But we’re not here to talk about the incompetence and mendacity of Pam Bondi, nor even about the list that does exist—the so-called 1953 Trust enumerating those who were to benefit from Epstein’s estate once he’d offed himself two days after signing it. No, we’re here to talk about the growing list of people out of a job for having found themselves writing embarrassing things to a convicted sex offender—and how that list might grow further in the weeks and months ahead. Already, it’s claimed the head of global ports giant DP World, Hyatt Hotels Chairman Tom Pritzker, super-agent Casey Wasserman (who by the end of the current Olympic Games may no longer be running the next ones), and former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson’s hopes for a soft landing as an advisor to hedge fund Rokos Capital Management. Also, a (former) price of the blood enjoyed an unscheduled tour of a British police station’s holding cells and interrogation rooms.

Around these parts, of course, two resignations feel particularly significant. Last week, Goldman Sachs General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler bowed to what seemed inevitable to everybody but her and her boss, the bank’s CEO, David Solomon, and stepped down. Solomon’s support rankled below the corner offices, especially as D.J. D-Sol pronounced himself “disappointed”—not that one of his closest advisers had so close a relationship, and indeed a much closer relationship than she’d let on, with a pedophile, but that she’d decided to resign.

Certainly, she tried awfully hard not to, having a spokesperson tell the world that she was the real victim here, of a misogynistic witch-hunt: “It is despicable to single out and attack a highly respected female professional simply because of her benign interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.” The only problem with that was, anyone could read those interactions, and they did not seem benign: Ruemmler accepted more than $10,000 in gifts from Epstein, cringingly called him “sweetie” and an “older brother” and “Uncle Jeffrey,” turned to him for career advice, and joked with him, “you are going to trade one of your Russians for my comp”—with Citadel’s Ken Griffin, of all people. (On the same job discussion, when Epstein noted that Griffin, who Citadel says never communicated with Epstein, “might just be interested in a woman,” Ruemmler shot back, “I ain’t no affirmative action,” which given Goldman’s latest DEI ditch at least means her successor, should she be of the female gender, won’t need to worry about the same.) She cooed to him, at the height of the #MeToo movement, that he was simply the victim of an “abuse of power.” Hell, the night Epstein was arrested in the summer of 2019, just months before she took the Goldman job, Ruemmler was one of three people he called! Not exactly the most benign of interactions, you’d have to say.

For many at Goldman, Ruemmler’s position had become untenable days earlier, when Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp stepped down after 18 years atop the law firm, citing the same “distractions” that Ruemmler would reach for the following week. As far as some were concerned, Karp held on too long, too, although the Paul Weiss rank-and-file do not seem to welcome the rise of mergers and acquisitions partner Scott Barshay to Karp’s old post.

Of course, Karp wasn’t the only Paul Weiss partner to shift uncomfortably in their seat when finding their name in the Epstein files: Mitchell Webber received some pretty eye-opening questions from Epstein, such as “what would happen if one were to transport a minor for sex?” and another about sex tourism laws. Webber’s explanation, that he was simply a middleman between Epstein and Alan Dershowitz, because the Harvard professor “has never used a computer,” is not as strong a defense as he seems to think it is, but any port in a storm, we guess. And with millions of Epstein files still believed unreleased, the question running through many law firm boardrooms, general counsels offices and C-suites everywhere is, who’s next to grope (no pun intended) for an excuse that strains credulity before giving in to the “distractions” and “desire to spend more time” with their families?

The federal judge whose name shows up seems an innocent bystander, as it were, as are we here at Above the Law and Dealbreaker. Less so the late moral crusader Ken Starr, who found Bill Clinton’s peccadillos so opprobrious but saw no fault in his “friend” and “brother” Jeff; or Northern Ireland peacemaker Sen. George Mitchell, who Epstein called a “very good friend” and who was accused years ago by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre. New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch assures us that the only partners Epstein ever set him up with were “adult women,” as if there were another kind. Elon Musk and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman used their own respective appearances in Epstein’s inbox to renew their feud, with Musk pointing to documents demonstrating that Hoffman visited Epstein’s infamous private island, with Hoffman retorting that even if Musk never made it to Little St. James, he rather desperately wanted to. (Hoffman could have added, for good measure, that at least Epstein never played pimp for his baby brother.) A New York real-state billionaire (not that one, alas) called his relationship with Epstein a “blessing,” while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—who Bondi’s bumbling reviewers didn’t bother to protect as they did his boss—was reduced to proffering the Leon Black defense of his own visit to Epstein Island: “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies,” Lutnick said of the 2012 trip which, until it became irrefutable, he denied had ever taken place, since he said he’d cut all ties with Epstein seven years earlier. He added, awkwardly but perhaps necessarily, given what happened to the underage on that island, “we left with all of my children.” (The disgraced and already unemployed Black suffered the further indignity of having all of his finances spilled as part of the release.) Anyone who spent time at Epstein’s place in Palm Beach is no doubt hoping that the products of his hidden video cameras are not among those unreleased files.

