From Billionaire to $10: How John Everest Thomas Rebuilt His Real Estate Empire

John Everest Thomas (00:00)

Let me tell you the whole story. I was a cooperating witness with the FBI for 13 years. Yeah. And I got myself in some trouble. I cooperated against government officials primarily. And I ultimately get arrested and get put in jail. And I spent 39 months in prison. I lost everything I owned.

I was a billionaire at one point. I had zero when I walked out of jail. I had ten dollars on a debit card for the prison. And I had to start over and my second wife at the time was telling me I’d never be able to do real estate again. And I didn’t believe that. I spent my whole life doing real estate. I’m gonna continue to do real estate. And unbelievably, a hedge fund called T2 Capital backs me out of prison. And we do twenty three, twenty-four deals.

Q Edmonds (02:13)

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the *Real Estate Pros Podcast*. I’m your host, Q Edmonds, and I’m indeed excited to be here today. This gentleman has a robust story. He’s involved in land, but honestly, he covered all assets, if we’re being honest. I love what he’s doing. He’s told me a

I so much about his story and I’m not sure how much he’s gonna reveal to you, but listen, I’m gonna ask him the questions and then openly hopefully, he take us kind of through his journey and kind of let what he’s doing now, what he’s building. And I’m excited. I’m excited for us to learn from Mr. John Thomas. Mr. John, how you doing today, sir?

John Everest Thomas (02:50)

Good, how are you today?

Q Edmonds (02:51)

Man, I’m doing good, sir. Glad you’re here. You’ll probably hear me say this again towards the end. Thank you for your time. I feel like our time is our most precious commodity. So the fact that you’re giving us some of your time, I appreciate it. And so, Mr. John, I like to dive right in. So I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days.

If you don’t mind, give us a little origin story, kind of how you got into the spaces that you’re in. And then tell where you are in the world with markets you’re serving. And so Mr. John, sir, you have the floor, my friend.

John Everest Thomas (03:20)

So about 18 months ago, while I was still married, before I filed for divorce, I woke up at about two in the morning and tells my tell my wife that I’m gonna build a crypto company tied to a real estate portfolio. After my wife finishes telling me go to bed and you’re out of your mind, the next morning I start flying around the world and trying to tie up real estate deals to a crypto I haven’t developed yet. And so I go to Vietnam, I go to

England, I go to France, I go to Malaysia, I go to Dubai, I go to Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and I make deals in 16 countries and 22 states in the United States. And all of those deals are tied to our crypto, 100%. There are no mortgages. So when we close, we pay off the mortgages, we pay off any debts on each deal. The deals are escrowed with our attorney. So when we open our and launch our crypto,

All the assets transferred. We have 10 and a half billion dollars of assets today. We will be the largest RWA real-world asset token in the world. We’ll launch at number nine. And we’re hearing preliminary valuations of 15 to 16 billion, which is pretty amazing given it’s our first time out in the crypto world. But we’re doing things differently. Everyone who’s built crypto for real estate built it from the crypto side to the real estate side. It’s really difficult.

To understand all the nuances of real estate if you’ve never done it. And I’ve seen one failure after another failure. And there are basic things you could have done to stop that, like RealT. RealT is in turmoil, they’re going to file bankruptcy. I made an offer to buy the company. And it they won’t even negotiate. It ties my tongue because I’m amazed. They’re not trying to salvage the customers. I’m offering token for their token.

Reach token holder. But you lose their money. So

Q Edmonds (05:00)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (05:01)

and I’m gonna take over the assets in the company. So getting a response has been I call the French firm, I call the US firm, no response. But I’m the first group coming from a real estate perspective. I’ve done real estate for forty years. I’ve built office building, residential buildings, shopping centers, industrial properties, data center. I’ve built every type of real estate you can build. I’ve managed them, I’ve leased them.

I’ve done every aspect of real estate you can do, and I’ve raised money for them all. I’ve done billions, at this point, about 16 billion dollars of deals in my lifetime. And now I’m transferring that acumen into the crypto world. But I’m doing it a little differently. A lot of the crypto companies have had problems with cash flow. So we’re going to hire Securitize and Deloitte to be our gatekeepers. Securitize to take cash flow in and pay out the bills, and Deloitte to oversee the process and eventually take us public.

