Power in Waiting: Eli Simon at Simon Property Group
He took over just this year from his late father, who built the company into the nation's largest mall owner
Less than two months ago, the unhappy news was announced:
David Simon, the supreme tsar of everything mall related, had passed away at the extremely premature age of 64 of pancreatic cancer.
When the news broke, Commercial Observer was deep into the preparation of Power 100, and Simon’s name seemed like a gimme for the `26 list.
Simon Property Group (SPG) had an inarguably successful 2025. In the second quarter of last year, the real estate investment trust boasted an annual rise in net income from $493.5 million to $556.1 million. By the third quarter, funds from operations had gone from $1.15 billion to $1.21 billion and the REIT signed a dizzying 1,000 leases accounting for 4 million square feet of space.
They signed another 1,300 leases the next quarter, ending the year with 12 million square feet of space leased and at 96.4 percent occupancy.
If that’s not enough, SPG owns 26 out of the 46 best-
performing malls in the country.
This kind of success was never preordained. Back in 2020, the REIT lost about $1 billion in revenue in the throes of COVID closures. But as that annus horribilis ended, SPG took the counterintuitive decision of doubling its bets — it plunked down $3.4 billion to buy 26 malls from Taubman Realty Group. (Last November, it bought up the remaining 12 percent of the company.)
Ever since, SPG has been slowly and methodically readying the kingdom for the current atmosphere, spending money to improve food courts, bringing in new entertainment, trying out the latest pop-ups — all in all, preparing smartly for retail’s rebirth.
David Simon had known for a while that he had cancer and began preparing his oldest son, Eli, to step into his shoes. Now that the inevitable day has come, it is time to look at the successor.
We don’t know a lot about Eli Simon yet. “Eli reminds people of his father,” the Wall Street Journal wrote last summer as the preparation for the handover began to be discussed publicly. “They are both self-driven, obsessed with the mall business and hyper-detail oriented, say people who have worked with them.” (Eli, a Wharton grad who was only 37 when last year’s story came out, is more easygoing than his dad, according to the Journal.)
While it would be a little premature to say that this new figure will carry on in exactly the same manner as his father, Eli Simon might be a prime candidate for Power 100 `27.
Max Gross at mgross@commercialobserver.com.
