Here it was, the big reveal. After years of planning and wrangling, after more than $10 million spent on engineers, and lawyers, and architects; after all of the rumors, and headlines, and finger-pointing, the big presentation was ready to be made.
About 42 seconds after it started, things went off the rails. A “shitshow,” as multiple people would later describe to Vanity Fair the two-and-a-half-hour meeting on the morning of July 29th.
The setting was the Cotillion Ballroom, the chandeliered 4,000-square-foot event space at New York’s iconic Pierre Hotel, the site of Al Pacino’s blind tango in Scent of a Woman, where the ceilings are 19 feet high, the curtains are golden, and the windows offer views of Central Park’s southeast corner. Seated at round tables were 40 or so of the people with enough disposable income to call the Pierre home, or at least a home: investor Austin Hearst; Tory Burch, the fashion powerhouse; and Lois Chiles, the 1970s-era movie star and model. Joining remotely was Michael Eisner, the former Disney CEO, who last year spent $4.3 million to buy a second apartment there and, with it, even more shares in the co-op that owns the Pierre.
In came representatives from the Khashoggi Holding Company out of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and from the Dorchester Collection, the luxury hotel management firm owned by the Sultan of Brunei. Their proposition was straightforward. Khashoggi wanted to buy the Pierre—the nearly 200-room hotel, and all of the apartments, too—for $2 billion in cash, less expenses. It was an enormous haul, even for a neighborhood this tony. But it meant that everyone would have to move out, if the residents with two-thirds of the co-op’s shares accepted the offer. Neighbors would be voting, in effect, to force their fellow neighbors from their apartments.
It’d be in their best interests, the Dorchester and Khashoggi reps said. The Pierre was a gem, but a tarnished one after 96 summers and thousands of guests. The Pierre didn’t have many of the amenities that come standard these days in a five-star hotel. The façade was already undergoing a $22 million overhaul, and there were deeper, systemic problems to solve. The CEO of the company managing the Pierre publicly complained it was something of a money pit. All of that would change after Khashoggi bought the place, the presenters promised. Dorchester would invest more than $1 billion into the Pierre, giving the landmark building a grand new entrance on 61st Street, a pool in the basement, and structural renovations throughout. When it was all done, the residents would be first in line to buy apartments at the all-new, all-modern, Dorchester-managed Pierre, ready to last another century.
The response in the Cotillion room was instant and not particularly friendly. Some residents had moved in not long ago. Others had spent millions remodeling their apartments. The Pierre’s co-op shareholders were later informed by their lawyers that they were exempt from the city’s controversial pied-à-terre tax, thanks to an extremely specific and previously unreported legal loophole; the exemption might not be around years from now, providing another possible reason to stay. “How are we going to enjoy all the perks of this wonderfully renewed building when we’re forced to sell at a price you determine, and we have to buy reconfigured apartments, not our own, at market prices?” asked Tina Beriro, the philanthropist and long-time resident, in a recording of the meeting reviewed by Vanity Fair. Like many of the residents, Beriro, at 85, had lived through much of the hotel's storied history. “Many of us are going to be dead by the time you finish.”
Christopher Cowdray, Dorchester’s white-haired, Zimbabwe-born president, didn’t have an answer. Nor did he provide much of a response when asked about what would happen to the more than 400 people who work at the hotel. “In this case, we are still in discussion at the moment,” Cowdray said, to audible groans.
“Many employees have worked here 30 and 40 years and are just about to hit retirement,” Burch pointed out, per the recording. “I have people in the elevator crying that they feel like their job is on the line every five minutes.”
The questions kept coming. For years, shareholders had begged—and even sued—to find out more about the sale. But the long-promised detailed plans for the Pierre’s purchase were still weeks away, adding to the tension in the Cotillion Room. (One source, very much in favor of a sale, later called the decision to make an elaborate presentation to the shareholders without those specifics “idiotic.”)
“Look, ladies and gentlemen, I've been on the board of the Hearst Corporation for over 25 years. Sat on the boards of many corporations, for profit and non for profit. I have never seen anything like this,” Hearst said, his voice cracking. “This is a serious problem that you have presented to the shareholders, and you guys have done a miserable fucking job.”
One of the many lawyers in the room interrupted him, and they started going at it. Cowdray and the other presenters were escorted out. At one point, the wife of Michael Stern, the 88-year-old chair of the co-op’s board, tried to offer his resignation on his behalf (which he then turned down). Even by the famously hostile standards of New York City’s high-end co-ops, this was nasty.
