Billionaire buys the most expensive lodging ever in the US
The American billionaire Ken Griffin is on house hunting and we will have known that. Last week he bought the second-most expensive home there for 108 million euros in London. He also landed in New York a few days later. Griffin (50) is now owner of the most expensive cottage ever sold in the US. Cost of the penthouse at Central Park: 209 million euros.
Kenneth C. Griffin set up hedge fund Citadel in 1990 and became very wealthy. His assets are estimated at 8.4 billion euros. He lives in Chicago and, according to Bloomberg’s list, is the most prosperous man in the state of Illinois. He will therefore not have to eat a sandwich after a week of shopping at the property market in London and New York. Even though that made him lighter in total 317 million euros.
In London, he went for a 200-year-old residence, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace and with a view of St. James’s Park. Griffin apparently likes trees: in the US, his latest acquisition is located on the south side of Central Park, a location that is reserved for the more well-off fellows anyway. But Griffin also counted a record amount of 209 million euros for his penthouse in the long-announced skyscraper of architect Robert AM Stern, 220 Central Park South. The building has 65 floors and 118 apartments, of which 26 occupy an entire floor. That of Griffin is no less than 2,230 m². The billionaire had been working on the purchase since 2015. The building is not yet finished at this moment.
The previous record deal for a private apartment in Manhattan was closed in 2014. It was less than half that: 88 million euros. The record in the entire US was in the hands of Griffin’s colleague Barry Rosenstein who in 2014 donated over 120 million euros for a hospice in the Hamptons. The world record was then again established in 2017 in the Peak, one of the chicest neighbourhoods in Hong Kong. It was then a sale amount of no less than 317 million euros.
A Griffin spokeswoman said that he now has a place to stay in New York when he has to be there to work. His company Citadel has also signed a lease agreement for an office building on 425 Park Avenue, which would be completed in 2020. Citadel will occupy almost 31,000 m², spread over 16 floors, including the penthouse. The offices will be a five-minute walk from the new luxury loft of Griffin.
The American businessman has also bought four floors of an apartment building in Chicago and a penthouse in Miami Beach, each worth sums of 52 million euros and also local records. Since 2009, he also owns an apartment on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, for which he paid 35 million euros at the time.
Ken Griffin is also an art lover. In 2016 he bought another painting by Jackson Pollock and a Willem de Kooning for a total of 440 million euros.
