Grant Cardone has published the next video segment of his own sworn deposition under the title “Cardone EXPOSES $100B Racket of Class Action Lawsuits — Watch b4 it’s removed.” The video is posted above. 

In this video, under oath, Cardone testifies that he is writing checks of four to five hundred thousand dollars a week to investors in one of the funds at issue in *Pino v. Cardone* — returning their capital to them, on request, because they do not want to be part of the class action.

Both of those are Cardone’s own account of his own conduct, published by Cardone. He is calling the class action a hundred-billion-dollar racket on the title card while testifying on the tape that he is voluntarily giving investors their money back. This essay is about what happens when you set those two statements next to each other and read them against the court’s order.

Everything below is drawn from the transcript of the video Cardone published. Where we quote, we give the timestamp. Where the transcript is ambiguous — and machine transcription of a hostile deposition is frequently ambiguous — we say so rather than paper over it.

As Grant Cardone published this video on Youtube himself, it is incontrovertible. There is no leak, no reupload, and no question of authenticity or provenance to argue about. Cardone cannot say a bitter former Cardone Capital employee posted it.

A Crucial Question Cardone Was Asked

Opposing counsel opens with a narrow and answerable question: do the K-1s Cardone Capital issues to investors state an equity value higher than what those investors put in?

Cardone does not answer it. He tells counsel not to be disingenuous and says the questioner is trying to make him look bad (0:06). Asked again, he says he would have to see the K-1 and calls it a hypothetical (0:22). He then redirects to the investor portal and suggests counsel should become an investor and put his son into the funds (0:30).

Counsel narrows further, to the question that actually matters: when Cardone buys an investor out of a fund, does he pay that investor the equity value stated on the K-1? (0:42)

That question is never answered in this excerpt. What Cardone offers instead is a worked example — and the example is more revealing than an answer would have been.

IRS Form K1

Opposing counsel’s question on the IRS Form K1 is crucial. Here is the definition of a K1: 

A K-1 (Schedule K-1) is the tax form a pass-through entity — a partnership, LLC taxed as a partnership, S corporation, or trust — issues to each investor or partner every year. The entity itself doesn’t pay income tax; instead it passes its income, losses, deductions, and credits through to the individual holders, and the K-1 tells each one their share to report on their personal return.

For our purposes with Cardone Capital: each of Cardone Capital funds is an  LLC, so each investor gets a K-1 annually reporting their allocated share of the fund’s rental income, depreciation, and any gain or loss. That’s what makes the deposition exchange sharp — counsel was asking whether the equity value shown to investors (in the portal, and reflected in K-1 capital account figures) matches what Cardone actually pays them on a buyout.

Part of opposing counsel’s question goes to the $15,000 investor in Cardone Capital about whom Cardone talked.

The $15,000 Investor

In deposition, Cardone described a specific investor, apparently one identified in the interrogatory responses in front of him. Per his testimony at 0:55–1:20, the investor put in $15,000. Cardone paid him $14,727 in the buyout. Separately, the investor had received $272 in distributions.

Add those and you get $14,999. The investor received back, within a dollar, what he put in.

Cardone’s characterization of this at 1:09 is that the investor lost no money, not a penny. On the arithmetic he supplied, that is accurate — and it is also the entire point. The question on the table was whether buyouts are made at the equity value stated on the K-1, and the example Cardone volunteers to rebut the suggestion of underpayment is an investor who received his principal back and nothing beyond it.

Consider what that means against Cardone’s own sales pitch. Cardone markets these funds on two promises: that the real estate appreciates, and that investors collect monthly distributions along the way. Take him at his word on the first. If the property this investor was in had appreciated, then a buyout at original cost returned the principal and kept the appreciation on the house side of the ledger. The investor financed the position for the life of the hold, collected $272, and walked away with his $15,000 — no share of the gain Cardone says these properties produce, and no interest on the money Cardone had the use of.

We want to be careful here, because this is where the operating agreement governs. An exiting LLC member is not automatically entitled to unrealized appreciation; what a redeemed member receives depends on the buyout-valuation terms in the fund’s operating agreement. So the honest way to put it is as a question the documents answer: if the property appreciated, who kept the gain, and what does the operating agreement’s buyout clause say the investor was owed? That clause is the document to pull.