Ironically, the co-op’s biggest shareholder—the resident with the most at stake in the sale, financially—didn’t show up. Howard Lutnick was busy in the Oval Office that day with President Trump, in his role as US Commerce Secretary.
Lutnick had bought the Pierre’s 16-room penthouse, its largest apartment, in 2017 for $44 million. If the purchase of the Pierre were to go through, Lutnick could get as much as $100 million for the penthouse, even as his neighbors were forced to sell and hundreds of hotel staffers’ jobs were put in jeopardy. Newmark Group—the real estate services firm hired by the Pierre’s board and controlled by Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage house previously run by Lutnick—could earn tens of millions more in commissions, The New York Times reported.
Newmark may have a reputation for shepherding big-ticket sales to completion. But in a letter to the Pierre’s board last year, Beriro called the hiring of the Lutnick-linked firm “a blatant conflict of interest,” an allegation sources close to Lutnick and the board deny. One Pierre resident told me that Lutnick’s involvement is symbolic of a “culture of corruption” that extends from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to the edges of Central Park in New York. Others implied it was part of a different pattern: the purchase of more and more of America's most valuable assets by companies and sovereign wealth funds from the Persian Gulf's petrostates, at times orchestrated by those in and around the second Trump administration. Those shareholders wondered whether Lutnick had personally worked behind the scenes to maneuver the Khashoggi group into place to buy the Pierre, and that speculation spilled out into the pages of the New York Times.
A source close to Lutnick notes that he formally cut ties with Newmark in early 2025 and adds that, since his move to government, Lutnick’s only involvement in the Pierre sales process has been to respond to media reports like this one. A spokesperson for Sabre Park Avenue LLC, Khashoggi’s American holding company, told Vanity Fair in a statement that “any insinuation or implication that the proposal, the transaction or the parties involved engaged in improper or undisclosed conduct is categorically false.”
I spoke to more than 15 sources and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents related to the Pierre deal, including previously unreported text messages between Lutnick and Khashoggi and a corporate intelligence dossier dropped in my mailbox.
Turns out, the shareholders were right to wonder about Lutnick's role.
The Pierre for decades was synonymous with New York glamour. At the height of their star power Audrey Hepburn stayed at the hotel’s suites and Elizabeth Taylor kept an apartment there. The restaurant's original menu was created by Escoffier. Barbara Walters had a reception for her final wedding at the Pierre (about 10 years after she and my grandfather, the Broadway producer Lee Guber, officially split.) Yves Saint Laurent owned a two-bedroom on the 38th floor, which was later bought by Valentino cofounder Giancarlo Giammetti, who then sold it to former Bottega Veneta creative director Tomas Maier.
Art Garfunkel still lives down the hall from Maier, and Paul Simon’s ex-wife is also in the building. Larry Ellison now owns Shari Redstone’s pair of apartments on the 25th floor. Kathy Hilton and Rocky producer Irwin Winkler are shareholders, as are a number of billionaires from overseas who obscure their identities through LLCs.
And yet, for fifteen years or more, there’s been a growing sense that the Pierre’s best days are behind it. A 2010 Wall Street Journal article mentions how the Pierre “lost its glory.” A 2016 New York Post story describes “a renovation project that has dragged on more than a year past its deadline.” By the time Lutnick swooped in to buy the penthouse in 2017, he did so at an $81 million discount off of its original asking price.
Since then, age has continued to take its toll. Scaffolding has surrounded the hotel since at least 2018, according to city records. Exit a multi-million dollar apartment with a spectacular view of the park and you’re liable to find worn carpets, or hallways with the faint odor of mold. Rooms at the Pierre Hotel tend to cost much less than they do at the Plaza or the Ritz-Carlton, just around the corner. And while New York housing prices have gone up, up, up just about everywhere else, the rates per square foot for co-ops in this part of Manhattan have steadily declined, according to a Douglas Elliman analysis.
Over time, a group of shareholders became particularly vexed with Taj Hotels, which had managed the property since 2005. There were complaints of broken elevators, empty concierge desks, and “slipshod maintenance.” Maier, in an October 2023 co-op wide email, lamented that Taj delayed long-planned renovations to his 38th floor apartment for months, citing high hotel occupancy. (A Taj spokesperson said in a statement those concerns “reflected a specific point in time rather than the overall trajectory of the property.”)
