Steve Witkoff, who founded New York City-based luxury real estate development firm The Witkoff Group, said he is divesting from the company to avoid conflicts of interest.
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President Donald Trump tapped Witkoff, whose firm has built major projects in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, as special envoy to the Middle East just days after November’s election.
Witkoff says he will divest from both his own real estate company and World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm he co-founded with his sons, Bloomberg reported.
The Witkoff Group didn't immediately respond to Bisnow’s request for comment. A call to Alex Witkoff, Steve Witkoff’s son and the person currently in charge of operations at the real estate firm, wasn't returned by press time.
Since starting in the role, Witkoff has negotiated a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, CNN reported. He has also been present at meetings that go beyond the Middle East, successfully negotiating the release of American detainee Marc Fogel with Russian President Vladimir Putin, The New York Times reported.
He has also added a new title, according to Bloomberg: assistant to the president. Witkoff has floated the idea of a meeting of large developers to discuss the rebuilding of Gaza.
“I think when people see some of the ideas that come from this, they’re going to be amazed,” Witkoff said in February.
Trump and Witkoff have known each other since the 1980s. Witkoff began his career at law firm Dreyer & Traub, where the pair first met, and later began his own real estate business because he wanted to be like Trump, he told Bloomberg.
Witkoff is now worth $782M, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, although Forbes last year estimated his net worth to be more than $1B.
The Witkoff Group’s real estate dealings have also involved foreign capital, Bloomberg reported.
The Qatar Investment Authority, the Middle Eastern company’s sovereign wealth fund, bought the Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff for $623M in 2023.
Access Industries, founded by Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik, has repeatedly done deals with Witkoff’s real estate firm, including a private golf club and luxury resort in West Palm Beach and One High Line, a luxury condo development in Manhattan’s West Chelsea, Bloomberg reported.
At One High Line and The Shore Club Miami Beach, Witkoff took over and rebranded billion-dollar projects from defunct developer HFZ Capital.
He was also one member of a group that tapped Chinese investors to develop condos at 111 Murray St. in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood in 2015, The Real Deal previously reported.
In addition to Witkoff Group, Steve Witkoff co-founded World Liberty Financial with sons Alex and Zach Witkoff, which boasts on its website that it is the only decentralized finance platform “inspired by Donald J. Trump.” A family entity controls 3.75 billion tokens of their WLFI coin, which could be worth around $56M, per Bloomberg’s calculations. Separately, the Witkoffs are entitled to a further 12.5% of revenue from World Liberty Financial.
The Trump family also has tens of millions of dollars invested in the crypto project, Bloomberg reported, with Trump and sons Donald Trump Jr., Eric and Barron also promoting the project.
Experts told Bloomberg that questions remain about Witkoff’s impartiality, even with family businesses and assets transferred to other family members.
“How do you ensure you’re not using the special envoy role to skew policy your way?” Harold Hongju Koh, a former legal adviser to the State Department under the Obama administration, said to Bloomberg.
Similar questions were raised when Trump appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior adviser in his first term.
Kushner, like Witkoff, did not previously have diplomatic experience but helped broker peace accords between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan.
After leaving the White House, Kushner created a private equity firm named Affinity Partners that has $4.6B in assets that mostly came from foreign investors, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Bloomberg reported.
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