So there’s not going to be an issue of where the cash flow goes. The cash flow goes to the token holders first. It pays the bills next, and I get distribution after that. Everyone does it backwards. They take the money in, they spend it. Things go awry and they can’t replace it. We’re doing it backwards. Money comes in, it gets accounted for, it gets paid out to the token holders, it pays the bills, then it goes to me. And that’s how it should be done.

Q Edmonds (06:17)

Yeah,

John Everest Thomas (06:18)

And then from

a management perspective, given I’ve managed all these assets, we’re keeping most of the management companies in place. Where you find difficulty is, you go to, Turkey or you go to, how do I know what the best management company for an office building is in Turkey? I don’t. So I’m keeping people in place to determine whether they’re the right groups for us to work with and then grow with them if they are competent or replace them if they’re not.

Q Edmonds (06:41)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (06:42)

We’re now starting to look at

regional asset managers. When I say regional, typically regional is two or three states. In this instance is two or three countries.

Q Edmonds (06:50)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (07:38)

So we’re trying to create pockets of regional managers. So if anyone out there is looking for a regional international position, you should give me a call. I’ll give my information at the end of the podcast. So we’re setting up our infrastructure now and then we’re tweaking our coin is totally based on AI. Yeah. So everything in my company is run like HR.

My management, my trading is done internationally based on these bots that’ll trade internationally. we have a marketing program. Typically you use, market people to trade up your token. I have 200 million bots, marketing bots, that are going to social media to push our token. Not the individual market maker, but bots, billions of all over the world.

Q Edmonds (08:22)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (08:23)

that’ll be more effective.

Q Edmonds (08:24)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (08:25)

Lastly, we’re starting to buy REITs. We’re not going to buy individual assets anymore. We’re too big. It’ll take us forever to grow our company. We’re going to buy REITs where their value, their stock value, has come down significantly, and we can pick up good value by liquidating portions of the portfolio we don’t want and keeping the pieces we do want vis-à-vis like the Empire State Building. Yeah. Where it’s so undervalued it’s not funny.

Q Edmonds (08:49)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (08:50)

That that’s our path.

point four.

Q Edmonds (08:52)

Yeah, I love it, man. Thank you, man. Thank you for walking me through the journey of what it is you do now. I kinda wanna peek into kind of the passion part of it, kind of like the journey of it, of kind of how you got to where you are and like where the passion comes from. So I’m gonna ask it like this.

John Everest Thomas (09:07)

Let me give you little sideways story. Yeah.

I was I was a cooperating witness with the FBI for 13 years. Yeah. And I got myself in some trouble. I cooperated against government officials primarily. And I ultimately get arrested and get put in jail. And I spent 39 months in prison. I lost everything I owned.

I was a billionaire at one point. I had zero when I walked out of jail. I had ten dollars on a debit card for the prison. And I had to start over and my second wife at the time was telling me I’d never be able to do real estate again. And I didn’t believe that. I spent my whole life doing real estate. I’m gonna continue to do real estate. And unbelievably, a hedge fund called T2 Capital backs me out of prison. And we do twenty three, twenty-four deals.

Q Edmonds (09:49)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (09:50)

I thought it was a joke at first. I get an email saying, we’re gonna back you with a hundred million dollars. And I said, that’s a cruel joke.

Q Edmonds (09:56)

Yeah,

John Everest Thomas (09:56)

And it turned out not to be a joke. Jeff Brown’s a really a gentleman and helped me get on my feet. And I owe him a debt of gratitude, so I’m giving him a little plug.

Q Edmonds (10:04)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (10:04)

But he’s got a multi-billion-dollar REIT, took a chance with me, and we did a number of deals together. And it worked out reasonably well.

Q Edmonds (10:11)

Yeah,

John Everest Thomas (10:11)

And that led me to the next partner and the next partner, and we grew from there.

Q Edmonds (10:15)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (10:15)

So that got me on my feet. But in prison, I learned to be humble. When you’re a billionaire, you come in with a different attitude. And I was a reasonably astute, tough guy. I was in my 50s going to prison. And I fortunately came out of a couple scuffles reasonably intact. And

Q Edmonds (10:31)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (10:32)

I told people, my options were,

Not good ones and I was working against government officials.

Q Edmonds (10:37)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (10:38)

Names you know. Name one name that was a president got indicted and they didn’t follow through.