What Maier may not have known—and what the residents I spoke to were unaware of—was that the Pierre's board had already explored the possibility of replacing Taj. The only way to do that, to break the contract with Taj, was to sell the Pierre. In April of 2023, the board drafted a memorandum of understanding with the Maybourne Hotel Group, which is primarily owned by members of the Qatari royal family. Maybourne would buy the hotel portion of the Pierre and pour hundreds of millions of dollars into refurbishing the building. “But there was a condition,” a source familiar with the matter tells me. “Everybody had to move out for two years,” the source adds. “You cannot renovate a 100-year-old building with people living in it, right?”
The deal was ultimately rejected and the board decided, in this source’s words, to hire a firm that could broker a “more acceptable” sale. A “transaction committee,” including Lutnick, then-Paramount owner Shari Redstone, Eisner, and Joanna Carson, a former wife of the late-night legend, was formed to “handle negotiations related to the hotel operator,” according to a letter reviewed by Vanity Fair. After a “beauty contest with three groups,” in the fall of 2023 the real estate consultancy Newmark was picked. Lutnick was still chairman of Newmark’s board at that time, though two sources say he had no role in the decision. (The board, through its attorney, declined to comment for this story. But a Newmark spokesperson says its “unanimous” selection was “based on the firm’s experience advising on some of New York City’s most complex and high-profile real estate transactions.”)
From there, “Newmark went out to find another buyer,” the first source adds. Their fee at the time: 50,000-per-month, to be counted against any future commissions in the event of a sale. The board retained the high profile law firm Fried Frank, which had represented Lutnick's companies before, to assist Newmark in its search.
Lutnick's financial firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, owned a controlling stake in Newmark. That gave Lutnick an incentive to see the Pierre sold. He had another: according to the source connected to Lutnick, his 12,000 square-foot penthouse triplex had been uninhabitable since 2021, when a storm had caused catastrophic damage. For a while, on the advice of his insurer, he withheld about $500,000 in maintenance payments, before eventually paying. But Lutnick concluded, according to the source close to him, that major repairs wouldn’t make sense if they weren’t accompanied by a larger round of structural renovations to the building. In the meantime, he installed a basketball court in the apartment to make some use of the place.
“The process did not begin as an effort to acquire the entire building,” a Newmark spokesperson tells Vanity Fair. The initial discussions all focused on “potential hotel transactions and operating structures that would preserve the cooperative ownership framework.” In other words: Some Pierre residents might be encouraged to sell, but not necessarily everyone.
Several shareholders tell me they had no idea that a possible sale of any kind was in the works. As far as they knew, Newmark was trying to help renovate the building, not sell it off. Nor did they know Lutnick was personally trying to wrangle potential buyers for the Pierre.
On Wednesday, May 8, 2024, Lutnick’s private jet took off from Teterboro, New Jersey, outside of New York. Lutnick was on his way to Paris to meet with the Arnault family who, as part of their dominion over LVMH, run the Cheval Blanc hotel group. The source close to Lutnick mentions he had long admired the hotels, and pitched the idea of the Pierre joining the group.
Lutnick’s first stop, however, was in London. After his plane landed, he went to the Dorchester Collection’s eponymous hotel in Mayfair. Shortly after 9:00am on Thursday, Lutnick gathered with Cowdray, the Dorchester president, and Motasem Khashoggi, chairman and principal owner of the Khashoggi Holding Company. From the outside, it seemed like an unlikely trio. The Khashoggi family was mainly famous for its wealth, but that was decades ago, back when Adnan, Motasem’s relative, was one of the world’s leading arms dealers. Motasem is recognized internationally today not only as a captain of Saudi industry, but also as the primary legal representative for the Khashoggi family following the brutal 2018 murder of his journalist cousin, Jamal, by the Saudi state.
The source close to Lutnick says he and Khashoggi “met and spoke about a variety of different things” in London, “including: wouldn’t it be cool if the Pierre was a Dorchester Collection hotel.”
Eight days after the London meeting, according to screenshots of WhatsApp messages reviewed by Vanity Fair, Khashoggi texted Lutnick to say that “Brunie”—Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, who owns the Dorchester Collection—had “directly” asked him to explore a deal for the Pierre.