We here at Dealbreaker have spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out exactly how Epstein operated (financially), and the files have certainly filled out the picture as well as the list of those shamed (at the very least) by association. Flirtatious e-mails, shared confidences, “gang stuff” and “illicit trysts” established or deepened relationships from Wall Street to Washington, Hollywood to Silicon Valley. There was the private club he co-founded and which features the likes of Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman as members. (Schwarzman has not been linked to Epstein in any way.) And those friends—like hedge fund manager Tancredi Marchiolo and hedge fund wife Eva Dubin—helped broaden the pool. Marchiolo, while bitching about the apathy of Chelsea fans, sought to broker a meeting between Epstein and Chelsea owner (and Russian oligarch) Roman Abramovich—only one of Epstein’s efforts to build relationships in Russia. When Bill Gates and his longtime scientific advisers were on the outs, Epstein stepped in to patch things up, while also implying that one of the Russian girls he was going to trade to get Ruemmler a paycheck gave Gates the clap. And those friends, in turn, sought to buck up a man already convicted of underage prostitution when he was down, including Ruemmler, former Barclays CEO and then JPMorgan Chase private banking chief Jes Staley, the aforementioned then-Duke of York, Richard Branson and, even after the depths of Epstein’s depravities began to emerge, another illustrious Goldman and White House alum: Steve Bannon.

We suspect we’ll be hearing about a lot more “naiveté” and “conning” by a dead sex pest in the not-to-distant future by those desperate to avoid Ruemmler’s and Karp’s fate.

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Last week, the president dropped his latest trollsuit, this time targeting the government over the leak of his tax returns in 2020 by Charles Littlejohn, a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton. The New York Times penned dozens of stories about those returns before the 2020 election, but Trump claims not to have learned about it until January of 2024, when Littlejohn was sentenced. This is convenient, since any civil suit over wrongful disclosure of tax information must be filed within two years. Less convenient is the fact that Trump’s own lawyer Alina Habba appeared at Littlejohn’s plea hearing on October 12, 2023 “on behalf of President Trump who was a victim, as we just heard, of this atrocity.”

But no matter! Trump demands $10 billion because the Times wrote mean stuff about his finances. Plus, he and his company had to “defend against a meritless civil suit brought by the New York Attorney General based on wrongful interpretation of unauthorized disclosures of their confidential tax returns and related tax information.” KA-CHING!

This puts Secretary Bessent in an awkward position — or, two awkward positions to be exact, since he took over as acting Commissioner of the IRS after Trump pushed out Billy Long, his own pick to lead the agency. If Trump “wins” his “lawsuit,” then the taxpayers will be on the hook for the money. Even as Americans are coughing up thousands of dollars per household for increased health insurance premiums and those “non-inflationary” tariffs, they’ll be asked to hand the president an eleven-figure check.

It’s breathtakingly corrupt, and so Bessent has figured out a way to distance himself from the looting of his agency: He’s blaming Pam Bondi.

“This is a Justice Department matter. They represent Treasury,” he sneered in response to questioning by Senator Ruben Gallego about the glaring conflict of interest.

View the original article to see embedded media.

So much for the unitary executive theory! Apparently the DOJ is running the show, and Treasury is just along for the ride. The IRS has no institutional interest or say in the litigation. If the Attorney General decides not to defend against a patently frivolous lawsuit, it’s got nothing to do with him.

“We act as paymaster,” Bessent insisted, conveniently dumping responsibility for the plunder of his agency in Bondi’s lap.

When hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin sued the Treasury over the leak of his tax documents — in timely fashion! — the DOJ mounted a robust defense. But if the Bondi decides to “lose” this lawsuit, that’s on her. Bessent is more like a cash register, really, or an AI chatbot being ordered to generate CSAM. It’s user error!

View the original article to see embedded media.

