The Instagram Post

On March 14, 2026, Grant Cardone posted a slick-looking comparison chart to Instagram. The graphic, under the Cardone Capital logo, displayed what it called a “10-YR AAR” — a 10-year average annual return — for Cardone Capital alongside five of the most recognizable technology stocks on the planet: Tesla, Apple, MicroStrategy/Strategy (MSTR), Alphabet/Google, and Meta.

The numbers, presented in descending order, were:

  Cardone Capital  —  ~47%

  Tesla (TSLA)  —  ~41%

  Apple (AAPL)  —  ~28%

  Strategy (MSTR)  —  ~25%

  Alphabet/Google (GOOGL)  —  ~24%

  Meta (META)  —  ~20%

The message Grant Cardone seeks to communicate is misleading and dishonest: Cardone Capital beats the best-known technology stocks in America. Invest with Grant Cardone and you beat Tesla. You beat Apple. You beat Google.

There are numerous problems with Cardone’s claim. He did not invent the big Tech stock return figures. He looked up real data on real companies with audited, publicly available financial disclosures. He then cherry-picked one of his seventy funds to show a favorable return and called it a comparison.

This is dishonest at best as no one has any way to check Cardone’s “Fund 1” financials. Due to Cardone’s documented track record of dishonesty — he once told the public he was going bankrupt in an online video — everything he says must be fact checked. Where it cannot be fact-checked, it must be treated with skepticism in the absence of evidence. The SEC has sent Cardone warning letters about the claims he makes online.

In this article, we examine the real numbers and metrics — beginning with Cardone’s jet.

Corporate Jets, The Sale Of

After Bitcoin crashed and Grant Cardone was down ~$100 million on his ~$270 million in BTC holdings, he posted online that he was forced to sell the company jet:

Bitcoin is crashing so I have to say bye to the love of my life. Tough choices. 2024 Bombardier Global 7500, loaded, 5 year warranty, full programs, only 190 hours, full k-band and ready for starlink. Interior is gorgeous. 😢😢😢 find it on controller. pic.twitter.com/h9c5ndbC0u

— Grant Cardone (@GrantCardone) February 6, 2026

On February 6, 2026, Newsweek published an article under the headline: “Self-Proclaimed Billionaire Forced To Sell Private Jet After Bitcoin Crash.” The article quoted Grant Cardone’s own X post announcing the sale: 

Bitcoin is crashing so I have to say bye to the love of my life. Tough choices. 2024 Bombardier Global 7500, loaded, 5 year warranty, full programs, only 190 hours, full k-band and ready for starlink. Interior is gorgeous.

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and the other Tech titans can take a $100 million hit and not even think about it because they have major cash reserves on hand and know the market has volatility. These CEO’s factor in volatility and systematically amass cash reserves to manage both market downturns and fund growth and acquisition opportunities. 

When Grant Cardone lost a paltry $100 million on Bitcoin, he panicked and sold the company jet — and yet he wants to compare his company to Apple, Google, and Tesla.

The inference here is that Grant Cardone lacks sufficient cash reserves on hand to pay the operating expenses on his Bombardier Global 7500.

The operating costs on this jet are only $3-4 million per year and Grant Cardone can no longer afford it:

The Optics of Selling the Company Jet

When a company is in deep financial trouble, the company jet gets sold. Then the layoffs begin to happen. Watch next for layoffs at Cardone Capital. 

When Grant Cardone posted that he was selling his jet on social media, he was telling the investment world that he could not afford to keep the company jet. He was admitting that he did not have $3-4 million a year for the jet. And yet, Cardone has bragged for over a decade about how his apartment deals cash flow from day one.

What happened to Mr. Cash Flow?

Worse, now that Cardone has openly admitted to cash problems the market knows it. If Cardone is forced to sell any of his real estate, any prospective buyers will demand a steep discount as they know Cardone does not have enough cash on hand to pay $3-4 million a year for a jet.

Cardone perhaps thought he needed to get ahead of the story as someone would see his jet was for sale. However, the market now knows he is cash strapped.

Why would any rational investor want to invest in anything with Cardone’s name on it when Cardone cannot afford a few million dollars a year for jet? The jet was his signature brag for over 10 years and now it is gone. Selling the jet is a big red flag. 

Selling the jet is suggestive of an internal liquidity crisis at Cardone Capital; it also shows that L. Ron Hubbard’s business tech which Cardone built his company on is not working out for him: ~$3.8 billion in debt and now the jet had to be sold.

