Ken Griffin Moved Citadel to Miami. He Says It Wasn't the Taxes.

In June 2022, Ken Griffin told his employees that Citadel, the hedge fund he founded, and Citadel Securities, the market maker, would move their headquarters from Chicago to Miami. Both firms had been based in Chicago since 1990. The decision was one of the most closely watched corporate relocations of the decade, and it helped turn Brickell into a serious financial address.

Griffin's letter, quoted by Business Insider, framed it partly as a response to his own people. "Many of our Chicago teams have asked to relocate to Miami, New York, and our other offices around the world," he wrote. He had already moved to Miami with his family. Citadel had more than 1,000 employees in Illinois across the two businesses at the time, and the firm said it expected a few hundred people to be based in Miami within a year. A Citadel spokesman also cited crime in Chicago as a reason for the move, a point Griffin had raised publicly in the months before. The same letter pointed to new office space at 425 Park Avenue in New York, so the plan was to grow in more than one city at once, with Miami as the headquarters.

I.A city that moves fast

A few months later, Griffin sat down with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez at the Economic Club of Miami. The Real Deal reported his account of the city's first pitch: he mentioned the possibility of an office, and ten minutes later the mayor had Google Maps open and was walking him through sites for a tower.

That story gets at what Griffin says he values. He praised Florida's "pro get-it-done mindset that is lacking in the northern cities," and he contrasted it with the layers of approval he had dealt with elsewhere. "It's such a contrast to be here in South Florida," he said.

He was also direct about what wasn't driving the move. Taxes, he said, were "not part of our decision to come to Florida," a point Bloomberg also highlighted at the time. The Real Deal noted that Griffin partly grew up in South Florida and went to school in Boca Raton, and that Citadel tapped Sterling Bay to build a $1 billion bayfront office tower in Brickell, part of roughly $670 million he had spent on commercial real estate there.

II.Five days in a ballroom

The most revealing story from that evening was about the pandemic. Early in 2020, Citadel Securities ran its trading operation out of a ballroom at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. Griffin said it took the firm five days to become fully operational, building a trading floor "that could literally handle the entire U.S. equity market." Workers, he said, "literally shot rockets through pipes" to get enough bandwidth into the building.

"There were 200 people there 24 hours a day," he recalled. "I took my son to witness this happening, because to me, it was reminiscent of when this country just strove for greatness."

He compared the effort to building the Hoover Dam, and then delivered a punchline aimed at his old hometown: "In Chicago, it takes five years to build a bike overpass."

Leaders talk often about urgency. That is what it looks like in practice. A temporary room, a hard deadline, a few hundred people who knew exactly what was at stake, and a founder who wanted his kid to see how it was done.

III.What Miami got

Griffin is a polarizing figure in some circles, and he is a major political donor, which The Real Deal covered at length. Whatever one's view of that, the business effect of the move is clear. A firm that operates at the center of the U.S. equity market decided that Miami was where it wanted to build, and it brought jobs, a tower and a great deal of attention with it.

For other executives weighing a move, Griffin's reasoning is a useful checklist. He talked about where his people wanted to live, about public education and local giving, including a $5 million gift to Miami Connected to bring internet access to children in Miami-Dade, and above all about whether local leaders would help him build quickly. In his telling, Miami answered all of those questions faster than anywhere else he looked.

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Ken Griffin