This low-key NYC real estate investor just landed on Bloomberg’s billionaire’s index

Moses Marx owns several buildings in lower Manhattan

11 Broadway and 225 Broadway (Credit: Braun Management)
11 Broadway and 225 Broadway (Credit: Braun Management)

Real estate investor and banking executive Moses Marx, who owns several prominent commercial buildings in downtown New York, is one of the latest additions to the Bloomberg billionaires index.

Marx’s holdings include the 22-story office building at 11 Broadway, the 150,000-square-foot 160 Broadway and the 44-story tower at 225 Broadway, and Bloomberg recently valued his fortune at $1 billion. The octogenarian Orthodox Jewish real estate player keeps an extremely low profile and would not comment for Bloomberg’s story or even confirm his age when the publication reached him.

The investor fled Nazi Germany with his family in the 1930s and is now the controlling shareholder of New York-based lender Berkshire Bancorp Inc. He controls a 13 percent stake in Eastman Kodak as well, whose stock has soared since betting on blockchain technology.

Marx started making his fortune as a floor trader at New York’s Commodity Exchange in the 1970s and 80s and began investing his trading profits in real estate following the Hunt brothers’ attempt to corner the market on silver during his time at Comex.

“He had a mathematical mind, a genius mind in figuring out spreads,” Norton Waltuch, a fellow trader at the time, told Bloomberg. “He had a computer in his head.”

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He is generally much more focused on buying properties than selling them, although he did part with a lot in Soho in 2005 for $34 million. Marx also has holdings in the Bronx neighborhood Riverdale.

Seymour Lachman, a former New York State senator who has a summer home in Long Beach near Marx’s, told Bloomberg that the investor has never sought out the spotlight in his career.

“He never made himself into someone who talked about his accomplishments,” he said. “You don’t have to be Trump to be successful. Marx is not that type of individual at all.”

Another New York real estate figure, Pinnacle Group’s Joel Wiener, recently landed on the Bloomberg billionaires index, thanks largely to rising property values in Brooklyn neighborhoods. [Bloomberg]Eddie Small