Khashoggi then asked Lutnick if he could give one of his kids a summer internship, and provided his phone number. (Vanity Fair verified that number, as well as the ones used by Lutnick and the elder Khashoggi in the chats.) Lutnick quickly agreed to the father’s request. “We would be delighted to have your son join us,” he wrote. “I’m excited to invest in and build exciting companies together.” The Saudi businessman also wanted to invest with Lutnick, specifically in the special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, which were a Cantor Fitzgerald specialty. “As for the spacs,” Khashoggi texted, “I’m with you.” (A source familiar with Khashoggi’s thinking says he never consummated any SPAC deal with Lutnick or with Cantor Fitzgerald.)
A week later, Khashoggi sent the chat his greetings “from rainy Frankfurt,” along with a draft letter of intent to the Pierre's board, to begin due diligence for a “potential acquisition of The Pierre Hotel” and a plan to buy up “the remaining residential units.”
Lutnick wrote back on Memorial Day. “I am flying to Europe this evening, Italy and France,” he texted. “I’ve made a few modifications to the letter of intent.” Promise a “complete renovation of the guest rooms, public areas, dining facilities, and amenities,” Lutnick suggested. And be sure to include target prices, both per room and for the whole thing.
Lutnick's firm, Newmark, was supposed to be representing the sellers in this transaction. Yet here Lutnick was coaching potential buyers, in effect putting himself on both sides of the deal. It wasn't a cardinal sin in the take-no-prisoners worlds of New York City real estate or MAGA politics, but it wasn’t strictly kosher either.
According to the Times, several shareholders got their “first clue that something was afoot” in October 2024, five months after Lutnick’s meeting with Cowdray and Khashoggi when the co-op board wrote a letter to residents saying that Newmark could determine the building’s “ultimate transition.”
Lutnick was confirmed as Commerce Secretary in February of 2025; he stepped down from his Newmark chairmanship then and transferred his Cantor Fitzgerald assets to his sons. Lutnick was still listed as a member of the Pierre’s “transaction committee” in March, when the board confirmed in a letter that Newmark was in negotiation with an unnamed “operator” that would “offer” to buy up apartments if those talks worked out. But not to worry, the board added: “No owner would be required to sell their unit or move to another one.”
Residents scrambled to find out more. All they got back were rumors and whispers. One shareholder’s representative says he heard the chatter, but “blew it off,” thinking that nervous residents were being “dramatic.” According to this representative, the attorneys at Holland & Knight, which had represented the Pierre for years, seemed to be in the dark, as well. “You can’t sell a co-op. Never happening here,” one of those lawyers told the representative, in this source’s recounting. (Holland & Knight declined to comment for this story.)
In June 2025, the New York Post reported that the Sultan of Brunei was in talks to buy the Pierre, along with Essam Khashoggi, an older relative of Motasem’s. The board, chaired by 87-year-old Michael Stern, didn’t provide many specifics in a July Zoom with shareholders, but emphasized that a sale was in their best interests, according to multiple published accounts. Two months later, according to court filings, four co-op board members—the investor John A. Levin, former Coca-Cola CEO Douglas Daft, the lawyer and movie producer David G. Johnson, and former KB Home chief executive Bruce Karatz—approved a nonbinding term sheet to sell the Pierre.
On September 16, at a gathering in the Cotillion Ballroom, Fried Frank lawyers broke the news to shareholders. Khashoggi Holdings was the buyer, and the Sultan’s Dorchester Collection would be the hotel’s managers. The price was astronomical, they said, and would guarantee residents “at least three times the market value” for their apartments, Town & Country reported. But the transaction was different from the one discussed back in March. It was not just for the hotel and selected apartments. It was for the whole building, which meant the residents had to leave. Despite the board's earlier reassurances that people could stay in their apartments, in this deal, the co-op owners had to vacate within 12 months. All of them.
An escrow account of $10 million, funded by the shareholders, would be "used for eviction proceedings” for any residents who refused to leave, according to a slideshow presentation delivered by the lawyers that day. And on that happy note, residents were encouraged to open the personalized envelopes that had been given to them at the door, one for each shareholder. Inside were estimates of how much they might get from a sale, “Newmark fee not included.”
One person who was there said it reminded him of a “game show,” and kind of an insulting one to the ultra-rich in the room, for whom a few million dollars either way wouldn’t matter all that much. What was particularly galling, according to sources at the meeting, was the plan for the building’s union employees. Many of them, they said, were like family—to each other, and to the residents. The staff would have to begin to go even sooner than the shareholders; Fried Frank, in its presentation, estimated between $20 and $24 million in severance and $75 million in union termination. And before Khashoggi would be asked to put down a penny for the Pierre, “Fried Frank will engage with the Hotel Gaming and Trades Union to negotiate terms for the termination of the Union Contract.”
