Following his recent clash with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, billionaire Ken Griffin has updated plans for an ambitious real estate development along Biscayne Bay.
The Citadel founder proposes building a 300-unit residential building and a 1,420-car parking garage, alongside an office building he already owns.
Documents filed on May 13 with Miami-Dade County also show that plans to build a hotel have been scrapped to make room for more office space. However, Griffin is still considering developing a hotel across the street from his future headquarters, according to people with direct knowledge of the project.
Griffin has also purchased all the units in a 22-story condominium building located across the street from the development and will soon begin demolishing it to make way for new developments, according to a person familiar with the plans.
Griffin, whose fortune is estimated at $48.3 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has purchased nearly five acres of land spread across two city blocks in Miami’s Brickell financial district. He has spent years acquiring properties from various owners in the Solaris building to gain full control of the property as part of his vision to establish Citadel’s presence in the city.
The idea to expand the office space was linked to the conflict with Mamdani, although the other changes had been under consideration for some time, according to a person familiar with the plans.
“We are focusing this part of our development at 1201 Brickell exclusively on commercial office space,” said a Citadel spokesperson. “Miami is open for business, and the exceptional quality of our development will attract leading global companies, including Citadel and Citadel Securities.”
The updated plans were unveiled several weeks after Mamdani made Griffin the public face of a proposal to tax the second homes of the wealthiest Americans. The mayor released a video of himself standing in front of the financier’s $238 million penthouse on Billionaires’ Row in Manhattan, mentioning Griffin by name and stating that the tax targeted those who “store their wealth in New York City real estate” while living elsewhere.
Griffin responded by promising to review the Miami headquarters’ plans to make them even more ambitious.
“What the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and especially my partners in New York, is that we need to double down on Miami,” Griffin said in early May.
The dispute casts doubt on Citadel’s plans to build a large office tower in Manhattan. Citadel’s chief operating officer, Gerald Beeson, circulated an internal memo calling Mamdani’s initiative “shameful.”
Griffin, founder of Citadel Securities and head of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, received endorsements from prominent figures in the New York business community, including CEOs of major companies, and met with New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
During the Milken Conference, held in Beverly Hills, he stated that the controversy is spurring him to invest even more heavily in Miami.
Since relocating his residence and company to Miami in 2022, following clashes with Democratic legislators from Illinois over political and security issues, Griffin has become one of the city’s leading advocates.
He has since donated hundreds of millions of dollars to hospitals, schools, and urban development projects in Florida, employs approximately 500 people in the area, and is actively working to attract more businesses.
Shortly after arriving in Miami, Griffin spent a combined $700 million on three properties, including one of the few remaining waterfront lots in Brickell, the city’s main financial district, and announced plans for a new office tower. He has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in personal properties in Coconut Grove, Star Island, and Palm Beach.