Despite this, Grant Cardone claims that Cardone Capital outperforms the market:

Cardone Capital has no available public financial data showing that it outperforms the market. We posted an article using SEC filings to show Cardone REIT I is losing money: 

Cardone REIT 1 LLC  — the very investment vehicle Cardone told his followers never to invest in when other people offered them in 2019, before launching his own REIT in 2022 — has been losing millions of dollars in both 2022 and 2023 according to its Form 1-SA filed with the SEC on September 29, 2023.

Cardone REIT 1 LLC did not get any better in the 2025 SEC Form 1-SA:

Net loss H1 2025: ~$5,127,010 (improved slightly from $6,825,674 in H1 2024, but still deep red)

Losses from unconsolidated investees: ~$4.2M (H1 2025) vs ~$6.4M (H1 2024). Manager attributes this primarily to non-cash depreciation and amortization — the standard Cardone defense that the losses are “just paper.”

Fundraising: Fund is essentially maxed out. As of June 30, 2025: 75,936 Class A units issued (vs 74,936 at June 2024). That’s only ~1,000 new units = $1M raised in a year against a $75M target. The money spigot is closed.

Total assets: ~$46-47M (declining from $46.3M at June 2024)

Cardone’s Instagram claim that his company is outperforming the market is precisely the kind of statement that warrants SEC scrutiny. A firm with a money-losing REIT, roughly $100 million in crypto losses, and that is liquidating assets such as its jet is not outperforming the market.

How soon will Grant Cardone have to sell his $750,000 Richard Mille wristwatch at the pawn shop in Aventura?

By way of contrast to Cardone selling his jet due a crypto crash, Elon Musk took a $380 billion market cap loss in June 2025 and did not panic and sell his company jet. Instead, he worked and ended 2025 up. Here is Musk’s 12 month chart as of today:

Cash on Hand

Cardone wants to compare his debt-laden apartment-owning company with the big players. Very well.  Let’s look at some real numbers and facts. We estimate that Cardone Capital carries $3.8 billion in debt on its claimed $5.1 AUM. Now let’s look the cash on hand of the big companies to which Cardone wants to compare his debt-bloated enterprise: 

Live figures from TradingView and the most recent SEC filings, all current as of early 2026. The Berkshire bar is the story by itself — $381.7 billion in cash on hand makes every other number look modest. Cardone’s little red stub of debt going negative is barely visible at that scale, which is our visual point: Grant Cardone is not even in the same universe as the companies to which he is comparing himself.

Which brings us to returns.

Here are the companies with the highest rates of return in 2025:

Apples and Oranges: Public Equity vs. Private Equity Real Estate

Placing a private real estate fund’s claimed return alongside the 10-year annualized returns of publicly traded stocks is a textbook category error. These are not comparable instruments. They are structurally, legally, and economically different in every material way.

Liquidity.  Tesla, Apple, Google, Meta, and Strategy shares can be bought and sold in seconds on public exchanges. A Cardone Capital investor is locked in for five to ten years — with no public market, no exit mechanism, and transfer restrictions that leave investors entirely at Cardone’s discretion. When things go wrong in a Cardone fund, investors cannot sell. When Tesla declines, a stockholder can exit on their cell phone in under 60 seconds. 

Independent verification.  The returns of Tesla, Apple, Google, Meta, and Strategy are independently calculated by every major financial data service — Bloomberg, Morningstar, FactSet, Yahoo Finance — and are derived from audited, SEC-filed financial statements and publicly traded prices. Cardone Capital’s “47%” is a self-reported figure from a private entity with no external price discovery mechanism.

Regulatory transparency.  The five tech companies file quarterly and annual reports with the SEC under the Securities Exchange Act. Their cash positions, debt, revenues, and officer compensation are publicly disclosed. Cardone Capital files limited Regulation A disclosures — stripped-down documents that do not approach the transparency of Exchange Act reporting.

The Cherry-Pick: The Mystery of “Fund 1”

Even setting aside the apples-to-oranges problem, Cardone’s own caption quietly admits that the comparison is illegitimate on its face. His Instagram text states: “this investment is not across all of Cardone Capital but represents one fund that has had enough time to mature & refinance. I have 70 plus real estate deals they are all different.”

Read that carefully. He is not claiming that Cardone Capital as an enterprise has delivered a 47% annualized return over ten years. He is claiming that a single unnamed fund — “Fund 1” — produced that result. He holds “70 plus real estate deals.” He chose one. He put it at the top of a chart next to Tesla and Apple.

