Meet real estate tycoon Mike Meldman, George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila business partner and former blackjack dealer
The well-connected boss of luxury residential developer Discovery Land Company, Meldman started out as a dealer in a Lake Tahoe casino
George Clooney and multimillionaire Rande Gerber shook up the drinks industry in June 2017 when they sold their tequila company, Casamigos, to Diageo for a whopping US$1 billion.
They have a third business partner — real estate tycoon Mike Meldman, who everyone we’ve asked calls “one of the most well-connected people I know”.
Milwaukee-born Meldman’s road to success has been impressive. He said he went to Stanford as a history major with dreams of being a lawyer but “bombed the LSATs” and did not apply.
“I ended up dealing blackjack in Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino,” though that did not last long.
“I met a guy who asked me if I wanted to make as much money as I wanted to and work as little as I wanted to, and he hired me [to] his start-up commercial real estate company,” Meldman said.
He started as a broker selling land and leasing properties in Freemont, California, across the bridge from Palo Alto, where Stanford is.
“I had no training, but I went out and learned how to make deals,” he said, adding that within 18 months he progressed from a broker working weekends to make money to “selling all of Freemont”.
Meldman started taking the money he earned and buying properties that he could himself develop, which he said had its “ups and downs” in the eighties.
“I bought a ranch outside Palo Alto with 300 acres and [space] for 35 houses which had every environmental constraint known to man,” he said. “It took me 18 years to get 28 lots on the property, [but it] taught me how to develop property through the environment and not kill the vegetation.”