Why Can’t Billionaire Art Collector Steven Cohen Sell His Art-Filled Manhattan Apartment?

Steven Cohen is having a hard time offloading a 9,000 square-foot apartment at One Beacon Court in midtown Manhattan. He’s put it back on the market at a sharply reduced $79 million—30 percent off the original asking price.

The price on the apartment atop the Bloomberg Tower, on East 58th Street, dropped from $115 million when he put it on the market in April 2013, to $98 million in December of that year, and later to $82 million before he took it off the market, according to the New York Post.

“Some feel the place might have some bad karma or be jinxed,” one insider told the Post, because Cohen’s company, SAC Capital, was nailed on charges of securities fraud that year. The company paid a whopping $1.8 billion fine to settle the charges.

Cohen originally purchased the apartment in 2005 for $24 million, according to the Observer.

Steven A. Cohen. Photo via:  The Observer .

Steven A. Cohen.
Photo: Courtesy of The Observer.

The former hedge fund manager, named in artnet News’ Top 200 Art Collectors, is reportedly worth over $11 billion and is said to spend a fifth of his income on art.

Cohen was revealed in June to have been the buyer of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture Pointing Man (1947), which fetched $141.3 million at Christie’s New York in May. He had bought the artist’s 1950 bronze Chariot for $101 million in fall 2014.

He’s also the owner of a Jackson Pollock drip painting and Damien Hirst’s 1991 sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which features a shark in formaldehyde. (His interest in animals also extends to pigs; he’s been known to have kept one as a pet at his Connecticut estate before sending it to a rescue facility in Florida.)


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