Q Edmonds (10:45)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (10:46)

So I spent a lot of time doing that, but I learned how the inmate thinks. I learned how to be humble, how to be friends. I taught classes. I taught fifty different classes of prison. I taught them how to buy real estate, how to repair their credit, what economics was, how to build a business plan.

Q Edmonds (11:01)

Yes, sir.

John Everest Thomas (11:02)

And several of these people, actually more than that, there’s a hundred people on my Facebook today of guys that went from dealing drugs to being real estate developers all over the country.

Q Edmonds (11:11)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (11:12)

I’ve got guys

in Oregon, I’ve got guys in Pittsburgh, I’ve got guys in Chicago and probably 20 major cities. And they interact, they ask me questions, I sent them contracts, what to use, and they buy everything from houses to some guys are buying office buildings now and shopping centers. So

Q Edmonds (11:28)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (11:28)

They’ve matriculated and grown their portfolio. But

Q Edmonds (11:32)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (11:32)

It was a humbling experience and it really made my life passion not to be about money, but to be about how

How to be about helping people have a better life, not just myself. I’m on

Q Edmonds (11:42)

Absolutely.

John Everest Thomas (11:43)

A journey to build this company, but my journey is not about me or what I’m going to achieve. It’s about how many people can I help when I do that. It’s about, building a foundation for my children. I have a five-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter. Atlas is my five-year-old, and Gabrielle is my 19-year-old who’s in college. both great kids. I want to see them have a legacy.

Even their mothers. I mean, when we were together, there was good times and bad times. So I’m to focus on the good times and trying to help them as I matriculate beyond what we settled to do. So that’s my passion, my family, my helping people and growing my life holistically, not financially.

Q Edmonds (12:20)

I love I love that building your life holistically. I love that. One of my mentors say when you know who you are, you know what to do. So when you know your why, when you know why you’re building something out, you know how to act accordingly. And so I love that, man, that you’re building it holistically. I want you to help people because obviously you’ve been successful, you’ve built businesses. What’s one operational thing you’ve put into place, let’s say the last two years, that is really helping you be successful?

John Everest Thomas (13:25)

Well I’m a lot better listening to criticism this turn this time around than I was pre-prison. Pre-prison it was my way, the highway. Post-prison is, let’s have a quorum, let’s discuss things, let’s come up with a solution together, versus me always making every single decision. There are simple decisions you can make and you don’t need a lot of input on those. But then when they get a little more complex, you want to get, especially if they’re affecting other people.

You wanna get a quorum, you want to get everyone’s consensus. We have our meetings and we discuss, we throw things on the table, we pick a path. And we do it unanimously, not just me making the final decision.

Q Edmonds (14:00)

Yes sir. Yeah, I love that man. I absolutely love that. So what’s next for you, man? Like what would you say is the next real goal? What are you looking to solve for scale next?

John Everest Thomas (14:09)

Well, we’re trying to launch. I’m doing a fundraising for the last couple of million dollars of the company because not many people are buying or financing land right now. I have a hundred million dollars in land, but not a few hundred million dollars of deals. And the deals we did sign didn’t close because they couldn’t get structured financing. So we’re out in the market trying to raise some money and our next step is to launch in October. We’re looking at launch at the end of October, the beginning of November.

As the largest real-world asset. Just to explain, you have all these companies out there that say they have billions of dollars in assets. They don’t. There isn’t one of them that has more than a billion dollars. We’re the only group, from what I can see, after going through most of their books and records, that has more than a billion dollars in assets in total. So we’re looking to expand on that. And I’m looking to be one of the larger real estate. We’ll be the I think the largest real-world asset token.

But our goal is to chase Ethereum first and then Bitcoin. I was telling you earlier, Bitcoin, there’s an article that came out this weekend that Bitcoin goes to zero. Bitcoin goes to zero not because of what they wrote, but ETFs. Bitcoin goes to zero because we’re launching. People need to have something accountable and cash flowing when they launch a token. It can’t be a meme coin. It can’t be some like here’s a great idea. I’m gonna go sell things in Mexico and trade my currency like XRP.

That’s not a real way to make money.

