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The Long Game
Texas investor Sean Finn has spent fifteen years backing what comes next — in energy, film, space, and, lately, his own longevity. The thing that ties it all together is patience.
Sean Finn does not move like a man in a hurry, which is strange, because he is almost never in one place.
In any given month he might be courtside at a Lakers game, two weeks deep at Hotel du Cap during Cannes, at a Mar-a-Lago dinner that drifts into an afterparty, or standing on a ranch outside Houston counting cattle. The calendar looks frenetic. The philosophy behind it is the opposite. “I’m very go-with-the-flow,” he says. “It probably drives the people around me a little crazy, because my plans are always changing. But that’s just how I operate.”
Finn is the founder of Finn & Company, a Texas-based real estate development firm and investment office, with retail and office properties across Texas, Los Angeles, and South Florida.
That is the anchor. The rest of his portfolio reads like a map of where capital is heading next. He was an early backer of SpaceX in 2020, years ahead of this year's IPO, and holds positions in Anduril, Palmer Luckey's defense-technology company, and in OpenAI and Anthropic, the two firms at the center of the AI race. He's also in X-energy, the Amazon-backed nuclear venture, and Polymarket, the prediction market that has become one of the most closely watched names in finance. “Most of the opportunity right now is in investments,” he says. “There’s a lot of interesting movement across those sectors.”
He has a history in entertainment, too. As an equity partner through Cross Creek Pictures, Finn helped finance Black Swan, Hacksaw Ridge, and Black Mass. More recently he has been exploring a slate of new 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 rooms matter as much as the schedule,” he says of the festival, where he spent roughly two weeks this year. “A lot of what happens, happens in conversation.”
If there is one idea connecting a nuclear startup, a film slate, and a herd of cattle, it is time horizon. Finn tends to buy in early and wait. The SpaceX position took half a decade to mature. The real estate has compounded quietly over the years. He is comfortable being the person in the room before the thing is obvious, which is a different temperament from the one that chases headlines.
Lately he has turned that same patience on himself. Finn recently opened a longevity clinic in Houston, stepping into a field he says “a lot of people are moving into right now” but that he had been circling for a while. He has also been doing young plasma, a newer anti-aging treatment he credits with keeping his energy steady through long stretches of travel and back-to-back events. For a man whose calendar runs on adrenaline, the interest in longevity is less a vanity project than an operating strategy. The goal is to still be sharp for the next deal, and the one after that.
Then there is the ranch. Finn bought 250 acres outside Houston, where he now keeps more than a hundred head of cattle and has gotten into breeding and training rodeo bulls. It is, by his own admission, a completely new space for him, and he is enjoying the learning curve. He is also realistic about it. “You’re not going to catch me out there full-time,” he says.
The throughline makes more sense once you know where he started. Finn grew up in Toronto playing hockey, with a brief professional career that ended after an injury. He went back to school for law, started his business career in the medical field with GE Capital, and moved into real estate in 2009. In 2016, the Houston Business Journal named Finn & Company’s acquisition of 500,000 square feet of office space from Exxon its Deal of the Year. Partnered with Fidelis Realty Partners, the property was redeveloped into a supercenter in Houston’s 610/290 corridor. It is the kind of patient, unglamorous bet that built the foundation for everything flashier that followed.
For all the movement, his tastes are settled. New York is the one city that still excites him every time he lands, and the Aman is the hotel he keeps coming back to. His reset after a nonstop stretch is unfussy: a few laps in the pool. Ask what he never travels without and the answer is gloriously ordinary. “Phone charger,” he says. “Never leave home without it.”
Not everything on the calendar is business. This year Finn went to the Winter Olympics in Italy, where he caught the men’s ice hockey while a family member officiated the games, a full-circle moment for a former player. The afterparties have a way of turning surreal. He describes a night that began at a Mar-a-Lago event and ended at Palm Beach’s Carriage House, deep in conversation with Bret Baier. “The funny part,” he says, “was waking up the next morning, turning on the TV, and seeing Bret reporting on the escalation of the Iran war. Just one of those nights.”
What is next looks a lot like what came before: an oil-business trip to Venezuela, an AI project in the energy space that he is keeping close for now, and an annual boat retreat to the Amalfi Coast. None of it follows a master plan, exactly. But spend enough time around Sean Finn and a pattern emerges anyway. He is built for the places where industries overlap and the next thing is just starting, and he is patient enough to wait for it to pay off.