It’s a neat trick! Someone should hurry up and tell DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that she has to do whatever the DOJ lawyers tell her because they’re the ones really in charge. That would save those poor, harried AUSAs from having to explain to judges why ICE refuses to comply with court orders.

Whether it saves Bessent from being held responsible for the coming wealth transfer from American taxpayers to the president’s bloated pockets remains to be seen

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.

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But documents in the most recent Epstein file dump suggest Ruemmler knew something was up.

We know that Epstein was deeply involved in plotting out Ruemmler’s career, offering advice and negotiation tips on job offers. And in a June 2016 email exchange, the pair were discussing a potential job at hedge fund Citadel (Ruemmler never worked a Citadel, at the time of these emails was she was a partner at Latham & Watkins and co-chair of its white-collar defense group; in 2020, Ruemmler left Biglaw for the in-house world at Goldman Sachs, where she currently serves as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel).

Ruemmler seems skeptical about the job, and Epstein says “there is the off chance that [hedge fund founder Ken Griffin] might just be interested in a woman.” Ruemmler thumbs her nose at the notion of DEI, writing, “I ain’t no affirmative action.” Epstein responds, “i meant romantically.” And then comes the stomach churning line, “Oh, Jesus — meaning you are going to trade one of your Russians for my comp?!!”

Epstein is known to have paid “ostensible foreign models,” and the most charitable read is that Ruemmler was merely joking that trafficking one of Epstein’s Russian models to her maybe-boss might lead to a more favorable compensation package… or she suspected that was something the “monster” Jeffrey Epstein might really do on behalf of a trusted friend. (From all appearances, Griffin is just catching strays here, and Citadel said, “Ken has never met or communicated with Epstein.”)

Either way it’s an awful look for the prominent attorney.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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The case involves the unlawful release of Trump’s tax returns in 2020 by Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Littlejohn stole hundreds of thousands of tax documents and leaked them to news outlets like ProPublica, which published articles highlighting the paltry sums the ultra-wealthy contribute to the common wealth. Littlejohn pled guilty in 2023 and was sentenced to five years in prison.

In September of 2020, the New York Times published a series of explosive stories on Trump’s tax returns that highlighted how little he paid in taxes, thanks to write-offs and carried losses. Trump, along with his eldest sons and the family business, claim that these disclosures “incurred substantial financial and other damages, including having to defend against a meritless civil suit brought by the New York Attorney General based on wrongful interpretation of unauthorized disclosures of their confidential tax returns and related tax information.” And so they demand recompense under the Privacy Act and 26 U.S. Code § 7431.

The case is modeled on a similar suit filed in 2022 by Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, who was represented by Quinn Emanuel, and so it hews more closely to the norms of pleading than Brito’s regular offerings. And yet there may be one or two teensy tiny problems with Trump’s latest complaint.

Like, say, the statute of limitations which expires two years after the discovery of the disclosure. Trump says that the first he heard of it was January of 2024 when the Treasury sent him a letter informing him of Littlejohn’s sentencing. This is somewhat undercut by the numerous articles published in 2020 which “wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history” cited in this very complaint as evidence of damages. Trump also cites articles based on the 2022 disclosure of his tax returns by the House Ways and Mean Committee, ’cause YOLO.

Then there’s the theory of liability based on the IRS’s failure to adequately supervise its contractors. Trump crows that Griffin’s suit survived a motion to dismiss because Judge Robert Scola said there was a live dispute as to whether the IRS was responsible for Littlejohn’s crimes. But if Littlejohn was functionally IRS employee in 2020, then his boss was the plaintiff himself … which may complicate matters.

And then there’s the question of damages.

Trump spent ten years saying he’d be “proud” to release his tax returns.

In interview I told @AP that my taxes are under routine audit and I would release my tax returns when audit is complete, not after election!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 11, 2016

“I have big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time,” he said on Meet the Press in January of 2016.

Now he says the publication of true information he vowed continually to release himself “caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing” to the tune of $10 billion.

In any event, Griffin’s Privacy Act claim was dismissed for failure to allege any actual damages, and he settled in 2024 for zero dollars and a public apology (ed. note: Griffin did also secure a promise that the agency adopt reforms). But, of course, Trump has something Griffin didn’t: He controls the entire apparatus of the federal government and can just order the Treasury to loot the public fisc for his own benefit. Indeed, he’s already ordered it to pay him $230 million for the “illegal” raid on Mar-a-Lago.

