(Editor’s note: This story was originally published in November 2016.)
From the Archives: “Don’t be jerky,” Steven Roth told Gary Barnett. “It’s not even close.”
Sitting among other industry titans at Bloomberg LP’s headquarters last spring, Roth was in full troll mode. Barnett had dared to suggest that One57, his cathedral for the 0.1 percent, was better than Roth’s luxury condo tower in the works at 220 Central Park South. And when Jeff Blau spoke about the upcoming condos at Hudson Yards, Roth quipped that his firm, the Related Companies, was “selling to the suckers.” Of his lender at 220 CPS, the Vornado Realty Trust chairman and CEO said: “I’m in the suck-up business to the Bank of China.”
The chiefs of public companies tend to be careful to a fault about what they say in public. Not Roth, who is one of the last in a line of brash hustlers running blue-chip real estate investment trusts — very much in the vein of Sam Zell, whom he’s referred to as a “bald-headed chicken fucker.” At the same time, Roth has shown remarkable patience in turning Vornado, once a developer of New Jersey industrial properties and strip malls, into the $40 billion behemoth, with more than 30 million square feet of New York City holdings, it is today.