Ken Griffin secretly bought out a Miami condo building just to bulldoze it
Leave it to the ultra-wealthy to secretly drop $125 million on a building just to demolish it.Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin spent three years using a web of anonymous LLCs to quietly buy up all 138 units, plus the ground-floor retail space, of the Solaris condominium in Miami, Bloomberg reported.The mastermind behind the buyouts was a total mystery until recently.“The yearslong campaign featured repeated rounds of higher offers, personalized pitches to reluctant sellers and below-market leasebacks to people who wanted to stay temporarily,” according to Bloomberg, which interviewed with five former owners at the Solaris.Mark Clifton, one of the first condo owners to sell, got just over $500,000 from one of Griffin’s anonymous LLCs in December 2022.“Obviously, we should’ve held out,” Clifton told the outlet.
“But the timing was optimum for us.I’m sure a lot of people were upset that they didn’t get top dollar.”Griffin, who’s worth $48.3 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, paid an average of $875 per square foot between late 2022 and mid-2025, overpaying by more than 20 percent, Bloomberg found, citing Redfin data for the area.The 22-story tower in Miami’s Brickell financial district was one of the final roadblocks in Griffin’s quest to build a multi-billion-dollar corporate campus, as he plans to down Solaris this summer, a spokesperson for Griffin told The Post.The only thing left standing on the block is a city-owned historic building that once housed Miami’s first physician’s office.
It currently serves as headquarters for the Dade Heritage Trust, said the spokesperson.Plans call for a 300-unit apartment building, a 1,420-space parking garage, a $2.5 billion, 54-story headquarters tower for his Citadel hedge fund and securities firm, and possibly a hotel.Since uprooting Citadel and Citadel Securities from Chicago in 2022, Griffin has poured more than $1 billion into assembling a five-acre mega-parcel spanning ...