energy, space, and time. OT powers are useless against the Coronavirus and every other virus. This is why Scientologists go to doctors and take doctor-prescribed medicines when they get sick. All of Ron Hubbard’s old claims that Dianetics and Scientology can cure diseases went down the drain long ago.
Cardone’s advocacy that the Coronavirus should be allowed to run rampant with no quarantine strategy in place to flatten the curve is, in our view, incredibly irresponsible. Cardone appears to have absolutely no understanding of how death rates in a pandemic are exponential and this only becomes worse with no mandatory quarantine. Secondary infections would soar in an unrestrained spread of the Coronavirus; the morgues couldn’t keep up with the dead bodies. But this is what we’ve come to expect from Grant Cardone, a man who once torched a pile of Benjamin’s to light his cigar to make a point about what? That he has money to burn? The Karma of this act has come back to haunt him.
Grant Cardone repeats the same claim being perpetuated by the Chinese government on social media that the Coronavirus swept through America in January 2020 and was not recognized as such. This baseless claim means absolutely nothing. However, Cardone seems to be arguing that we already went through a Coronavirus outbreak a few months earlier and we got along just fine without mandatory quarantines. Therefore, he reasons, no quarantines are needed now.
As with any business owner, Cardone is obviously concerned about the solvency of his company going forward into a pandemic and mandatory quarantine that may go longer than the government predicted. Cardone recently stated that he is $1 billion in debt. We don’t believe the number given his claim that he has $1.7 billion AUM. This would mean Cardone Capital is setting on top of $700 million in equity. We just don’t believe that number given that Cardone Capital prospectus’ typically show a projected 85% debt on the properties to be purchased.
Cardone states that possibly 15-20% of his tenants may be unable to pay rent. We think the number will go higher and that Cardone is looking at >50% when Coronavirus peaks in late April 2020. Cardone is sweating this along with every business owner.
Grant Cardone asks about forbearance on his loans. Will this happen when banks can go to private equity firms that amassed a record $1.5 trillion in cash while waiting for a massive correction in an overpriced market? The Black Swan event of the Coronavirus is something nobody saw coming. Capitalist investors and the banks are going to ruthlessly exploit it to their advantage even as they did in 2008. Grant is a debtor and is not a banker or a financier. This places him on the wrong side of the equation in a situation where the predators with money are on the hunt for bargains. Grant Cardone may emerge from the pandemic with a “severe reality adjustment” about how the really big money players way above his level don’t care about his brand, his social media platform, or anything else. Like Cardone, they are out to make money.
Grant Cardone once released a video of a job interview with a young man who owed Cardone’s company money for a sales course he had purchased and not paid for. Grant tore into the young man after two minutes into the interview to call him on his lack of integrity. Grant demanded to be paid on the spot and asked the kid for a credit card. This was a ruthless PR stunt and it humiliated the young man. When the shoe is on the other foot, the banks will do the same thing to Cardone. However, Grant won’t have a billion dollar credit card. His only possible hope, as we see it, is if fellow Scientologist Trish Duggan bails him out. Scientologist David Gentile of GPB Capital certainly isn’t in a position to do so. Here is Grant Cardone doing a job interview with another candidate and humiliating the poor guy:
Grant Cardone’s anti-fanboys are out on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4GlutVEZvUA few days ago Tony Ortega posted a letter from Scientology leader David Miscavige to Scientologists. The Daily Beast reposted this letter and called David Miscavige a Coronavirus denier. Because the Church of Scientology, like Scientologist Grant Cardone, has to keep the cash pouring in, the pervasive mood inside of Scientology seems to be to minimize or ignore the threat posed by Coronavirus and carry on with business as usual to rake in the money.
Here is David Miscavige’s letter to Scientologists posted by Ortega:
Categories: The Scientology Money Project
I would strongly suggest that Mr. Cordone be the first to arrive at his sweat-shop office every day, that he shake hands with every employee who shows up for work and that he sit in the midst of all of them until the last one leaves the office that evening.
His arrogance seems to know no bounds
I’m sure he would deign himself to be far too important a monarch to put his holy self in harms way
It’s going to be fun to watch Cardone implode.
The biggest economic casualty in the coronavirus pandemic is going to be anything related to disposable income (for this discussion, a.k.a. discretionary spending). Even if you aren’t one of the 20% or more of workers that could lose their jobs in the next 60 days, you’ll pull back on discretionary spending because you are worried about the potential risk of losing your own job. Even if they were open, no more restaurants, no more clothes shopping (even buying online), nothing.
And investments in Cardone’s seminars and in his shady D-list real estate deals are absolutely a discretionary expenditure. In the world of two months ago, where the longest bull market on record looked like it might go on forever, you could easily part with $10,000 to buy into a shady real estate deal. But the world changed almost overnight. Nobody will want to spend $495 on a seminar that may make you feel like you have some power over your life when you’re worried about losing your job and finding your next meal. That $495 buys a lot of ramen noodles.
I’m sure he knows he’s going to tank badly. And all those second-tier markets where he does apartment deals (because he’s not big enough to operate in top-25 metro areas) will ultimately be harder hit because healthcare infrastructure is not as deep and because recovery will be slower. Yeah, NYC, Seattle and Atlanta are getting hammered but note that in the last few days, the per capita case rate in New Orleans and smaller cities is actually higher than in the bigger cities.
Cardone reminds me of WeWork: an arrogant, entitled, delusional founder who sells the vision of “transforming the nature of work itself.” (In reality, he’s just another landlord renting shared office space to Millenials). The business model of packing people into open rooms full of hundreds of desks packed together is not going to work for a while, and people may never come back to working that way in the future. $25 billion in venture capital will disappear by the end of the year with zero return. No resilience in the business model. Good riddance.
