BILLIONS AND BILLIONS

The hedge-fund titan Ken Griffin beats the competition at making money—and spending it.

- BY GARY SERNOVITZ —January Gill O'Neil

Griffin, who is worth about fifty billion dollars, owns at least eleven properties. They are collectively worth $1.5 billion.

When Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, recently filmed a one-minute video to announce a tax on pieds-à-terre, his appetite for class warfare was on full display. Background music evoked the “Succession” theme, underlining that he was taking on wily tycoons. He stood across the street from the building that housed the most expensive home ever sold in the United States—a four-floor penthouse on Central Park South, which was purchased in 2019 for two hundred and thirty-eight million dollars. Its owner, Mamdani noted, was the “hedge-fund C.E.O. Ken Griffin”—one of the “richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate but who don't actually live here.”