We also cannot prove from this transcript what the investor’s K-1 said. What the record shows is that Cardone, asked whether he pays out stated equity value, answered by describing a payment equal to the original investment. If the K-1 equity value and the buyout figure were the same number, that was the simplest possible answer to give, and it was not given.

Cardone’s public case for these funds has been built on claimed returns — the 15% annualized figure at the center of the litigation, the 213% claim, the $356 million profit argument. This investor’s return, on Cardone’s own numbers, was 1.8% in distributions over the life of the holding, not annualized.

At 1:29 he says it is as though he is Santa Claus, and at 1:33 that no one else in the country — not Wall Street, not JP Morgan, not Morgan Stanley — does this for the everyday investor. That is promotional language, delivered under oath, in a case about promotional language.

The Part That Belongs on the Docket

Here is what we would want a securities lawyer to read twice.

Counsel notes that the interrogatory responses were submitted on February 3, 2026, and asks how many investors Cardone has bought out since (1:45). Cardone says he wrote checks for four or five hundred thousand dollars last week and expects to write another four or five hundred thousand this week (2:02–2:09).

He then supplies the reason, unprompted. Investors, he says, do not want to be involved in the lawsuit — they are getting emails late at night and want no part of it (2:09–2:29).

Cardone describes the mechanics. There was a notice email telling recipients that if they did nothing, they would be included in the class (3:14–3:48). Cardone says thousands of people contacted his company about it (3:30). In response, he says, a landing page was created and people who contacted the company were sent a link (3:52–4:08). He says he did a call the previous night and that people opted out during it (4:08–4:16).

In the same passage he says he did not activate this and did not tell anybody they could opt out (4:08–4:16), and that he told people to do whatever they wanted (4:16). Those statements sit alongside his description of a landing page his company created and a call he personally conducted. We are not going to characterize the contradiction; we are going to put both halves in front of the reader and note that they are in the same answer.

Two things follow, and both are checkable against the docket rather than against our opinion.

First, the notice. This is no longer an open question. On March 27, 2026, United States District Judge John F. Walter signed an order certifying Pino v. Cardone Capital, LLC, Case No. 2:20-cv-08499-JFW-KS, as a class action in the Central District of California under Rule 23(b)(3). Class notice and related documents were due April 13, 2026.

The email Cardone describes — inaction results in inclusion, with a mechanism to opt out — is court-approved class notice, issued in a certified class action. His testimony describing thousands of investors contacting his company about it is testimony about the aftermath of that notice.

This matters for a second reason. In Part 1 we noted Cardone’s position in supplemental filings that this is a $10,000 individual case that has not been certified as a class. That characterization did not survive March 27, and on this tape he is describing the notice mechanics of the very certification he elsewhere denies.

His claim at 3:06 that in six years one person joined the suit reflects the same confusion, or the same framing. In a Rule 23(b)(3) class nobody joins. Every investor who purchased into the certified class is a member unless they opt out.

Second, the buyouts. A defendant making cash payments to absent members of a certified class, and doing so through a company-created landing page and a call conducted by the named principal, is conduct that courts have authority to examine. The Supreme Court addressed a district court’s power over defendant communications with absent class members in Gulf Oil Co. v. Bernard, 452 U.S. 89 (1981). Courts have since scrutinized — and in some cases invalidated — opt-outs and releases obtained by defendants through unsupervised contact with class members.

A buyout is not a release. Handing an investor $14,727 does not, by itself, extinguish that investor’s claim. The claim survives the payment unless the investor signed something. So the first question for the docket is concrete: what releases, non-disclosure agreements, non-disparagement agreements, or other contracts accompany these checks? If a release is attached, then what is being described is a settlement negotiated directly with absent class members, outside the supervision of the court, by the defendant. Courts examine that closely. If no release is attached, Cardone has paid out several hundred thousand dollars a week and bought no legal peace at all.