Employees at the Pierre tend to talk about their tenures at the hotel in decades. "I only have 12 years here," one staffer tells me, without irony. Some workers have jobs that are so old-school they’re not really jobs anywhere else: elevator drivers, telephone switchboard operators. Housekeeping staff wear black-and-white outfits that wouldn't have been out of place in Audrey Hepburn's day. “I’m very used to it,” this employee says, referring to the atmosphere at the Pierre. She means that as a positive.
Like so many Pierre staffers, she’s an immigrant. A 2021 New Yorker profile counted “forty-nine languages” spoken by the staff, “including Cantonese, Creole, Danish, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Tamil, Tibetan, and Twi.” I spoke with employees who are originally from four different continents.
One was a man I’ll call Ray, who put in more than a quarter-century at the Pierre, and he would very much like to keep going, even if the severance deal written into his union contract is pretty sweet; Ray figures he could live off of it for a year. But then what? He’s still got kids in school. And at the other hotels in town, the competition for open positions is really intense, the promotions mostly from within. “The chances of getting hired [in his particular department] is almost zero,” Ray tells me. “So I wouldn't want to get a buyout. I don’t want the hotel to be closed.” Just in case, he’s taken a part-time gig elsewhere.
“We’re not like these millionaires, billionaires, the Howard Lutnicks, the Tory Burches,” says another Pierre employee. “Just working people, trying to protect their families.”
The rumors about a sale have been around long enough, and loud enough, that they’ve rattled the staffers I spoke to. According to one source with direct knowledge of the matter, representatives from a prospective buyer and the union have already talked about the possibility of sizing down in the food and beverage positions. Even a renovation could upend staffers’ lives: the remodeling at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel lasted eight years; more than 1,100 union workers were bought out of their contracts. “Most of us, we worry,” a housekeeper tells me.
People move to the Pierre, in part, because of the staff. More than a few residents come to be taken care of, to be treated like five-star hotel guests in their own (second, or third) homes. Room service is available from 6:45am to 10:45pm. The concierge's desk is there to help with finding dinner reservations or a personal shopper. Housekeeping comes in seven days a week; the apartments I saw were immaculate in every way, part of the reason why maintenance costs can run tens of thousands of dollars per month. (“I haven’t made a bed since I was a kid,” says one long-term resident.)
My mom for years talked about retiring to a place like this, not that she could’ve afforded it. For older people who can, it’s a way to have the help they need while still living on their own. You see a lot of women who’ve lost or split up with their rich husbands: Beriro, the philanthropist; Gale Hayman, the cofounder of Giorgio’s of Beverly Hills; Princess Firyal of Jordan; Mimi Sternlicht, the social entrepreneur; Julie Opperman, the prolific author, whose late husband started the Westlaw legal research service.
You could, perhaps, confuse these women for pushovers, one Belle Vivier pump away from assisted living. At last month’s meeting, Dorchester and Khashoggi brought gifts for the shareholders: bright-red teddy bears. “For little old ladies to snuggle up to in their beds,” one resident laughs.
That was an error. (“I’ve never been so insulted,” the resident says.) These ladies were long past cuddly tchotchkes. Over time, several residents, most of them women and most of them over 65, had formed a loose coalition to learn what they could about the deal for the Pierre, and figure ways to stop it. “It was a handful of older women,” another resident adds, “banging on the pipes, saying, ‘Listen up, people!’”
Some of them, at least at first, were open to the idea of a sale; they had other homes, after all. But the cloak of secrecy around the deal infuriated them. So in the days leading up to the contentious reveal of the Khashoggi proposal last September, Chiles and Beriro, and others banded together with Hearst and Burch—relative youngsters—and lawyered up. “We became an informal little group: Tory and a bunch of widows,” one source with direct knowledge of the matter says, tongue a bit in cheek. Burch, who wasn't known for being particularly close with her neighbors before, emerged as vocal leader—and a lightning rod for deal proponents.
