His real estate company, Bedrock Detroit, broke ground on the building in 2017. Gilbert said his current priority is the construction of a skyscraper in downtown Detroit. He is able to walk with a cane but still struggles to move his left arm. Gilbert spent eight weeks at a rehabilitation center in Chicago last summer. “If that artery was blocked more minutes than it was, it would have been much worse,” Gilbert said. Doctors implanted seven stents inside his carotid artery to open the blood vessel. Gilbert said he had a blood clot in his carotid artery that was cutting off the blood supply to his brain. His wife and a physician friend convinced him to go to the hospital after he started showing other signs of a stroke, including facial asymmetry, arm drift and speech difficulty. Unlike many big contract lending companies which rely on stores to make their loans, Rocket Mortgage uses an online application platform rather. Gilbert was hosting a party just before Memorial Day when his vision seemed suddenly blurry. Rocket Mortgage, a moneylending firm that was established in downtown Detroit, has become the leading retail loan provider inside the US since January 2018. Right before his stroke, Gilbert was texting Michigan’s governor about a deal to get long-term funding for road repairs. It’s a change of pace for the hard-charging executive, who also owns the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and several other sports teams. Gilbert is scheduled to give his first public speech since the May 25 stroke this Friday at the Crain’s Newsmakers of the Year luncheon in Detroit. “Like you wake up, getting out of bed is hard, going to the bathroom is hard, sitting down eating at a table is hard. Yet Quicken Loans, the mortgage lender Gilbert co-founded in 1985, has invested 1 billion over three years, bought some 2.6 million square feet of commercial space in the downtown area and moved 7,000 employees there in a bid to make that vision a reality. Everything,” Gilbert told Crain’s Detroit Business in his first interview since the stroke. “When you have a stroke, here’s the problem with it: Everything is hard.