Ken Griffin has vaulted into the ranks of the super-rich with twin Wall Street fortunes.
He oversees more than $60 billion in assets through his Citadel hedge fund and his Citadel Securities, which trades more stocks than any other company in the world, raked in revenues of $7.5 billion last year.
Forbes clocks him as the 35th richest person in the world today, worth an estimated $34.6 billion.
And, after a 2022 move to the Sunshine State, he’s now the richest person in Florida (and the 22nd richest American).
His leaked tax returns revealed that from 2013 to 2018, he earned an average $1.7b each year, 29.2% going to the IRS.
So, what does all that money buy the 55-year-old, twice-divorced father of three?
As The Post revealed Wednesday, some is being put to use to build a $1 billion estate on Florida’s most prestigious land, gobbling up more than 27 acres of Palm Beach to create what will be the biggest single property in the area.
Larger than former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, seven acres alone will be a separate home for his mom, Catherine Gratz Griffin.
It’s just part of an extraordinary, years-long splurge that makes Griffin not just Wall Street’s richest man but its biggest spender, a prodigious collector of record-breaking properties and pieces of art, and a mega-funder of philanthropy and politicians.
Record-breaking big-city homes
Griffin’s $238 million purchase of a four-story condo at 220 Central Park South in Manhattan was — and still is — the highest price ever paid for a home in the United States.
Bought in 2019, the 24,000-square-foot condo is located on so-called Billionaires’ Row, overlooking Central Park.
Neighbors include Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Sting and Trudy Styler, and Brazilian heiress Renata de Camargo Nascimento.
The same year, Griffin scooped up a mansion in London for $122 million, reportedly the most expensive home sold in that city for nearly a decade.
The 16,000-square-foot property at 3 Carlton Gardens is near Buckingham Palace and was once home to Charles de Gaulle during World War II. It boasts an indoor swimming pool, formal private gardens, and a storied history.
But they are not even his only record-breaking homes.
In Chicago, where the Citadel founder lived and worked for thirty years, he paid $58.5 million for a Gold Coast condo in 2018 — once again breaking a record for the largest home sale in that city.
Florida realty empire
At the onset of the pandemic, Griffin temporarily relocated Citadel’s operations from Manhattan, renting out the entire Four Seasons in Palm Beach for his employees and several thousand computer servers and essentially creating his own trading floor at the hotel.
He made the move official in 2022 when he moved his firm’s headquarters — and his family — to Miami.
Griffin is a Floridian, born in Daytona Beach in 1968, when his father worked for the space program during the Apollo moon landings, and brought up in Boca Raton.
His massive Palm Beach estate project started in 2012 with a series of purchases which now total $450 million.
With construction estimated between $150 to $400 million dollars, the resulting mega-estate will stretch from the Intracoastal to the Atlantic Ocean.
Further south, in 2022, Griffin set a record for a Miami-Dade single-family home when he paid $106.9 million for philanthropist Adrienne Arsht’s two bay-front houses in Coconut Grove.
Combined, the houses have 12 bedrooms, 25,000 square feet of living space, and a separate historic home, circa 1913, built by the statesman William Jennings Bryan.
A second Florida estate
Then there’s Griffin’s ever-increasing Star Island holdings in Miami, where he has assembled a second Florida waterfront mega-estate.
His assemblage now consists of seven adjacent lots on the west side of the island—spanning numbers 8 through 14 Star Island Drive—including one he recently repurchased from baseball great Alex Rodriguez for $45 million in a swap.
The contiguous properties span 6.5 acres and reportedly cost a combined $169 million, and make him a neighbor of Gloria Estefan and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Vacation homes across the States
Griffin’s pursuit of the most prestigious addresses stretches to the Hamptons.
In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, he paid $84.44 million for the off-market purchase of Calvin Klein’s 7 acres at 650 Meadow Lane in Southampton.
That address makes him a neighbor to New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, fellow hedge fund king Henry Kravis, nightclub and hotel entrepreneur Ian Schrager and fallen Apollo Global co-founder Leon Black, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein who is now accused of rape.
Griffin also owns comparatively low-profile multimillion-dollar vacation homes in Aspen and Hawaii.
Blockbuster art buys
Then, there’s Griffin’s art collection, which includes masterpieces by Basquiat, Degas, Cézanne, and Pollock.
Art News has named him as one of the top 200 art world collectors and put his collection’s value at $1 billion — which may be extremely conservative.
As someone who clearly likes breaking records, according to Vanity Fair, Griffin was the first person to spend half a billion dollars on art in one transaction, purchasing two pieces from David Geffen in 2015: William de Kooning’s “Interchange” for $300 million and Jackson Pollock’s “Number 17A” for $200 million.
That wasn’t his first purchase from Geffen either. In 2006, Griffin bought Jasper Johns’ “False Start” from the music mogul for a reported $80 million.
Other big art world investments? A Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, “Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump,” which he bought for $100 million in 2020 from Peter Brant. Two Cézanne’s, one of which he secured for $60.5 million from Steve Wynn. In 2021, he scored a Barnett Newman, “Uriel,” for $84.2 million.
America’s treasures
Griffin also acquired an iconic piece of American history in 2021, spending $43.2 million on a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution. It is one of two versions that remains privately owned.
The collector also pledged to display his copy of the Constitution to the public, and it was on loan to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville for about seven months. Sources say the historical document will be moving to another museum soon.
His other artworks which are on display are now hanging at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach after he moved them from the Art Institute of Chicago where he was a trustee.
Open wallet for philanthropy
Griffin has donated to the top cultural institutions in the country such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York ($40 million), Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art ($10 million), Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach ($16 million), Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago ($125 million), Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. ($10 million) and American Museum of Natural History in New York ($40 million).
The contemporary art fan also extends his largesse to many philanthropic causes, from education to innovation, to the overall tune of $2 billion.
On the top of that list? He’s endowed Harvard, his alma mater, with $500 million.
In Florida, Griffin has already made over $150 million in philanthropic contributions to various institutions and partners, including $25 million to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital to advance critical pediatric care; $20 million to launch a scholarship fund at Miami-Dade College, the largest gift in the college’s history; and $5 million to support The Underline’s accessible 10-mile linear park.
GOP mega-donations
Politically, Griffin has made bipartisan donations, but the majority of his fundraising dollars have gone to Republicans. In the 2022 election cycle, he contributed $50 million to Republican candidates running in federal races, ranking him as the nation’s third-largest private political donor, according to CNBC.
Griffin was initially a big backer of Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, donating $5 million to his 2022 gubernatorial reelection fund. Since then, Griffin has changed his tune and has clashed with DeSantis over his culture wars. For now, the mega-donor is sitting out the Republican primaries.
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