And here is the sharper point. In his certification order, Judge Walter adopted a classwide damages methodology. Investors who still hold their fund interests are entitled to rescission: the return of their purchase price, minus any income received. Investors who have already sold are entitled to the out-of-pocket measure.

Now look again at the example Cardone volunteered under oath. The investor purchased for $15,000. He had received $272 in income. Cardone paid him $14,727 and took back the interest in the fund.

Purchase price, minus income received.

That is not an approximation of the certified classwide rescission formula. That is the formula, to the dollar, executed by hand, one investor at a time, by the defendant, outside the supervision of the court.

We cannot prove that Cardone or his counsel set the buyout figure by reference to Judge Walter’s order. Intent is not something a transcript gives you, and there is an innocent explanation available: returning an investor’s net capital is an obvious way to price a redemption, with or without a court order in the background.

What the record shows is that the man calling this case a hundred-billion-dollar racket is privately paying certain investors the exact measure of damages the court has certified for the class — while the case he calls a racket remains pending.

What is missing from his version is prejudgment interest — six years of it — along with fees, costs, and any adjudication of whether the representations were misleading in the first place. The investor who takes the check gets the principal back and gives up the rest.

And Judge Walter has already ruled on this argument. At certification, Cardone contended that individual issues predominated because he had offered refunds to investors who requested them. The court rejected it. Judge Walter held that this did not defeat superiority — that it is not a defense to securities fraud that the defendant offered to partially unwind the transactions after the fraud was discovered.

That holding was entered on March 27. The buyouts Cardone describes in this testimony postdate February 3, 2026, are ongoing at four to five hundred thousand dollars a week, and rest on the same theory the court has already declined to accept. He is not raising a novel defense. He is scaling up one that has already failed.

If the suit is meritless, the obvious question is why capital is going back out the door at that rate.

His answer is on the tape, and it is not an unreasonable one: they asked. Investors wanted liquidity, wanted no headaches, and he accommodated them. Nothing prohibits an issuer from redeeming an investor who requests it, and Cardone frames these as inbound requests throughout.

But that answer has to survive one more fact, and it is a fact from his own public record rather than from this transcript. Cardone’s stated public position on this litigation, which we have addressed in earlier coverage, is that if the plaintiffs prevail, the investors lose. If that framing was conveyed to absent class members — on a call he conducted, or through a landing page his company built — then the communications are not neutral accommodation. They are a defendant telling members of a certified class, without court supervision, that the case brought on their behalf threatens them.

That is the precise category of conduct the Supreme Court addressed in Gulf Oil, and the reason district courts retain authority under Rule 23(d) to regulate communications between a defendant and absent class members. Courts have invalidated opt-outs obtained through contact found to be misleading or coercive.

We are not lawyers and we are not predicting an outcome. We are identifying what a plaintiff’s motion would look like if one is filed, and what documents would answer it: the certification order, the approved notice language, the landing page as it appeared, any recording of the call, and the buyout paperwork.

A Note on Refunds

One contrast is worth drawing, given this site’s subject of Scientology. 

Grant Cardone is a Scientologist. When Scientology parishioners demand the return of unused advance payments, the Church does not write checks on request. It routes the demand into internal religious arbitration under the contracts every parishioner signs, and it litigates, sometimes for years, to keep it there.

Cardone Capital has no such mechanism. It is a securities issuer, not a church. Its investors signed subscription agreements, not religious enrollment contracts. There is no ecclesiastical forum to divert them into and no First Amendment doctrine standing between Cardone and the Central District of California.

So when Cardone’s investors ask for their money back, Cardone writes checks. Whatever else the buyouts are, they are what it looks like when a Scientologist’s business is subject to ordinary securities law.

Fund 5 to Fund 29

At 2:29 Cardone says investors are taking money out of Fund 5 and putting it into Fund 29 because they do not want to be involved.

Fund 5 is one of the two funds at the center of Pino v. Cardone.

If capital is moving out of an at-issue fund and into a current offering, that transaction touches the Cardone Capital fund economics we have described on this site before — the acquisition fees, the management fees, the 35% back-end promote — and it does so while the fund’s performance representations are being litigated. It is worth a look at the Regulation A filings for both funds.