View the original article to see embedded media.

Funny, he doesn’t want to answer questions about this very legit litigation!

To the extent that it matters, the case has been assigned to Judge Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee. Stipulated settlement in 3…2…

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.

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KG & co. have been able to push those troubles from their minds by imagining the Class A paradise they’re planning for Miami’s up-and-coming Brickell neighborhood, a 1,000-foot-hight affront to god gazing out into Hurricane Alley. The planned 4.2 acre campus by the Bay is to feature some splashy places to eat, some ritzy places to stay, a snazzy spa, a waterfront terrace, perhaps a dock. Once all of that’s done, there’s going to be another off building and a condo tower behind the main one.

The only thing standing in the way of the full grandeur of Griffintown is a 22-story condo, 130-ish-unit condo right in the middle of the planned development. It’s the only piece of the two blocks that Griffin doesn’t yet own. Or does he?

Some unknown buyer (or buyers) has been acquiring individual units in the building through a number of all-cash transactions, identified only through a series of limited liability companies based in Delaware.

The LLCs have amassed nearly half, or at least 67, of the building’s units over the past two years, public records show. If a buyer gets to 80%, or about 110 units, it will take control of the property. According to documents that govern the building, once that threshold is achieved, the remaining unit holders could be compelled to sell and the new owner could knock the building down.

The question everyone in the building is asking: Is Ken Griffin the mystery buyer looking to fill in the final piece on his massive waterfront assemblage?

Well, if he’s not—and the registered agent behind the purchases is the same as that used to buy up the surrounding acres, so he probably is—all we can say is, as the former residents of a former Palm Beach cul-de-sac called Blossom Way can tell you, Ken Griffin isn’t a big fan of people getting in the way of his real-estate fantasies.

Ken Griffin and the Big Miami Real-Estate Mystery [WSJ]
Billionaire Ken Griffin wants to get out of Chicago quick — sells record-breaking penthouse for a 44% loss [N.Y. Post]

It was, alas, only after those purchases of more than 25,000 square feet in the sky that our hero realized the city below had become an uninhabitable shithole, whose residents—along with the rest of Illinois—wouldn’t simply let him pick their governor. So he decided not to finish the bare white space he’d bought in the Windy City and to relocate to his native Florida, where he’d accumulated a quarter-mile of private beachfront and plans for the world’s most expensive house in Palm Beach.

In the intervening years, he’s tried and failed to sell a couple of those floors, as well as his penthouse in the nearby Park Tower, and tried and succeeded at selling a few other places on the North Side, including another Park Tower penthouse to no less a personage than George Lucas. But he held on to that top floor at 9 West Walton, perhaps as a potential bunker to rest his head on those hopefully infrequent visits to Chicago, perhaps as a memento of his plans for a wild Midwest bachelorhood therein.

Back in the summer, however, he apparently decided it wasn’t worth the memories. Or really much of anything else, since he was prepared to part ways with it for about half of what he paid seven years ago. And unlike his other places downstairs, someone actually wanted this one.

The 38th-floor, paradise-in-the-planning was listed at $11 million — a humiliating half of what he forked over for it, back in 2017….

His attempts to sell other units in the tower have so far been unsuccessful…. Two days after finding a buyer for his 38th-floor property, Griffin put his 37th-floor unit on the market for $9 million — well below the $12.7 million he shelled out for it in 2018…. Griffin’s previously lost $6.9 million on two other local properties — located at the Waldorf Astoria Chicago and 800 N. Michigan, also known as Park Tower, home to the Park Hyatt Chicago.

We somehow doubt that a man who has since bought a $45 million stegosaurus, a $90 million place in St. Tropez and a big-name soccer coach will be humiliated by this turn of events. Twenty million dollars and counting seems a small price for vindication of his direst warnings about the future of Kabul-by-the-Lake. And it’s not like he needs the money.

Billionaire Ken Griffin dumps luxury Chicago penthouse for $11M amid Miami move — half of what he paid in 2017 [N.Y. Post]

The assets held by principals and staff in the Citadel Wellington fund jumped to 20% as of Dec. 31 from 12% at the end of 2019…. Much of the increase in the employee share is attributable to the performance of Wellington, which generated annualized returns of 25.9%. That resulted in higher payouts for Citadel traders and portfolio managers, who are required to leave roughly half of their incentive awards, over a hurdle, in the fund for 3 1/2 years.

