A meeting between a school’s leaders and dozens of dads was drawing to a peaceful end in February 2022 when the bank executive Gregory Garrabrants made his move. Months earlier, the head of Axos Financial Inc. had emailed the other parents at the private Christian school in California, asking them to vote him onto the board so he could fight against a “secular, leftist, anti-American ideology.
” The school’s head kicked out the family, citing the banker’s “overly aggressive” behavior. Garrabrants sued, and a judge let his kids return while the case played out, so long as he continued to “stand down.” At the meeting a few days later, he stood up.
“Where do you want me, inside the school with my children enrolled — and where I will behave — or do you want me on the outside?” he said, according to an account in a court filing, adding he’d tie up teachers in litigation for years. “I just won a long-term lawsuit, and I know that I will win.” Garrabrants stands out on Wall Street, not just because he’s among the industry’s best-paid chief executive officers.
Three of his most operatic clashes — with whistleblowers, short sellers and a school that costs up to $26,330 a year — show what he’s willing to do. It’s worked so far: Axos profits have jumped from one record to another for more than a decade and its stock has left most of the industry in its dust. But now the bank faces a reckoning.
It has huge loans to US commercial real estate righ.