Appeals Court Revives Grant Cardone Lawsuit Over Alleged 15% Return Promise

A federal appeals court just tore up a win Grant Cardone celebrated for two years, reviving a lawsuit that accuses the real estate influencer of luring investors with a 15% return promise he couldn’t back up.

Quick Take

The Ninth Circuit revived a class-action lawsuit against Grant Cardone and Cardone Capital in June 2025, reversing a dismissal Cardone had touted as a legal victory.
Investor Christine Pino claims Cardone promised a 15% annual return and specific monthly payouts that never materialized.
Court records show the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) once asked Cardone to drop those return projections, and the lawsuit says he kept promoting them on social media anyway.
The case now heads back to a lower court for discovery, meaning Cardone’s internal records and marketing decisions could soon become public.
Cardone faces other legal fights too, including a defamation lawsuit and a separate $1 billion defamation claim filed in 2026.

A Dismissed Case Comes Back to Life

Grant Cardone, the social media real estate mogul, first got the Pino class action tossed out in 2023. A Los Angeles federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it looked over for good. Cardone treated it as proof his business practices were clean. But on June 10, 2025, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that dismissal and sent the case back for more proceedings.

The reversal matters because it means investor Christine Pino’s claims get a second chance to be tested in court, with access to internal documents through discovery. That is a very different outcome than the clean legal win Cardone had been citing publicly.

What Investors Say They Were Promised

The lawsuit centers on Cardone’s pitch to investors in his real estate funds. Court filings say he told people a $220,000 investment would bring in about $12,000 to $15,000 a year in payouts, and that investors would “walk away with a 15% annualized return.” Actual distributions, the complaint claims, came in far lower than that.

Filings also allege Cardone did not fully explain how the funds would finance property purchases or what interest he charged the funds for lending them money. Those omissions, combined with the return promises, form the core of the securities claims now moving forward again in court.

The SEC Letter at the Center of the Fight

A key piece of the revived case involves the SEC. According to reporting on the ruling, the agency sent Cardone a letter asking him to remove his 15% return projections from an official offering document because they lacked enough support. The lawsuit claims Cardone pulled the numbers from that paperwork but kept promoting the same figures on Instagram and YouTube without telling investors about the SEC’s objection.

The Ninth Circuit’s opinion focused heavily on those social media posts, ruling that Cardone’s statements about projected returns could count as misleading opinions under securities law, not just harmless sales talk. That legal distinction is what let the case survive and head back to the trial court.

More Legal Trouble Piling Up

The investor case is not Cardone’s only courtroom headache. A former T-Mobile chief executive, John Legere, is pursuing a $100 million defamation case against Cardone after calling him a “bullshit artist,” and a judge refused to dismiss that suit in 2024. Separately, a new defamation lawsuit worth a claimed $1 billion was filed against Cardone in a Florida circuit court in May 2026.

Taken together, the string of lawsuits shows a pattern that goes beyond one bad headline. Cases like this often hinge on how well a complaint is written at the earliest stage, not on a full airing of the facts, so an early dismissal or revival can look bigger than it really is until discovery plays out. For now, the investor case against Cardone moves forward, and the records that surface next could shape how the public views the returns he promised for years.