And that’s the rub: Sure, as the Bloomberg article makes clear, that presents a difficulty in voluntarily leaving Griffin’s discomfiting embrace. But it also means that employees have an advantage over Citadel clients, as Ken respects those lockups even when forcing other investors to take money back.

The firm has returned profits to investors each year for decades, including $6 billion from Wellington for 2023 alone…. In contrast, profits on employees’ deferred compensation generally remain invested until their lockups expire — a big advantage during the past four years.

What’s more, Citadel’s also got a couple of in-house funds open only to its most well-paid principals, which means its getting closer and closer to all big-name hedge funds’ inevitable transition to a family office.

Employees have accounted for the largest change in the firm’s investor base, rising to 29% of total assets at the end of June from 21% at the end of 2021.

Citadel Staff’s Fund Stake Triples to $9 Billion in Four Years [Bloomberg]

The biggest donation came from the hedge-fund billionaire and Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who agreed to make a multimillion-dollar gift to coax the biggest name available into a USA tracksuit, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Now, that person is Argentina’s Mauricio Pochettino, who has coached some of the biggest clubs in Europe and secured a 2-0 victory over Panama in his first match in charge on Saturday. He is widely reported to be earning some $3 million a year…. The approach to Griffin, however, only came after U.S. Soccer had made contact with Pochettino and was scrambling for funding. The federation connected with Griffin through another donor who was familiar with Griffin’s love of soccer and long history of donating to soccer causes, including an $8 million gift to build 100 mini-pitches in the Chicago and Miami areas.

The U.S. Soccer Coach Paid for by a Billionaire [WSJ]

Still, as they say, you don’t get rich by spending money, and the above—to say nothing of dinosaurs and historical documents and nice things to put on the wall—notwithstanding, it has to be said that Griffin has gotten rich in part by being somewhat selective about how he spends his money, i.e. as much as possible on the things he wants and as little as possible on those he doesn’t, like taxes. And he’s found another public good he’d really rather not pony up for.

Brokers are calling for the regulator to suspend proposed new billing schedules that would force them to contribute to the costs of the CAT system, or Consolidated Audit Trail, a real-time record of all activity across US equities and options markets, which has been likened to a “Hubble Telescope” for securities markets.

Exchanges have so far footed the bill for CAT. But unless the US Securities and Exchange Commission takes action in the coming weeks, brokers will begin racking up charges dating from Tuesday….

Citadel Securities, which is controlled by billionaire Ken Griffin, has warned the SEC that it would “be left with no choice but to seek appropriate judicial relief” if the agency did not suspend the billing by next week.

In a letter last week it described the latest filings as “brazen” and “an effort to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from broker-dealers such as Citadel Securities”.

Citadel Securities leads fight over payments for market surveillance system [FT]
Citadel's flagship fund up roughly 1% in August, says source [Reuters via Yahoo!]

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Of course, reducing his total global residential square footage will not do. And while he owns plenty of waterfront property on this side of the Atlantic—20 acres in Palm Beach, one-fifteenth of the priciest island in America down the coast therefrom, another $100 estate along Biscayne Bay slightly further south from there, to say nothing of his $100 million retreat in the Hamptons—as well as a place by the Pacific in Hawaii, when on the other side of the pond the only place he has to call his own is Charles de Gaulle’s old digs in central London (also costing in excess of $100 million).

But where can Ken catch some rays when in Blighty? I mean, let’s be honest: neither Brighton nor Blackpool are exactly the equivalents of south Florida or Southampton or the Big Island. Luckily, just a hop across the Channel and then the entirety of France, there’s a place befitting Griffin’s tastes and budget.

Griffin’s latest target: St. Tropez, where the financier recently purchased a lavish roughly 2-acre waterfront estate with at least four structures for more than $90 million…. The main property, known as Domaine de la Capilla, was previously owned by celebrity photographer and heir to an industrial fortune Gunter Sachs, perhaps best known as the onetime husband of actress Brigitte Bardot….

The property is on Tahiti Beach, at the northern end of St. Tropez’s Pampelonne Beach. The area has long attracted the rich and famous, who are seduced by the glitz and glamour of the French Riviera, with its beaches, picturesque coastline, nightlife and yachting. Bardot’s iconic role in the 1956 film “And God Created Woman” helped cement the town’s appeal to a global audience.

It sounds very nice. But two acres is smaller than any of Ken’s other sunny escapes. And we know how much he hates feeling crowded on the sand.