In November 2025, the group sued the board to force them to produce more information about the sale, with Burch’s LLC as the lead plaintiff: how much the board really knew about the buyer; how much money they had spent pursuing a deal with him; which third parties might benefit from it. Shortly after, Fried Frank lawyer Michael Keats criticized Burch in a letter to her attorney: “She might want to consider that her tactics might be counterproductive to her cause, as this comes across as completely unhinged.” On at least one occasion, according to a source familiar with the matter, a board member approached Burch to see if she might want to keep her apartment, even while Khashoggi bought everyone else's. Burch refused.
The suit was quickly dismissed when the board agreed to release some of the information, accessible in a “data room” at Fried Frank’s offices, a source recounts. Few residents visited, though; a source says the data room was too technically complex for some of the older residents. And besides, you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get in.
A number of shareholders, meanwhile, had found other sources of information. Some of them enlisted, in the resident’s words, “spies” to ferret out what the sale truly entailed. In March of 2026, some shareholders, independently of the board, met with Taj CEO Puneet Chhatwal. People both for and against the deal pressed shareholders for how they were going to vote, like Capitol Hill whips.
In late July, a 41-page corporate intelligence dossier was delivered to my home in an unmarked envelope. Who commissioned it is unclear; the cover page is missing, and the report is undated. But it provides a tough assessment of Khashoggi’s corporate expertise.
According to the report, none of Khashoggi Holdings’ “eight subsidiaries and associated companies,” operate in the “hospitality sector, and none appear to have any international presence or cross-border real estate capability.” (That appears to match the information on Khashoggi Holding’s website, which presents a diversified portfolio across the global finance, health care, legal advisory, and industrial engineering industries but only mentions hospitality as part of corporate history or as a component of other investments.) The company’s “most prominent publicly reported investments to date,” it adds, are an approximately $37 million “pharmaceutical investment in Aleppo [Syria] and a cement factory partnership.” Other deals publicly linked to the company and to Motasem Khashoggi are substantial, but of a similar size. In recent years and especially in the second Trump era, money from the Persian Gulf has backed an attempt to merge two of America’s iconic movie studios, completed a leveraged buyout of one of its biggest videogame makers, and some of New York’s most prized office towers. Khashoggi’s deals, on the other hand, “are orders of magnitude smaller than the proposed Pierre Hotel acquisition,” the report notes. (A spokesperson for Khashoggi’s American holding company insists their offer is a “credible, fully equity-financed” one.)
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that during the July 2026 meeting in the Cotillion Ballroom, the Khashoggi and Dorchester representatives received question after question about how Motasem Khashoggi could possibly have the resources to buy the Pierre.
“You mentioned the Khashoggi LLC is the buyer, but who is putting up the money behind the Khashoggi hedge fund?” one shareholder asked.
“There is no hedge fund. This is Mr. Khashoggi. This will be funded in all cash, and it is only him,” was the answer. (Proponents of the sale have promised to share proof that the funds are available and ready to use in the purchase. “The proposal,” the Khashoggi spokesman later said, “should be evaluated on its merits, including, financing certainty, substantial value for shareholders and a credible long-term plan to preserve and restore The Pierre.”)
On other topics, the shareholders at the Cotillion seemed better briefed than the presenters. Not long after Cowdray, the Dorchester president, got up to present, Opperman spoke up. She noted how “extraordinary it is for you to be here today,” especially since “the Dorchester group has its fourth CEO in three years, that you have not turned a profit since 2018, and that you are three years behind in your London hotel.”
A Fried Frank lawyer jumped in to ask, “Why don’t we let the presenters finish?” In a later exchange, Cowdray conceded that much of Opperman’s characterization was on target, if explainable.
The teddy bears, the stumbling answers, the whole morning in the Cotillion was a mess. Opponents of the sale were triumphant. “Reminds me of all the doofuses who underestimated me. As soon as you push back, they fold like a cheap lawn chair,” one resident tells me over lunch not far from the Pierre, shortly before grabbing my utensils to cut my food.
Michael Eisner's terrace door was open on the night of February 8th, Superbowl Sunday, when the temperature was approximately 3°F. That open door allowed the cold air to rush in. It froze the water lines behind one of the closet walls. The pipes burst. Water went everywhere, and not just in apartment 1815. Forty-nine guest rooms and suites were knocked out of service. Five other apartments at the Pierre were damaged.
