Who the heck is Giants owner Jed Walentas?

A real estate guy. Maybe I shouldn't give it away in the subtitle, huh?

Welcome to Part 3 of our series on who the heck owns the Giants. This time, I glanced at the Big Board of owners:

And, among all the unfamiliar names I never hear about, I picked Jed Walentas for today’s installment, mostly because I’m trying to avoid getting pigeonholed in that fourth column.

Jed Walentas was born August 8, 1974, the day that Richard Nixon resigned. His father, David Walentas, was a New York real estate developer who had some modest success, ran into bureaucratic roadblocks in the ‘80s, and finally hit it big redeveloping the DUMBO area — it stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — in Brooklyn in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.

The younger Walentas seemed to be a precocious child. “He was always a good student,” his mom said in 2017. “Loved school, good little athlete, always lots of enthusiasm for everything. Was a huge baseball fan. From the time he was like four he knew every statistic, I think.” Growing up, he lived down the street from Etan Patz, a 6-year old who disappeared in 1979, and one of his hobbies was getting wood from a nearby lumber yard, taking it home, and building stuff in his hands.

It would probably be too pat to say this would lead to his career building buildings in New York, but, well, here we are.

Jed went to college at Penn, majoring in economics. He enjoyed journalism too, though, writing about sports in the school paper. The New York Post offered him a job when he graduated, but by then the bloom was off the journalism rose, so he went to work for…wait for it…

Are you waiting for it?

This is gonna be worth it.

After graduating from Penn, Jed Walentas went to work for Donald Trump.

David Walentas was a well known developer in New York by this time, and he made a call to Trump, also a well known developer, who hired Jed, because that’s just how things are done. Trump had nice things to say about Jed afterwards, and Jed returned the favor, telling The Real Deal, “I’m not saying this through any kind of political lens, but he couldn’t have been nicer or more respectful to me. He made time for me, he looked after me and he was generous.”

It’s likely he was legitimately not saying it through a political lens. Walentas is a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party; he gave more than $10,000 to two Biden funds this year and $25,000 to the DNC, and in 2016 he gave the Hillary Action Fund $100,000, as well as giving scores of donations to Democrats running for Congress. When asked about the Kushners, he said they weren’t friendly, but they weren’t not friendly either, which seemed like he was avoiding the question, but only because he was.

Jed went to work for his dad’s firm, Two Trees Management, after spending a year and a half with Trump. At Two Trees, he immediately became an integral part of the DUMBO project and fairly quickly rose to CEO. The firm’s new big project is the redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory, a closed industrial space which Two Trees is turning into four new buildings and a 6-acre park. The land cost $185 million and the construction obviously much more. Two buildings and the park are open already, and if you’re for development and housing density then this is probably a good project for you; if you’re more concerned about gentrification, well, it’s in Williamsburg, so that ship has already sailed, but the Domino project is blowing a little more wind into its sails.

(There is affordable housing included in the development, but not that much, but also what is affordable in New York anyway, but also the company takes advantage of badly written laws and lax enforcement to get themselves another couple million here and there, but also oh whatever I’ve spent enough time on this Domino thing)

Jed Walentas is obviously doing very well for himself. The Commercial Observer ranked him number 7 on their 2019 list of commercial real estate’s 100 most powerful players. As of that ranking, Two Trees’s real estate portfolio was worth more than $4 billion. So what does a guy do when he experiences that kind of financial success?

Well, he buys a stake in a Major League Baseball team, of course.

Around 2007, Walentas bought a less than 5% stake in the Giants (I say “Around 2007” because in 2017 he said it was 10 years ago, but that might be approximate). He called it the most extravagant thing he’s ever bought, which makes sense, since he’s a Yankees fan and, from what I can find, didn’t seem to have a prior connection to the Giants. It’s obviously worked out for him, since the team has won three World Series since he’s been a part owner, and as of 2011 he was part of ownership’s 9-member executive committee.

He gives interviews and gets attention, but mostly just in New York. He has a wife and two kids — their daughter, Filo, was adopted from Haiti — and gives to charity. This year, he established The David Prize, named for his father (who he calls “David” instead of something more traditional like “Dad”), which gives $200,000 to five everyday New Yorkers “pioneering innovative strategies to solve city problems.” (That quote is on A10B in this Wall Street Journal issue)

So who is Jed Walentas? A former rich kid who got a chance very few other people would have gotten, and made the most of it. He works hard, and takes risks, and does many entrepreneurial things, and also just about no one in the world has ever been in the position he was handed because of who his dad is. It’s not a mark against him to note that, but it was also probably the biggest piece of the puzzle.

You were never going to grow up to be Jed Walentas. Neither was I. Neither was anyone I’ve ever known. These are the things that matter: family money and family connections. Jed had no idea what he was doing on the first project he worked on at Two Trees, but that didn’t matter. He had room to learn, he learned, and now he’s a wild success. It all came from an opportunity that almost no one can possibly get. This is how you succeed in America.

New park looks pretty nice, though. They’ve got bocce ball!

(I didn’t link it anywhere else, but one of the main sources for all this was this New York Magazine article on Jed and David. Thanks, New York Magazine!)