Q Edmonds (15:28)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (15:28)

Because there’s no consistency. We have a few billion dollars of cash flow. That’s consistent. That

Q Edmonds (15:34)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (15:34)

creates a distribution. You buy our token, you get a quarterly distribution. Our return should be somewhere between 25 to 35 percent, including the annual dividend that we’re gonna give is 10% in tokens. Your cash dividends will come out quarterly at the end if you spend a year with us.

You get a 10% of it. And that’s what gets our percentages so high. And

Q Edmonds (15:55)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (15:55)

we have no mortgages. Our acquisitions are 100% crypto. So that six, seven, eight percent meter is not there anymore. So our percentages have increased.

Q Edmonds (16:05)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (16:06)

So our path is to be the largest crypto ever. That’s our path.

Q Edmonds (16:09)

Yeah. Mm Man, so I know I love it. I

John Everest Thomas (16:13)

We’re going to do two more tokens. Yeah. One’s going to be energy-based. We’re going to buy oil wells and gas deposits and refine them and sell them. Yeah. And the last piece is precious metals. We’re in the process of acquiring gold mines and platinum mines as we speak in Africa, where we’re going to start mining, refining, and storing precious metals. So those are our next two tokens.

Q Edmonds (16:33)

Man, I love it. Now you say I’m we, and so I would love for you to talk about relationships, right? So what’s your perspective when it comes to relationships within business and what are some relationships that have helped you be successful and maybe some relationships who you’ve helped be successful?

John Everest Thomas (16:49)

I think it’s just gonna be a weird answer because a lot of what I’ve done in this process has been done by me. And there hasn’t been relationships that have helped me. I’m 63, there isn’t a bunch of 20, 30, and 40 year old crypto guys rushing to sit by me and do crypto with me because I’m an old guy, So I am the I think I’m the oldest guy in crypto, to be honest. But my relationships were really the mentors that got me here.

That taught me how to buy real estate effectively, taught me how to manage it, that taught me how to lease it, that taught me how to develop it and do it carefully. And each person, ten years my senior, fifteen years my senior today, and some younger people as well that have a different way of doing things that I thought were effective.

Q Edmonds (17:29)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (17:31)

I’ve taken the best of all those conversations and used that to acquire our portfolio and continue to acquire portfolios as we go forward.

Q Edmonds (17:38)

Yeah.

John Everest Thomas (17:39)

That’s been an individual mentorship. Really no one has helped me. I I’ve funded most of the money, in fact all of the money for Blockstar and as we grow and what we do. I cultivated our staff. We have a small staff, only about fifteen people today. There’ll be about a hundred shortly after closing. So we are in the process of starting interview.

And we’re interviewing, interestingly, we’re gonna we’re gonna do satellite offices all over the world. It’s not it’s not a come to Chicago, it’s you’re in London, you’re in Dubai, you’re in various cities around the world doing functions in those areas. A very

Q Edmonds (18:15)

Yeah,

John Everest Thomas (18:17)

spread out spider-like a lot of octopus, a lot of tentacles around the world.

Q Edmonds (18:23)

Yeah, absolutely. Well listen, sir, man, I really appreciate the conversation today. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, sir?

John Everest Thomas (18:35)

Two ways. My email, jet@myblockstar.com. Or you can text me. Don’t call me, text me first so I know who’s calling me. 312-515-2333. I take most of my calls. But I need to text first to know who’s calling what it’s about. You can do either of those things and right now I’m fully accessible. And if you have something that makes sense, send me an email first so I can read through it and then we can see if we have a good synergy together.

Q Edmonds (19:03)

Absolutely. Well, listen, sir, let me say three things to you. One, reiterating, thank you for your time. Think time is our most precious commodity. Secondly, man, thank you for your story. Thank you for the gift of your integrity, your vulnerability, man, and authenticity. I always say when we tell our stories, it’s like planting seeds, right? And those seeds, they drop, they may grow root at any given time, but we don’t know. But I think you planted some real seeds today for people that’s listening. And lastly, man, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think, Mr. John.

And bringing that mindset to this platform. I appreciate you coming on, sir.

John Everest Thomas (19:33)

Thank you for having me.

Q Edmonds (19:34)

Absolutely. So listen, y’all heard Mr. John. His information is in the show notes. Please get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here. Cause I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people, just like John. So, sir, thank you again and everyone else. Y’all have a fantastic day.