Oh, and by the way, the more people die, the more potential customers get taken out of the market. The long-term economic damage of letting a couple million people die is actually going to be greater than the economic damage of shutting things down to try and prevent that, no matter how costly that is. So the “cure is worse than the disease argument” is blatantly wrong.
That’s because the economy is so efficient now that a small change in consumption ripples back through the whole rest of the economy with magnified effect. Last I checked a few days ago, the predicted change in gasoline consumption globally is only about -5% to -8%. But the price of oil crashed more than 50% in a matter of hours. Same with real estate… when you have an overheated market and you chase 2% of the buyers out of the market, prices will drop a lot farther than 2%. And on and on through the economy.
JCP: Grant said on a YT video that he’s not selling his jet or his buildings. This was the green jet he paid $50 million for in cash and how much more? Another $15+ million for the interior & avionics suite? That’s a waste of cash but GC had to have the bigboy Gulfstream 550.
What is Grant’s G550 in this economy if he had to sell?
I looked at a few videos from Grunt Cardone fanboy investors.. using 15K as an avarage
your unaccredited investment with 4% returns nets a whole $56 a month. which amounts to $672 a year.
Grunt takes 35% off the top should he decide to bail and sell off the property.
and 3% in various fees yearly
unless Grunt makes a huge killing with the sale of the property.
netting 35% over the purchase price…
you might be lucky to get that 15K investment back
and the 3% Grant takes makes that 4% return look like peanuts
your investment with Cardone Capitol isn’t worth squat.
long before Cardone capitol was hatched
Grunt was shilling investments in a Dianetic’s sponsored (Scientology) Race Car to run on the NASCAR circuit ..calling his company “Freedom” Motorsports
the driver was Kenton Gray a Scientologist ..and the car never got onto the NASCAR circuit.
Grant was nothing more than Used Car salesman playing with other peoples money
Grunt folded the company sold off the car for a little less than 60K.
go figure
Grunt was roping investors (Grunt was given an Executive Producer credit)
Scientologist who Directed the pic was Dror Soref
Dror’s only claim to fame was he directed a Weird Al Yankovic music video
in a clunker film called “Not Forgotten” it had one showing and sold a whopping 65 tickets
roping in another Scientologist Michelle Seward.
Soref and Michelle Seward lured investors with the promise of double-digit returns on their investments that carried no risk. Some victims lost as much as $395,000,
Nearly 140 investors were affected, most of them elderly, according to the district attorney. Seward and Soref are accused of using money from new investors to pay prior victims, as well as pay themselves and their employees.
that ended in a 25 million dollar Ponzi scheme
Grunt claimed he invested $3 on the stinker.
Grunt was used to wrangle other Scientologist whales to dump money into the stinker.
I’m sure Grunt got his return, sitting on the top of the food chain of the Ponzi scheme.
Jets don’t typically work like, say, real estate, where the market in a crash is much more volatile. There are a couple thousand private jets in the world, and most are owned by companies or individuals with a lot more money than Cardone. So there’s not going to be a wave of foreclosures and panic sales. Valuation of a jet is generally fairly precise, correlating tightly with the number of total hours and cycles (takeoffs and landings) for the airframe and the number of hours on the engines. There are adjustments for different avionics suites and interior configuration but it’s not like valuing a house, where there’s a lot of subjective room for “curb appeal” or “provenance” if it’s been owned by someone famous.
So I don’t think you’ll see panic sales on high-end planes. New orders will dry up pretty quickly, though. You’ll see odd lower-end or older stuff basically being dumped for scrap prices, because the owners are desperate. Case in point: conservative talk radio nutbar Glenn Beck bought a 1966 (!) DC-9 for $1 million a few years back and put it on the market in 2018 as his media company hit the skids financially. The thing’s a fuel hog and probably takes three pilots and has a full set of “steam gauges” (i.e., no digital cockpit). I don’t know if it sold, but no way is he going to get anything like what he paid for that antique.
My guess is that Cardone is either leasing or buying the G-550 on a very long-term lease. If he’s buying it, he’s probably paying about $300,000 a month for a 20-year loan, and he’s got operating costs of perhaps another $250,000 for pilots, maintenance, hangar and fuel. If you stop flying you can dial back probably 2/3 of that monthly operating cost, but it can’t go away entirely. He probably charters it out when he’s not using it personally to offset some of the cost. He claimed in a tweet that he doesn’t, but a high percentage of private individuals that own planes charter them out the back (companies like GE, IBM, etc. don’t because they need flexibility and they fly a lot of hours anyway). Some celebrities actively market that you’re chartering *their* plane, so they can boost utilization and get higher rates; golfer Greg Norman and his BBJ are an example here. So I’d be willing to bet he’s lying about not chartering his plane.
He could conceivably get out of it by walking away, selling it for a nominal sum to a buyer that’ll take it off his hands quickly. The buyer gets a good deal because the loan balance could be less than it’s worth, though that depends on the age of the loan and how much he put down. He could even mark it down to a couple million below the loan balance (a couple months’ payments) and attract someone who would rather have a low-time plane right now and could cancel their order for a new plane that was supposed to be built in two years.
He could thus eat the loss and get rid of it without getting foreclosed, which would limit his ability to borrow in his core business. If his real estate businesses start to fail and he screws his banks on a $65 million jet, they’re not going to be terribly interested in helping him stretch out payments on distressed properties; they’ll go for the kill and liquidate his holdings aggressively.