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Former Twitter CEO scores sprawling Soho co-op for $8M

Dick Costolo and wife Lorin buy unit featuring stripper pole, sake tap and 1K-sf room

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (right) and Lorin Costolo with 136 Grand Street (Credit: Costolo via Jesse Grant/Getty Images; Google Maps)
Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (right) and Lorin Costolo with 136 Grand Street (Credit: Costolo via Jesse Grant/Getty Images; Google Maps)

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his wife Lorin have picked up a spacious Soho pad for $8 million from French fashion and furniture designer Alexandre de Betak.

The 4,000-square-foot co-op at 136 Grand Street went for 9 percent less than its $8.8 million price tag, public records show.

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In a Jan. 7 story about the contract signing, The Real Deal called the two-bedroom, four-bathroom pad “a house fit for a party.” One room alone is about 1,000 square feet and the sprawling unit comes complete with a stripper pole in a mirrored room, a hydraulic table that rises from the floor and a tap with three types of sake.

Costolo, 56, who is based in San Francisco, has an interesting story as well. As a computer-science major at the University of Michigan he needed arts credits to graduate so he looked for one with “no homework,” he told PandoDaily in a 2013 interview. He found a theater class, started doing open mics, turned down all his coding job offers, moved to Chicago and did improv comedy for a few years.

“It was awesome. I don’t have any regrets,” he said in the interview. “I had no money though.”

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He does now — several hundred million dollars, according to various estimates.

Costolo left improv for Anderson Consulting, where he spent eight years before launching and selling three tech companies — the last of them, called FeedBurner — to Google.

After a stint at Google he became COO of Twitter in 2009 and CEO the following year. He owed 7.5 million shares of the company just prior to its initial public offering in late 2013. The share price peaked at $69 early in 2014, and during that year he sold about 10 percent of his shares as their value fell by half. Twitter stock now trades at about $30.

Costolo left Twitter in 2015.

The seller of the Soho co-op, de Betak, 51, who has offices in Paris, New York and Shanghai, saw his career blossom after moving to New York in 1993. He traces his career back to age 7 when his grandfather gave him an Instamatic camera. At 19 he produced his first fashion show and has done nearly 1,000 since then, including “the live Victoria’s Secret webcast that famously crashed the company’s website in 2000,” Business of Fashion reported.

The designer and events producer bought the Grand Street apartment for $3.9 million from artists Thomas Buehler and Rosemarie Schiller in 2013 and spent millions on renovations that included a swing, a tatami room and a hidden party room with the stripper pole, according to the New York Times.

He shared the unit with his wife, Sofia Sanchez de Betak, a fashion and travel influencer, and three children, but listed it to pursue a new home design challenge, he told the Times. Corcoran broker Steve Gold, of “Million Dollar Listing New York” fame, handled the sale for de Betak.

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Manhattan Luxury MarketSoho