Who’s the Chicago billionaire behind the record $75 million Star Island home buy?
The mystery buyer who agreed to shell out a record-breaking $75 million in late December for a mansion on Miami Beach’s Star Island is billionaire and Citadel hedge fund founder and CEO Ken Griffin, a reliable source told the Miami Herald.
The property purchase appears to be the third for Griffin on Star Island, a residential enclave in Biscayne Bay for the ultra rich that has seen an explosion in prices as a flood of extremely wealthy people surges into Miami and the Beach.
Public records show Griffin or a corporate entity related to him spent $62 million in 2020 for two abutting vacant lots directly north of the $75 million house. That would bring Griffin’s Star Island splurge to $137 million.
Griffin, a Florida native who has made Chicago his primary residence since 1989, lately has been spreading his fortune and business interests around Miami and the town of Palm Beach, where he has spent even more — a tidy $350 million — to assemble a 20-acre estate stretching from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean. His property on the island, a quarter mile south from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, is the biggest in the town.
The 53-year-old Griffin, also known as a philanthropist, has made some multimillion-dollar donations in both South Florida places, including a recent $5 million gift to The Underline, the 10-mile linear park and trail under construction beneath Miami’s elevated Metrorail line.
A spokesman for Griffin on Monday declined to confirm that Griffin was behind the blockbuster house buy or what plans he may have for the property, which set an all-time record for a home purchase in Miami-Dade County when it closed Dec. 20. Jill Eber and Jill Hertzberg of the Jills Zeder Group, affiliated with Coldwell Banker Realty, represented the buyer but declined then to disclose the buyer’s identity to the Herald.
The Griffin spokesman, Zia Ahmed, head of global communications at Chicago-based Citadel, also declined to address the two vacant Star Island properties contiguous to the $75 million waterfront estate the Herald learned Griffin bought except to say: “I wouldn’t assume the other lots are his.”
The nine-bedroom, 14,785-square-foot mansion at 8 Star Island Drive, built in 1993, sits on two acres. The seller was Dr. Lourdes Sanjenis, a Miami physician, who had originally listed the property for $80 million.
In a sign of how wildly Star Island house prices have outrun the typically conservative estimates of the Miami-Dade County property appraiser, 8 Star Island is assigned a market value of $25 million on the office’s website. The sale is not reflected on the website yet; typically, there is a lag before a closed property sale appears on the county property appraiser’s site.
Florida Atlantic University finance professor Ken Johnson, an expert on real estate, predicted that record-breaking home transactions like Griffin’s purchase will become more common in Miami-Dade in the next couple of years. That’s thanks to an influx of well-heeled new residents moving to Miami from other parts of the country with higher property prices. These high-income, high-net-worth professionals work in industries that are gaining more traction in South Florida, such as financial services and cryptocurrency, and find local prices a relative bargain.
“These are people coming here with a lot of money and they are used to really nice apartments and homes,” Johnson said. “What they can get here seems relatively inexpensive to them, compared to New York or Boston. Especially with lower property taxes, it’s like everything is on sale. These folks tend to worry less about the price.”
Griffin’s newest house may not be the single most valuable property on Star Island. That distinction may belong to billionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur and philanthropist Phillip Frost and his wife, Patricia, who first bought into the island in 1991 for a mere $2.1 million.
Today, the Frosts own the largest estate on Star Island by far — a 269,000-square-foot property whose market value the county appraiser’s office puts at $83 million. Thanks to a homestead exemption and their long tenure, they pay taxes on only $45 million of the value, according to online property records.
But the 8 Star Island house doesn’t appear to be Griffin’s only property on the island. Two adjoining vacant lots directly to the north are owned by a corporate entity, 11 Star Island LLC, with a mailing address listed on the Miami-Dade County property appraiser’s website as “131 Dearborn 32 Floor, Chicago, IL.” Citadel’s main office is at 131 S. Dearborn Street in downtown Chicago.
The two vacant properties were bought by 11 Star Island for $25 million and $37 million in November 2020 and August 2020, respectively, county property records show. That would give Griffin a contiguous 200,000 square feet of property on the island of luxury.
Other homeowners on Star Island, including Gloria and Emilio Estefan, have taken advantage of swelling prices to cash out on long-held properties for enormous gains — though no other reported sale has come close to Griffin’s $75 million home buy.
The Estefans sold a property where they used to host guests near their longtime Star Island residence for $35 million in July 2021. They had paid $1.8 million for the guest house in 1993. The couple lives nearby, in a 15,500-square-foot house whose market value the appraiser’s website sets at $25 million. In 1986, the Estefans bought what was then a 3,000-square-foot house for $600,000 and since have expanded it substantially.
Stuart Miller, CEO of giant home builder Lennar Corp. sold a 27,000-square-foot home at 22 Star Island Drive for $49.5 million in July 2021. Two years earlier, Miller had built a massive modern home on the property and combined it with a historic mansion he moved to one side of the lot and restored, making him an exception to a growing trend of older home demolitions on Miami Beach.
Miller lives in another Star Island home next door to Griffin’s record-setting house. Miller and his wife have owned the house, 7 Star Island Drive, since 1994, when they bought it for $2.3 million, county property records show. It’s now assessed for market value at nearly $14 million.
Meanwhile, Griffin made national news last year when he secured ownership of a rare copy of the Constitution — one of 13 printed originals still in existence — by outbidding a group of cryptocurrency investors. His winning $43.2 million bid set a record for the most money paid at auction for a printed text.
Griffin, who was born in Daytona Beach and attended high school in Boca Raton, also has been extending his business operations to South Florida. He set up a trading floor for his Citadel Securities, a separate unit from his hedge fund, at the Four Seasons resort in Palm Beach during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. And Citadel has been looking to expand to Miami, where it’s hiring and searching for office space.
Griffin has a well-documented taste for extravagantly expensive homes in the United States and abroad. His other residential holdings include a $238 million penthouse in Manhattan and a $122 million London mansion. In Palm Beach, Griffin last year filed plans for a 50,000-square-foot house on a portion of the vast property, where he has demolished some smaller mansions, the Palm Beach Daily News has reported.
Aside from spending big on real estate, Griffin, whose net worth is estimated at $21.3 billion by Forbes, is also known for making big philanthropic donations in places where he owns homes. According to Forbes, Griffin has given away $1.3 billion.
In addition to the December gift to The Underline in Miami, Griffin made another $5 million donation earlier in 2021 to help launch Miami Connect, a $30 million effort to provide as many as 100,000 Miami-Dade County households with free high-speed internet.
He also gave $20 million towards the recently completed expansion of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.
Griffin is a top Republican Party donor, too. He spent $66 million to support conservatives in the 2020 elections, placing him in the top five of party donors, according to OpenSecrets.org. Griffin, who has sometimes donated to Democratic candidates, also has made significant political donations to Florida’s sitting U.S. senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis.
He has said previously he did not support Trump’s campaigns, and in October 2021, he told Bloomberg he would not back the former president if he ran again in 2024. Griffin praised Trump’s economic policies, but called him “divisive.”
This story was originally published January 10, 2022 at 7:41 PM.
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