LA Weekly
The Part-Time Angeleno
Sean Finn lives in Houston. He spends enough of his life in LA that nobody would hold it against him if he stopped pretending.
[originally published on laweekly.com]
Sean Finn has a regular order at Il Pastaio, a favorite table in Beverly Hills, and enough Lakers-game stories to bore his friends. He lives in Houston. That, he’ll tell you, is a minor technicality.
Finn, the founder of Houston-based real estate firm Finn & Company, has spent the last fifteen years building a portfolio that cuts across energy, entertainment, real estate, and health care. Finn & Company holds more than fifteen developments across Houston, LA, and South Florida. He was an early SpaceX investor in 2020, ahead of this year’s IPO. He’s got stakes in Polymarket and X-energy, the nuclear project tied in with Amazon. He was an equity partner on a handful of films via Cross Creek Pictures: Black Swan, Hacksaw Ridge, Black Mass. He’s the kind of operator who rarely ends up in gossip columns but keeps turning up in rooms where the next thing is starting.
This spring, a lot of those rooms happen to be in LA.
Finn is exploring investing in a few Eli Roth projects, including Ice Cream Man, a reimagining of Cliffhanger, and Dead Man’s Wire. He met some of the team at a Cannes party last year and stayed in touch. “The thing about LA,” he says, “is the number of places where film, deals, and the people who matter overlap. Cannes is that, too. I’ll be there two weeks at Hotel du Cap this year.”
Ask him about his month and the list runs long. He just opened a longevity clinic in Houston, riding what he calls “a wave everybody’s on right now.” He’s got a 250-acre ranch outside the city, with over a hundred head of cattle, a new interest in breeding and training rodeo bulls, and zero intention of relocating there. “You’re not going to catch me out there full-time.”
The longevity interest is personal, too. Finn has been doing young plasma treatments himself, which he frames as a practical way to stay sharp through his travel calendar: Cannes, amfAR, the US Open, Mar-a-Lago, the Olympics this year in Italy, where he watched men’s ice hockey while a family member officiated the games.
Finn grew up in Toronto playing hockey with a brief professional career that ended with a bad injury, and went back to school for law. He started in pharmaceuticals and landed in real estate in 2009. In 2016, the Houston Business Journal named his deal of the year: the purchase of 500,000 square feet of office space from Exxon, redeveloped with Fidelis Realty Partners into a supercenter in the 610/290 corridor.
It’s the kind of résumé that tells you nothing about what he’ll be doing next Tuesday. He doesn’t plan his nights in advance. “I’m very go-with-the-flow. It probably drives people around me a little crazy because my plans are always changing, but that’s just how I operate.” His best reset is a drive down Thirty Mile Road. He doesn’t sleep much. He’s up early. At dinner, the order is steak, and the drink is tequila and Sprite.
What else is on the calendar: a trip to Venezuela for an oil-business meeting. An AI project in the oil space he’s not ready to talk about publicly. The two weeks at Hotel du Cap. More conversations with the Roth team. Lakers games as often as the playoffs allow. He had a moment courtside with Luka Dončić earlier this season, which he talks about the way most people talk about seeing a good band before they got big.
If you listen for it, there’s a common thread. Finn is built for the spaces where a lot of different industries meet in one room. A Mar-a-Lago dinner that turns into an afterparty at Carriage House, where a conversation with Bret Baier turns into a TV appearance about the invasion of Iran the next morning. (“Just one of those surreal nights.”) A Cannes party that turns into a film investment. A longevity clinic that turns into an edge on the road.
Los Angeles is one of those places. Not his home, exactly, but a city that keeps rewarding the part of him that refuses to pick a lane.