On July 18, 2026, Grant Cardone posted the first segment of his own sworn deposition testimony to his YouTube channel. The title, as originally published, told viewers to save the video while it was public. The description posed the rhetorical question directly — who would share a deposition if they had anything to hide? — and stated that he has spent millions defending the case and will spend his last dollar if necessary to defend his reputation and his investors.

Read our previous article on Pino v. Cardone

We take him at his word that he posted it voluntarily, and we want to be clear at the outset about what that means for this analysis. Everything we discuss below comes from Cardone’s own publication of his own testimony.

There is no leak here, no anonymous reupload, no question of authenticity, and no adversary’s editing to argue about.

Grant Cardone chose to release the deposition online. Deposition testimony is preserved sworn testimony and is already potential trial evidence; what Cardone has added by publishing it is a public, attributable statement of his own position on the litigation, made while the case is pending.

That makes the video an unusually clean document. It also makes the questions it raises harder to deflect.

Where the Case Stands

*Pino v. Cardone Capital* has been in litigation for years. The named plaintiff, Luis Pino, has since died; his daughter Christine Pino is now the lead plaintiff. Cardone Capital is the defendant.

On June 10, 2025, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court and sent the case back. After preliminaries, Pino filed a pretrial motion to compel documents from Cardone Capital. Cardone’s attorneys filed an opposition, and a hearing was held on November 26, 2025 — two days after Cardone’s fellow Scientologist David Gentile walked out of federal prison on a commutation from President Trump, a story that generated the kind of global coverage Grant Cardone has never managed to attract.

The core allegation in the case concerns material misrepresentations Cardone is alleged to have made on social media in the course of selling securities to a class of potential investors — statements alleged to have induced unsophisticated investors to put money into Cardone Capital’s funds.

Cardone has argued in supplemental filings that this is a $10,000 individual case that has not been certified as a class. That argument strikes us as beside the point. The question the litigation turns on is not the size of one plaintiff’s stake but whether the representations were made and whether they were material.

The Argument the Ninth Circuit Already Rejected

Cardone’s central legal position for years has been that things he said online about his funds’ performance do not amount to statutory sales of securities. The Ninth Circuit disagreed.

The court found that the defendants relied significantly on social media to source investors, that Cardone had described Fund V as funded through crowdfunding using social media, and that he touted social media as an intentional strategy to hold down promotional costs.

The court concluded that through their social media engagement, Cardone and Cardone Capital were significant participants in the selling transaction because they disseminated material information to would-be investors, and that reading the statute otherwise would defeat Congress’s remedial purpose. The panel adopted the Eleventh Circuit’s observation in *Wildes* that a seller liable for recommending a security in a personal letter cannot escape accountability by making the identical pitch in an internet video.

Hold that holding in mind, because it is the frame for one of the most revealing chapters in the deposition Cardone just published.

What the Deposition Covers

The chapter markers are Cardone’s own. He supplied them. They run directly through the material at issue:

– His role as founder, owner, and corporate representative of Cardone Capital
– His control of the company, and of Funds 5 and 6
– His personal investment in Fund 5
– Interrogatory responses and the offering documents
– The 15% annualized return statement
– The argument that one video out of more than 12,000 cannot be judged without its full context
– Education or fundraising?
– His real estate track record and the prior-property spreadsheet
– Operating costs, net profits, and the $356 million profit argument
– Why he relies on past performance
– His testimony that he is at 213% a year
– ARR versus IRR
– Profit splits and acquisition fees
– The dispute over the requested documents

Two of these are worth flagging before anyone watches: 

The 15% annualized return statement goes to the heart of the alleged material misrepresentation. So does the exchange over ARR versus IRR — the difference between an average rate of return and an internal rate of return is the difference between a number that can be made to look impressive and a number that accounts for the timing of cash flows. Anyone evaluating a fund’s performance claims needs to know which one is being quoted.

“One video out of 12,000” is Cardone’s contextual defense, and the Ninth Circuit’s holding is the reason it carries so much weight for him. If a single social media statement can constitute a statutory offer, then the volume of his output is not a shield. Twelve thousand videos does not dilute one actionable statement; it is simply the denominator. Cardone appears to be arguing that the sheer scale of his content should immunize any individual piece of it. The Ninth Circuit’s reasoning points the other way.

It is also worth remembering that Cardone Capital’s own court filings state the company put a social media compliance manual in place after the SEC wrote to it about certain representations Grant Cardone had made online. A company that adopts a compliance manual in response to a regulator’s letter has made a judgment about the risk its online statements carry.

Cardone Product Placement in a Legal Deposition. 

Never one to miss an opportunity to build his 10X brand, Cardone ensured his 10X branded water could be seen when he was being deposed. Cardone talks about tax deductions and that 10X bottled water will probably be written off as an advertising expense.

The Structure Behind the Numbers

Readers of this site will know our long-standing view of how Cardone Capital’s acquisitions work. In pur assessment of the record:

– Cardone acquires properties as an individual, using his own cash and debt.
– He then sells those properties to Cardone Capital at a markup, taking a profit on the sale of his personal holdings to his own company and its investors.
– He generally takes a comparatively small position in his own funds.
– As CEO, he takes an acquisition fee when he sells his property to his company.
– He takes annual management fees on the properties.
– He takes 35% of the profit on the back end when a fund exits a property.
– Once the sale to the fund is complete, the fund and its investors carry the debt and liabilities. Cardone has recovered his cash, plus a profit, and moves on to the next acquisition.

Note also that in *Pino*, the defendant is the company, not Grant Cardone individually.

This is the structure against which the deposition testimony about acquisition fees, profit splits, and personal investment should be read.

Three Different Numbers

There is an arithmetic curiosity in Cardone’s own posting. The video description says he has spent $6 million on this suit. His own chapter marker at 21:25 is titled for a four-year, $3 million fight. In earlier coverage we noted his public statements that he had spent millions fighting the case on principle.

That is three characterizations of the same expense. They may be reconcilable — total defense costs versus a narrower category, or an older figure carried forward. We are not going to characterize any of them until we have heard what the sworn testimony says at that timestamp, because the answer given under oath is the one that counts.

We will say this about the “on principle” framing: We do not buy it. Our view is that Cardone has to fight this case. If a jury ever sees the evidence, We believe his reputation does not survive the encounter.

Two Cautions

First, questions asked in a deposition establish nothing. A lawyer’s question is not evidence, and Cardone’s own disclaimer says as much, correctly. What a deposition establishes is what the witness said under oath. That is a different and narrower thing, and it is the only thing we will treat as established here.

Second, we are reading the testimony against the documents — the Fund 5 and Fund 6 offering materials, the REIT filings, and the record in *Pino v. Cardone* — rather than against my impression of Mr. Cardone. Where his sworn answers and the filings agree, we will say so. Where they diverge, we will show the reader both and let the numbers carry the argument.

Cardone closes by telling his audience to watch the testimony and decide which argument the numbers support.

That is precisely what we intend to do.