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Posted on 07/01/2026 4:45:21 AM PDT by Red Badger
Sergey Brin spent a career building one of the most valuable companies on earth. It took Zohran Mamdani less than a year in office to convince him New York City real estate wasn’t worth the trouble.
Amphitheatre LLC, the family office vehicle tied to the Google co-founder, quietly sold off its stake in a New York apartment fund late last year, according to filings first reported by Bloomberg. The fund, managed by A&E Real Estate, controls nearly 5,900 rent-stabilized units scattered across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Brin’s exit price was not generous. He accepted roughly six cents on the dollar for a stake that carried a gross value of about $79 million.
A&E did not name Brin when it confirmed the transaction to the New York Post, but the terms matched precisely. A company spokesperson described the seller as someone “willing to accept six cents on the dollar on their original equity investment to divest itself from the New York City multifamily sector.”
That is not the language of a landlord walking away from a bad year. It is the language of an investor who has concluded the sector itself is broken.
The Rent Freeze Arrived Right on Schedule
The timing tells its own story. Brin’s sale closed weeks after Mamdani, campaigning on a promise to freeze rents for New York’s roughly one million stabilized units, won the mayoralty. On June 25, his handpicked Rent Guidelines Board made good on that promise, voting to hold rents flat for the coming lease year regardless of what landlords are actually paying to keep buildings standing.
A&E says its operating costs have climbed 78.5 percent over the past decade. Insurance, labor, and capital repairs do not freeze because a mayor wants a headline. The company is now carrying $84 million in unpaid rent, and Wells Fargo, acting as trustee, has begun foreclosure proceedings on a $506 million loan tied to the portfolio. The University of California, which had $115 million riding on the same fund, wrote down half its value last year.
An A&E spokesperson put it bluntly: “institutional capital, both equity investors and lenders, are fleeing New York City’s rent-stabilized apartment sector.”
The spokesperson blamed the 2019 Albany rent laws for handcuffing owners’ ability to recover the cost of repairs, layered on top of “a hostile political establishment determined to freeze the rents no matter the real-life implications for residents.”
Mamdani Called Them the City’s Worst Landlord. He May Also Be Their Landlord of Last Resort.
None of this is to pretend A&E has a spotless record. Mamdani singled the company out in January for what he called “overt cruelty” toward tenants, and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams named its executives among the city’s worst landlords, citing thousands of building violations across 60 properties.
A&E counters that it has spent more than $800 million clearing 35,000 violations, many inherited when it acquired the buildings in the first place.
Both things can be true. A landlord can have a documented record of neglect, and a rent policy can simultaneously make it financially impossible to fix what’s broken. New York’s stabilized housing stock is aging, capital-starved, and now governed by a mayor who has told the market, in effect, that revenue will not be allowed to rise no matter what expenses do. Institutional investors read balance sheets, not press releases. They are reading this one and leaving.
Brin’s exit did not happen in isolation. Only months earlier, an entity connected to him terminated or relocated fifteen California LLCs out of that state as voters weighed a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires. Brin told the New York Times he fled actual Soviet socialism with his family in 1979 and had no interest in watching California drift toward it again.
The man is not making a habit of sticking around to test how bad a policy experiment can get.
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people. (Isaiah 10:1-2, KJV)
The people who will actually suffer from a shrinking supply of well-capitalized rental housing are not billionaires with the luxury of exit. They are the tenants Mamdani claims to be protecting, who will find fewer landlords willing to invest in maintenance, fewer units built, and a housing stock that ages faster than the political class is willing to admit.
Capital does not owe New York City its patience. It goes where it is treated well, and right now it is telling City Hall exactly what it thinks of the plan.
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> He accepted roughly six cents on the dollar… <
One implication here is that Brin thinks if he waits even a little longer, he’ll get even less than six cents on the dollar.
Yikes!
But those business titans did have a warning of sorts. Back in 2022 New York State sued Trump. Trump lost, and was ordered to pay $354.8 million. Did the other NY business leaders really think they’d be left alone?
ISLAMamdani doesn’t care. He’ll use the decision to build the utopia.
Eff Sergey Brin. Brin and his fellow traveler billionaires supported the likes of Mamdani until it became clear that Mamdani policies would affect Brin’s bottom line.
If those rich b*st*rds hadn’t thrown money at the Dems, we wouldn’t be in this position. Now? I think it may be too late.
Dance with the devil. You will get burned.
“5,900 rent-stabilized”
A fool for owning rent controlled apartments even before mammydammy.
+1 The enablers are now complaining about the monsters they created.
you hit the nail on the head. Plus the dude had already experienced this 1st hand in the soviet union. WTF did he think was going to happen?
How much of this real estate, after being seriously devalued by Mandami policies, will be bought by his cronies and big money supporters for pennies on the dollar. Then he when he or his successor ends the rent control programs his buddies will all own very valuable properties they could never had afforded otherwise. Communist-capitalism at its best.
What could possibly be the financial benefits of investing in property in a hard-core socialist market?
A SUBSTANTIAL TAX WRITE-OFF...............
Look at Sergey Brin’s reaction to the 2016 election. He became depressed when Hillary lost.
Brin is the guy who cried with his Google employees the Friday after the 2016 election.
he’s dating a MAGA chick and I guess she turned him
He left Loserville then
you are right.
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