Dan Gilbert's Quicken Buyback

A story about how Dan Gilbert built, sold, and bought back his mortgage company before turning it into a massive success.

"The first sale was $90 million to Intuit. Then he and some friends went back and bought it back - I don't have the exact number but it was around $20 million. They kept the Quicken Loans name, even though Intuit owns the Quicken financial software brand, which created this weird situation where there's this other business called Quicken Loans even though that's an Intuit brand.

He took it back, got rid of all the crap that Intuit had added, and started growing it again. This whole time he's living in Detroit watching his city fall apart. During the financial crisis when Detroit went bankrupt, he was super rich living in the suburbs. He decided to move his entire team of 4,000 employees into downtown Detroit. They bought this huge building in Campus Martius right in the center of downtown.

He said 'for my own employees and for the city, we're just gonna fix it.' He built casinos, built a private security firm, bought billions of dollars of derelict buildings. He owns like 20-30% of downtown Detroit. He just announced he's going to pay off $300 million of property taxes for Detroit residents.

Since then, it's become the largest independent mortgage business in the United States. They went public recently, and he owned about 85-90% of it when it went public. The market cap is now $46 billion."