How Ken Griffin Built a $1B Portfolio of Luxury Homes

By: Benyamin Davidsons

The billionaire hedge-funder has paid more than $1 billion to amass a super posh collection of luxury homes spanning from London to New York. The 52-year old entrepreneur and investor serves as CEO to Citadel, a leading hedge fund and financial services company headquartered in Chicago, which he founded in 1990 and which now manages about $36 billion in assets. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, over the last five years Griffin has been working to create a massive estate that would be the closest thing in modern days to rival the gilded estates fashioned in the 1900s by the wealthiest businessmen of that time.

Griffin has shelled out exorbitant amounts of money on real estate in Chicago, Miami, NYC, London, and most recently in the Hamptons. In late February, Griffin purchased fashion designer Calvin Klein’s oversized Hamptons property in an off-market deal. The ocean-front roughly 7-acre property on coveted Meadow Lane in Southampton may have been worth roughly $100 million, as per the WSJ. In January 2019, Griffin spent a whopping $238 million on a New York City apartment at 220 Central Park South.

The four-floor 23,000-square-foot apartment broke the record, becoming the most expensive home ever sold in the US. After that, in October, the NY Post revealed that the investor purchased two more adjacent apartments in the building’s 20th floor, spending $1.89 million on one and $2.06 million on another. To top it off, only days before news of the NYC purchase dropped, in London word came out that Griffin purchased a $122 million mansion in the UK capital. His other real-estate assets include a four-floor condo in Chicago, and neighboring oceanfront estates in Palm Beach, FL.

Well, he can afford it, so why not. With a net worth of about $15.8 billion as of October 2020, according to Forbes, the famed Harvard Grad is currently ranked as the 45th richest person in America. Griffin is also the 2nd richest person in Illinois.

Incidentally, Griffin is also making waves in philanthropy. In 2018, he donated $20 million to Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, his birth state. He is a board member at the University of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Chicago Public Education Fund, Chicago Public Library Foundation and Museum of Contemporary Art. Together with his wife he founded the Kenneth and Anne Griffin Foundation, which makes donations to public schools and libraries. He has also gifted $150 million to Harvard University’s financial aid program.