Sam Zell isn't afraid to speak his mind.
The billionaire real estate developer and chairman of Equity Group Investments charmed Forbes' Reinventing America Summit with his (often profane) thoughts on politics, the economy, and even the Chicago Cubs. Here's some of the juiciest moments of his on-stage conversation with Forbes Magazine editor Randall Lane:
On the future of the real estate market in the US: "If I could answer this question, I’d be rich."
On business partnerships: "It’s hard enough to build a partnership with two people. Three’s a crowd, four's a fucking disaster."
On what Zell would do in his first 100 days as President: "The first thing I’d do is get the lobotomy removed, since that’s the only reason I could have agreed to run for office in the first place."
On the move back to cities: "I doubt there’s any social change in the last 25 years greater than the deferral of marriage. Think how that changed our world. When I graduated from college, 99% of people got married, bought suburban homes. That’s the way the world was."
On America's biggest untapped resource: "The intellectual quotient of the immigrants who come here to settle. We don’t offer them the opportunity to stay and contribute. It’s very hard to come up with anything more wasteful than that."
On education: "If you could find a major city that actually had a functioning, good public school system, you should buy all the real estate."
On the late Hyatt Hotels billionaire Jay Pritzker: "He wanted to hire me because I was under 30, a lawyer and a successful entrepreneur. So I told him, if I met all of those criteria, why the fuck would I work for you?"
On the one thing the US could do to stimulate the economy: "If you wanted to see the economy go wild, just cut all the regulations in half. We’re in a society where we think all risk can be regulated out. There are just unending interpretations, revisions, legal fees to the sky – when you’re focused on that, you’re not focused on growing and getting new customers."
On risk: "There are baseball players that get paid $25 million a year to get a hit once out of every three times. If I were right only one out of every three times, I wouldn’t be sitting up here. We have to be right 70, 80 percent of the time. But more important, we have to have calibrated wrongs. The world is full of skeletons of people who didn’t understand the scale of the risk they took."
On investments Zell wouldn't make: "I don’t invest in anything that if things got very difficult, I couldn’t take over myself. We try to do things that we understand: no high tech, no biotech."
On affordable housing vs. luxury condos: "What is affordable housing? Is it housing that costs less to live in than it costs to build? That seems to be the standard. I think it’s positive that New York and San Francisco are attracting people from around the world to buy preposterously expensive apartments. We should encourage as much of that as possible because it helps grow the cities."
On lessons from owning the Chicago Tribune: "I learned the press loves to cover the press."
On the newspaper business: "The newspaper business refers to subscribers. The reality is that the newspapers should focus on customers."
On when the Cubs will win the World Series: "When my hair grows back."
Read more about Sam Zell in last year's Forbes 400 cover story by Morgan Brennan.
