Who the heck is Giants owner Scott Seligman?

Part 1 in a series.

If you, as a Giants fan, ever hear about an owner who isn’t the public face of the ownership group — formerly Peter Magowan and Bill Neukom, and now Larry Baer — it’s not a great sign for the team. Suddenly Charles Johnson has to answer questions about why he donated money to that racist Senate candidate, and the team has to issue statements, and no one is having a good time. Ownership much prefers to stay in the shadows, silently making their money, watching the team’s valuation raise, and eventually selling their stakes for a nice profit.

Anyway, that’s dumb. Because I want to know, who the heck owns the Giants anyway?

Here’s one way of answering that question, from the Giants’s website:

Today, we’ll start with Scott Seligman, picked out mainly because he was listed as a fellow Giants owner on Charles Johnson’s Wikipedia page with a link I could click on. Also, I tried to work in, “I’m not a Selig, man; I’m a Seligman,” but if I’m being honest, finding a context for that was a tough nut to crack.

Let’s get started. Scott Seligman was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1951, one of two children of Irving Seligman. He got a B.A. from the University of Michigan — no source will give his major, though he did run for student government under the banner of The Tenant’s Union — and in 1973 joined Seligman of Florida with the title of Vice President. If you think it’s a pretty big coincidence that he joined a company called Seligman when that was his own surname, well, guess what? It’s not! That was actually his dad’s company, which Irving had founded in 1954, originally to build garages after World War 2, but the company soon expanded to building homes in Detroit and Las Vegas.

The Seligman Group, as it’s known now, is a landlording operation whose assets are mostly located in six states: Michigan, California, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia. According to their website, their bank, Sterling Bank & Trust, has a net worth of $92 million and, according to the bank’s website, total net assets of more than $3 billion; according to another website which I found and is therefore reliable, the Seligman Group handles between $250 million to $499 million in assets and is classified as a Family Investment Office.

Seligman’s business group were also primary drivers of the gentrification of Mid-Market. They started evicting local businesses in 2001 to bring in higher revenue national chains, which worked! You can’t say it didn’t work, which is just swell.

Politically, Scott Seligman is a Republican. This election cycle, he gave money to John Katko, Don Bacon, and Yvette Herrell, all Republican House candidates who won their elections, as well as $2,800 to Donald Trump and $10,000 to the Republican National Committee in late October. And then, after the election in early November, he gave another $7,000 to the Trump For President campaign and another $800 to the RNC (You can find this all here, though watch out for another Scott Seligman, an author who lives in Washington DC). However, if you go back a decade or so, you’ll find more varied donations, with money going to Bush-Cheney and Norm Coleman, but also Dianne Feinstein and Tom Daschle, among other Democrats.

Seligman’s wife is named Carol and he has one child, a son named Joshua. Carol, it is likely, is also a Republican, as someone with that name attended a San Francisco protest against Twitter censoring right-wing content and said, “They [Twitter] have no business being here, they're trying to build a fascist movement in this country.” There could be more than one Carol Seligman in San Francisco! There also…could be exactly one Carol Seligman in San Francisco. That would be the one who attended the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s Fall Gala 10 years ago with Scott Seligman.

And speaking of charity, the vast majority of Scott Seligman’s publicly visible charitable contributions go to Jewish organizations, and in many cases, Zionist organizations. He spent time as a committee member on the board of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and Birthright Israel, as well as multiple Jewish Federations.

I have not found any interviews with Scott Seligman at all, much less one where he explains his life’s philosophy or what specifically he enjoys about being a baseball owner. But all in all, he seems like a real estate tycoon who’s had a lot of success, which is just swell for him. But we don’t have a lot of insight into who he is or what drives him. He’s just a finance guy who happens to own a piece of the Giants.

Admittedly I haven’t checked, but I’m guessing that won’t be an unusual story as we start looking closer.