The $30,000 Write-Off

At 1:02 Cardone says the $15,000 investor would also have received roughly a $30,000 depreciation tax write-off.

Two questions come out of that number.

The first is verification, and we flag it and go no further. A passive investor’s deductible loss is constrained by the at-risk rules and the passive activity loss rules, though qualified nonrecourse financing on real property can increase at-risk basis, which is presumably the mechanism contemplated. Whether a $15,000 limited partner in fact receives and can use a $30,000 deduction is a question for a tax professional looking at an actual K-1, not for us looking at a transcript. But it is a specific number attached to a specific investor in sworn testimony, and it is verifiable.

The second is what the pitch has now become. Is Cardone selling appreciation, distributions, or tax losses? On this tape he is selling all three at once — and the third sits awkwardly against the first. Real estate depreciation is a paper deduction. As Investopedia puts it, it lets an owner recover cost through deductions regardless of whether the physical market value of the property is appreciating.

In other words, it is a phantom loss the tax code hands real estate investors even on a building that is gaining value. So the $30,000 write-off is not evidence the buildings are falling apart; it is Cardone marketing a tax loss on the very same assets he tells investors are appreciating. An investor being sold both stories at once should ask which story the fund’s own filings support.

The Title

This is the third segment, and the framing has now completed its migration.

Part 1 went up as the full deposition, posted voluntarily by Grant Cardone, with viewers told to save it while it was public. Within a day it was retitled to characterize the Pino class action lawsuit as an effort to extort fees.

Part 2’s description carried the extortion theme forward. This segment is titled for a hundred-billion-dollar racket, with viewers again told to watch before it is removed.

The transparency framing is gone. The urgency framing remains, though the only person in a position to remove these videos is the man who posted them.

In the testimony itself the theme is the same. Cardone frames opposing counsel as a scumbag recruiter and an ambulance chaser (4:56). The case is a game, a trick, garbage (3:06, 3:14, 5:39). Six years, he says, and one person joined the suit (3:06).

That last one is a factual claim with a number in it. Like the class notice, it can be checked. And it has been.

Cardone’s instruction to his audience in Part 1 was to watch the testimony and decide which argument the numbers support. He has now given us more numbers. We intend to keep checking them against the documents.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE — July 20, 2026: The court-authorized class notice is now live at the official administrator’s site, www.CardoneClassAction.com, run by JND Legal Administration.

This site confirms the framework described above and adds two facts. The named defendants are Cardone Capital, LLC, Grant Cardone, Cardone Equity Fund V, and Cardone Equity Fund VI.

The class is defined as anyone who purchased or acquired an interest in Cardone Equity Fund V or VI through their public offerings.

The court appointed Susman Godfrey L.L.P. as Class Counsel, with Marc Seltzer as lead counsel. A jury trial is currently scheduled for March 9, 2027.

The site also states the defense posture in the defendants’ own terms: they deny making any materially false or misleading statement or omission in violation of the federal securities laws. Note the mechanism this creates. Investors who want out of the class are directed to mail a request to the neutral administrator, JND Legal Administration, in Seattle — a supervised, court-approved channel.

This is the official path.

The landing page Cardone testifies his own company built, and the opt-out call he says he personally conducted, run alongside it. The contrast between the two — the court’s channel and Cardone’s — is exactly the kind of parallel, unsupervised defendant-to-class-member contact that Gulf Oil addresses.

**Sources**

*Pino v. Cardone Capital, LLC*, Case No. 2:20-cv-08499-JFW-KS, Order Granting Class Certification (C.D. Cal., March 27, 2026); *Pino v. Cardone Capital, LLC*, No. 23-3512 (9th Cir., June 10, 2025); *Gulf Oil Co. v. Bernard*, 452 U.S. 89 (1981); transcript of Grant Cardone’s self-published deposition segment, *”Cardone EXPOSES $100B Racket of Class Action Lawsuits — Watch b4 it’s removed,”* 0:00–5:39; prior Scientology Money Project reporting, March 30, 2026 and July 19, 2026.