This is the most elementary form of performance cherry-picking. If you run 70 investments and present only the best one as your headline number, you are not reporting your returns — you are performing a selection trick. Every fund manager who has ever existed could construct a 47% annualized return chart if they were permitted to reach across a decade of investments and display only their single best outcome.

Cardone adds the caveat that “every investor in Fund 1 has received over 400% AFTER FEES.” This is consistent with a refinancing or sale event that returned principal plus gains — a one-time liquidity event, not an ongoing yield. When a real estate fund refinances at a higher property valuation and returns capital to investors, the annualized return figure is turbocharged by the capital event. That is not the same as a stock compounding 47% annually for ten consecutive years on market-driven price appreciation. The comparison is structurally misleading.

The phrase “mature & refinance” is the tell. The 47% figure was almost certainly driven by a loan refinance — Cardone’s funds routinely use interest-only five year loans, and a refinancing at a higher appraised value can create a one-time distribution event that, divided over the years of investment, produces an impressive annualized figure. That is not a recurring, compounding return. It is a single event, and the fund is now closed or frozen pending the next such event — whenever that may come. Meanwhile the other 69+ deals go unmentioned.

The Regulatory History Cardone Did Not Include in the Graphic

Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Strategy have never been the subject of a securities fraud class action proceeding that survived appellate review. Cardone Capital has.

In Pino v. Cardone Capital LLC, investors filed a federal securities fraud class action in the Central District of California in 2020 alleging that Cardone used social media communications to mislead prospective investors in two of his funds. The district court initially dismissed the case. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal, holding that social media communications used to solicit investors could be actionable under the Securities Act — establishing a significant legal precedent in the process. An amended complaint was filed after the original plaintiff’s death.

Paul Pelletier, the Department of Justice’s most senior fraud prosecutor during a 25-year career, reviewed the case documents and issued a blunt assessment: “It looks like his business is built on lies and deception that will likely collapse leaving investors holding an empty bag.”

This legal history was not included in the Instagram graphic. The performance comparison omitted it entirely. Investors scrolling Cardone’s social media would not know it exists.

What the Chart Should Have Shown

A genuinely informative comparison would have presented the following:

The annualized returns for all of Cardone Capital’s funds over the same 10-year period — not the single best performer.

The liquidity terms alongside the return figures — so that an investor can evaluate whether a locked-up, illiquid 47% one-time event is more or less attractive than a liquid, mark-to-market 41% annual compound return in Tesla.

The fee structure. Cardone Capital charges a 1% annual asset management fee, a 1% acquisition fee, and a 1% disposition fee. These costs accrue against investor returns.

The debt load. $3.8 billion in liabilities is not an asset. The five tech companies in the graphic are sitting on tens of billions in cash reserves. Cardone Capital is sitting on billions in debt.

None of this was in the graphic. What was in the graphic was a single fund’s best result, stripped of context, placed next to the audited 10-year returns of five of the most transparent public companies in the world.

Conclusion: The Architecture of a Misleading Claim

Grant Cardone’s Instagram post is a carefully engineered piece of investor marketing that uses accurate peripheral data — the stock returns of publicly traded companies — to frame an unverifiable, cherry-picked, context-stripped claim about a single private fund as though it were a direct apples-to-apples comparison.

It is not a comparison. It is a juxtaposition. Placing a number next to other numbers in a table does not make those numbers comparable. A private, illiquid real estate fund with $3.8 billion in debt and no independent price discovery is not a peer of Tesla, Apple, or Alphabet. It is a different instrument entirely, with different risks, different return mechanisms, different liquidity, and a dramatically different disclosure regime.

The Ninth Circuit has already concluded that Grant Cardone’s social media statements to prospective investors may be actionable under federal securities law. The March 14 Instagram post — publicly visible, directed at an audience of potential investors, presenting a return figure that is self-reported, cherry-picked from a single fund, and framed as a competitive comparison to regulated public securities — fits squarely within the pattern the Ninth Circuit identified.

Grant Cardone’s caption asks: “Too good to be true?” The answer, on the evidence, is yes.

“Hello SEC: It’s that nut case Grant Cardone flapping his gums online again. He thinks he’s Apple or Google. He belongs in a Psych ward or jail.” 

The Scientology Money Project has covered Grant Cardone and Cardone Capital since 2014. Prior coverage includes analysis of Cardone’s SEC Regulation A filings, the Pino v. Cardone Capital litigation, Cardone’s Bitcoin hybrid fund structures, his $3.8B debt load and balloon payment obligations, and his tokenization announcement. All prior articles are available at scientologymoneyproject.com. Copyright 2026.