The Goldman Family's Billion-Dollar Manhattan Real-Estate Feud

One of New York City's most storied real-estate dynasties is tearing itself apart in courtrooms and conference rooms, with Jane Goldman — America's only female billionaire running a real-estate empire — locked in a bitter multigenerational war with her nephew Steven Gurney-Goldman over the future of a company worth billions.

The business traces back to Sol Goldman, a scrappy Brooklyn grocer's son who at his peak owned 1,900 New York City properties, including a stake in the Chrysler Building, and was widely considered the city's largest private landlord when he died in 1987. Sol built his fortune on a simple philosophy: don't sell, don't subordinate, don't use financing. His daughter Jane absorbed those lessons through years of daily contact — working in his office seven days a week, having dinner with him every night — and took over the company at 32 when Sol died. Today, Solil Management holds ground leases beneath some of Manhattan's most prestigious addresses, including the Gramercy Park Hotel, the Cartier Building on Fifth Avenue, and the Mark Hotel. Many of those ground leases run 99 years.

Jane is described by associates as brilliant, mercurial, and almost pathologically patient in negotiations — a dealmaker who extracts maximum value because she genuinely doesn't need to close. Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development, says he has paid more than expected on virtually every deal he's done with her. Tyler Morse paid $50 million in 2023 for a 99-year lease on the land beneath the Gramercy Park Hotel after Jane foreclosed on the prior operator. She lives in a $25.5 million Upper East Side townhouse and owns homes in the Hamptons and on Palm Beach's Billionaires' Row.

Steven, Allan Goldman's only son and a Vanderbilt and Wharton graduate, worked at Solil from 2013 to 2020. He claims he modernized operations, implemented online rent payment, cleared thousands of housing violations, and helped negotiate leases. Jane's camp says he accomplished nothing of note. The gulf between them widened catastrophically after Allan died in January 2022 in Saint Petersburg's City Hospital No. 40 — alone, unable to stand, walk, or feed himself — after being brought to Russia by a longtime companion named Natalia Vostrikova, ostensibly for experimental stem-cell therapy. Steven sued Vostrikova and later settled; Jane blamed Steven for failing to intervene sooner as Allan's healthcare proxy.

The conflict exploded publicly in a Delaware courtroom in 2024. Jane testified that Steven visited her Midtown office and threatened to share damaging information with her older sister Amy — with whom Jane was already in litigation over asset valuations — unless she handed him a 25% stake in the business. Steven, a former competitive poker player who won $29,342 at the Hollywood Poker Open in 2015, denied any blackmail, calling the accusation ridiculous. Jane, watching him on the stand, said she thought he was bluffing. Behind the legal maneuvering lies a family pattern stretching back 40 years: the same accusations of fraud, cheating, and betrayal that consumed Sol's generation now define the third.