Report: As Witkoff negotiated ceasefire deal with Qatari mediation, his son pitched investment billions from Doha

The son of top Trump envoy Steve Witkoff pitched for billions from Middle East governments involved in ceasefire talks at the same time his father was negotiating for a hostage deal, The New York Times reports.

According to the report, Alex Witkoff solicited Qatar for a planned investment fund that would focus on commercial real estate projects in the US, a spokesperson for Doha’s sovereign wealth fund tells the newspaper.

Individuals familiar with the proposals, but not authorized to speak on the matter, tell the outlet that Alex Witkoff later told potential investors that he had secured pledges worth billions of dollars from government-affiliated funds in Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait.

The soliciting of funds came as Steve Witkoff was working to try to secure a hostage-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, with Doha’s mediation.

The Times says that the fund could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for the Witkoff Group. The report says Steve Witkoff remains a partial owner of the real estate company after selling some of his stake earlier this year.

The report also says Alex Witkoff was still discussing the fund as recently as a month ago, but that shortly after the newspaper began to ask questions, a Witkoff Group spokesperson said the “preliminary” plans for the fund were “not moving forward.”

When asked for comment by the Times, a spokesperson for the White House says it is “another bogus smear from the failing New York Times against Steve Witkoff,” without making reference to any alleged inaccuracies in the questions asked, the newspaper says.

Responding to the NYT report, a Witkoff Group spokesperson says, “Many of the reported statements in this article are patently false and the New York Times intentionally chose not to include our full statement, which is not a surprise given the ‘journalist’ Debra Kamin who wrote it failed to disclose her clear conflicts of interest including her radical left-wing history of anti-Trump posts and donating to democrats like Elizabeth Warren For President.”

“We never went beyond preliminary discussions regarding forming this fund, never said to possible investors that funds were ‘locked down’ from these companies, and never even spoke to some of the purported possible investors mentioned,” the Witkoff Group spokesperson adds.

“While Witkoff Group routinely explores real estate opportunities, we chose not to proceed here, strictly as a matter of economics. We concluded that falling rates from the Fed in an increasingly overcrowded private credit market rendered profitability challenging. The idea that we scrapped this plan because of a media inquiry is genuinely laughable.”

“Our founder Steve Witkoff has had no involvement in our company since 2024, and so despite the dishonest innuendo, the suggestion that any sort of “conflict of interest” exists is categorically false. The Witkoff Group has been active in both real estate equity and credit (including funds) since the 1990s and we will not be bullied by a leftwing smear campaign from the media to try to force us to stop doing the work that we’ve done for 30 years – because our founder – who no longer has anything to do with our company – happens to now work for the current administration,” the statement concludes.

Qatar also issued its own statement denying the claims detailed in the report, which it described as “entirely false and so lacking in credibility that they can only be described as absurd.”

Statement from the International Media Office of the State of Qatar in response to false accusations in The New York Times pic.twitter.com/Z7TPAJ2QCt

— Qatar's International Media Office (@IMO_Qatar) September 27, 2025