In an incident report signed by Taj Hotels’ general manager for the Pierre and distributed building-wide, Taj blamed the whole thing on Eisner, for “fail[ing] to maintain [the] unit in safe condition.” Eisner, in a letter of his own, shot back: “Stated simply, the Taj memorandum is full of lies.” He speculated that the workers renovating the building’s facade—workers supervised by Taj—used apartment 1815 and its terrace to get to the scaffolding nearby. A photograph taken by a Taj employee from inside Eisner’s apartment shows snow starting to accumulate, weeks before Superbowl Sunday.
Everyone acknowledges that the Pierre is deteriorating. The question is how quickly. A source says Eisner’s incident wasn’t the only time a major pipe burst in the Pierre during that February cold spell. Taj says there was only “one significant pipe burst incident at The Pierre during the February 2026 extreme cold-weather event.” Some long-time residents and a Taj manager say that’s no different from what’s happened in other old Manhattan buildings—including two just down the street. Experts hired by Dorchester see evidence of a structure in steep decline.
“All the pipework looks like it’s eroding,” one of those experts said in a prerecorded video screened in the Cotillion room, adding he and his team of 60 found “water entering through multiple pathways affecting apartments, …systems, internal components, structural elements, and building infrastructure.” The Dorchester team came just short of implying that the Pierre was some sort of deathtrap. God forbid there’s a fire, because it could take “an able-bodied person somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes” to get out of the building from an upper floor, in the words of one representative. Then he quickly added that the Pierre was up to code, “I’m not saying it’s not safe. I’m just saying that it could be better and it could be a lot nicer.”
To which Beriro joked, “I think we should all put down our pens and leave the building now.” (A Taj representative rejected Dorchester’s safety analysis, and noted that the Pierre recently installed a “state-of-the-art fire alarm system.”)
Meanwhile, Taj and the Pierre’s co-op board increasingly have been at one another’s throats. In an interview with a local YouTuber, Chhatwal, Taj’s CEO confirmed having lost more than $100 million on the property, noting the challenges involved in working with a co-op that is governed by a board and whose shareholders usually don’t agree among themselves. A source familiar with the matter acknowledges that the board has turned down some smaller Taj projects lately, mostly carpets and furniture. The co-op board just took out a new, $75 million mortgage, according to city records.
The speculation and the finger-pointing has helped split neighbor from neighbor as the possibility of a sale has grown closer and residents have taken sides. “They run the hotel, in my opinion, very badly,” Eisner said of Taj in that July Cotillion room meeting, adding that he “would not stay at this hotel” with them in charge.
“Then sell your apartment. If you're not happy here, leave,” Burch snapped, according to the same recording of the meeting. “You don’t have to force everyone else and fire 700 employees in the process.”
“This is not your home,” Burch said a moment later to a second shareholder, who tried to take Eisner's side. The decay, the imperfections, they can be a hassle, for sure. But they’re also part of the throwback charm, a necessary side-effect to living in some place with so much history. “I don’t need a shiny new hotel,” she added. “People actually love this place, as shabby as it may be.”
Despite the rancor, with nearly a decade left on Taj’s contract, the board and the Indian hotel operators have been trying to negotiate a way forward. Or at least a competitive offer to Khashoggi’s. After 10 months of talks, they finally came to what they thought was an agreement. Two agreements, actually: one to buy the hotel portion of the Pierre; the other to extend Taj’s lease, in exchange for a commitment to invest almost $400 million into the building. The idea was to give both options to shareholders, shortly after the Khashoggi presentation.
Then suddenly, with less than a week to go before the Cotillion room meeting, Taj withdrew. The bosses in Mumbai voted to not approve the transactions they had been negotiating. To the co-op board, to the proponents of the sale, it was affirmation of what they’ve thought all along: that it’s time to move on.
A letter from Chhatwal floating the idea of a $300 million investment was rejected out of hand by the co-op board. The heads of the board wrote to shareholders the next day: it’s Khashoggi or the status quo, no other choices.
“Do you want to live here or do you not? Let’s not overcomplicate it,” Burch told the Cotillion room. “It’s going to be down to two options. You either stay with Taj. Or you leave, and then it becomes some fancy hotel that we have nothing to do with.”
The final vote could come as early as October.
The staffers at the hotel remain in limbo, waiting on Lutnick and the other residents to make up their minds. A source close to the Trump official claims he’s undecided how he’ll vote, despite all of his efforts to sell the Pierre, and despite the potential $100 million windfall he might receive. For now, the billionaire’s penthouse remains vacant, and his basketball court too.
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