Fortress REIT

1998–2010

Fortress Investment Group LLC was founded as a private equity firm in 1998 by Wesley R. Edens, a former partner at BlackRock; Rob Kauffman, a managing director at UBS; and Randal A. Nardone, also a managing director at UBS. Fortress quickly expanded into hedge funds, real estate-related investments and debt securities, run by Michael Novogratz and Pete Briger, both former partners at Goldman Sachs.Fortress's investments grew rapidly, with its private equity funds netting 39.7% between 1999 and 2006. When Fortress launched on the NYSE on February 9, 2007 with Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers underwriting the IPO, it was the first large private equity firm in the United States to be traded publicly. In the wake of the economic downturn of 2008, Forbes included Wesley Edens among its "biggest billionaire losers of 2008", noting that Edens had "watched his fortune dwindle as investor redemption soared at the company's flagship fund". Fortress and its principals were subsequently featured in an April 2009 Vanity Fair article on the adverse economic conditions facing hedge funds.

2010–present

In 2014, Fortress was named "Hedge Fund Manager of the Year" by Institutional Investor and "Management Firm of the Year" by HFMWeek. Fortress has previously been recognized by Institutional Investor as “Discretionary Macro-Focused Hedge Fund of the Year” for 2012, and “Credit-Focused Fund of the Year” for both 2011 and 2010. In Autumn 2014, Fortress hired Jeff Feig, formerly the Global Head of Foreign Exchange at Citigroup to join Novogratz as co-CIO of the Fortress Macro Fund. However, as of October 13, 2015, the company announced that the $2.3 billion Macro Fund was to close down and distribute its assets to investors. This development came after Feig stepped down as co-CIO of the fund in July 2015. According to the firm, Novogratz, the remaining CIO, was expected to retire from the firm by the end of 2015. As of June 30, 2016, Fortress Investment Group had four core businesses totaling approximately $70.2 billion of assets under management: private equity, credit, liquid markets and traditional asset management .On February 14, 2017, SoftBank Group agreed that in the future it would buy Fortress Investment Group LLC for $3.3 billion. The SoftBank acquisition was completed in the last week of December, for $3.3 billion to SoftBank Group Corp.In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault scandal, in late October 2017, it was reported that Fortress Investment Group was in talks to provide a loan to Weinstein Co. In December 2017, Fortress Investment Group loaned $100 million to the medical startup Theranos. Theranos had reportedly been on the verge of bankruptcy, with the loan to keep them solvent through 2018. At the time, Fortress also had "underdog" bets in a private passenger rail line in Florida. By January 3, 2018, however, the company had divested itself of Florida East Coast Railway and Logan Circle Partners. It remained the parent company of the Brightline passenger rail in Florida, however, which is the only privately owned and operated passenger railroad in the United States. Fortress Investment Group is also investing in the construction of Brightline West, a high speed rail route between Las Vegas and Southern California. The route is being advertised as “A Brightline Company.” On January 3, 2018, it was reported that Fortress was nearing a deal to sell its stake on OneMain to Apollo Global Management. The agreement was announced on January 5, with Varde Partners also taking part in the purchase.In 2020, Fortress Investment increased its bid for Japanese company Unizo to roughly $1.6 billion.