Billionaire developer and founder of Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage), the mortgage company. He also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team.
In 2007, with his company's lease expiring and the business growing, Gilbert decided to move Quicken Loans' suburban headquarters into downtown Detroit. He wanted to keep young people in Michigan rather than losing them to cities like Chicago; young workers, he found, did not want to work in suburbs. Over the following years he acquired approximately 130 properties in the city through his development company, Bedrock—many of them derelict, bought defensively during the financial crisis and Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy. By 2015 his firm was operating 500 CCTV cameras and running its own security teams downtown.
His flagship project, the new Hudson's building on Woodward Avenue, was completed on October 9th 2025. The 681-foot (207-metre) skyscraper stands on the site of the original Hudson's department store—once the second-largest in America after Macy's in New York—which closed in early 1983 and was demolished in 1998, the tallest building ever to have been blown up at the time. The new building contains offices, apartments, a hotel and a conference centre; General Motors is moving its headquarters there from the Renaissance Centre, the iconic collection of skyscrapers on the Detroit river that Gilbert intends to buy and renovate next.
Woodward Avenue now features expensive fashion retailers, and historic buildings such as the Book Tower have been restored. City tax breaks introduced by Mayor Mike Duggan, who served for 11 years, helped make the regeneration financially viable. Gilbert also helped pay for the Q-Line tram, hoping it might attract federal investment in public transport. Much office space in downtown Detroit remains empty, however, and some new condos are struggling to sell.
Gilbert has said he intends to give away almost all of his money before he dies, mostly to projects in the Detroit and Cleveland region. He runs a scheme helping homeowners escape property-tax arrears.
The man gave a shrug which indicated that, although the world did indeed have many problems, this was one of them that was not his.