The property is in a small enclave with just a handful of homes. It is unclear if Griffin plans to make offers on any of the other homes there. Griffin’s plans for the properties weren’t immediately clear. He declined to comment.

Ken Griffin Makes Another Major Real Estate Play. This Time in St Tropez. [WSJ]

What we didn’t know what that Cohen’s rival for both art and talent is also a fan of the globular, or of petty billionaire failsons, or both.

Ken Griffin raised his stake in Sphere Entertainment to 5.3%, according to a Monday SEC filing. The hedge fund titan previously owned 1.6% of the Sphere through his investment firm Citadel but added more than 900,000 shares since April 1, and now holds 1.5 million shares….

[James] Dolan recently signed three-year contract extensions to continue to run Sphere, MSG Sports and MSG Entertainment…. Sphere’s stock rose 4% on Monday and is up 32% year-to-date.

Citadel’s Ken Griffin Boosts Stake in Jim Dolan’s Sphere [Sportico via Yahoo!]

It’s also safe to say that Ken Griffin doesn’t need quite as much space in Chicago as he’s currently got. He doesn’t live there anymore, after all, and, frankly, he wonders how or why anyone still does. He can jog perfectly well along his quarter mile of private beach in Palm Beach, and ride his bike around Star Island in Miami—and do both of those things in February without freezing any intimate parts of his anatomy off.

Further, it’s safe to say that even with all of that money and a bunch of business that print even more of it, the naming rights to museums, Republican congresspeople, sweet office space in his new hometown and, most recently, $45 million stegosaurus skeletons don’t pay for themselves. Alas, unloading some more of his unused pieds-a-terre in the bargain-basement Windy City—even the priciest among them—won't go an awful long way towards paying for them, either.

For the first time, billionaire Ken Griffin has publicly placed on the market his top-floor condominium on the 38th floor of the Gold Coast building at 9 W. Walton St. He is seeking $11 million for it….

Since 2022, Griffin has been trying to sell — with some success — the numerous luxury condos that he has owned in the Park Tower, the Waldorf Astoria and at 9 W. Walton. Up to now, however, he only has listed two of the four floors he owns at 9 W. Walton, but not the top floor….

Beyond his holdings in the building at 9 W. Walton, Griffin has the 9,250-square-foot, 67th-floor full-floor penthouse in the Park Tower for sale for $15.75 million. He previously sold the 8,000-square-foot, 66th-floor full-floor penthouse in the Park Tower last year for $11.2 million to retired filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson — who also own the full-floor unit on the 65th floor. Also, Griffin sold his 7,400-square-foot full-floor unit on the 37th floor of the Waldorf Astoria for $10.225 million in October 2022 to a still-unidentified buyer who bought it through an opaque ownership vehicle.

Billionaire Ken Griffin lists Gold Coast condo for $11M [Chicago Tribune]
Citadel’s Ken Griffin buys a stegosaurus for $45 million in a record auction sale [CNBC]
Ken Griffin gives over $20mn to US Republican fundraising committees [FT]

And now, according to the not-entirely-unbiased team at the Daily Caller, the modern-day e-Der Stürmer founded by Carlson, we know who we have to thank for those delicious, if disturbing, text messages: Citadel Investment Group founder and Ron DeSantis stan Ken Griffin’s ex-wife.

Fox News’ Chief Legal Counsel Viet Dinh allegedly called a close associate of Carlson’s on May 3 asking to have a message relayed to Carlson. Dinh expressed regret at how the previous week had played out in the media, according to two sources, reassuring Carlson’s camp that Fox News had “not authorized” the leaks that led to several negative headlines…. Critically, he also confessed, according to the sources, that the network’s leaders suspected a member of the board of directors had been speaking to the press about Tucker without authorization.

Carlson’s camp suspected either former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan or Anne Dias, a wealthy hedge fund manager, according to a source. Both were appointed to Fox’s board in March of 2019. Carlson’s inner circle has since ruled out Ryan, according to sources, and now believes it was Dias who talked to the press.

For its part, Fox says Carlson's inner circle's conclusions are about as reliable as anything Carlson said on their network over the last 14 years.

"Any clam that Anne Dias has spoken to the media on these matters is absolutely false."

Fox News Lawyer’s Phone Call Is At The Center Of Tucker’s Breach Of Contract Case [Daily Caller]

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Above all, however, he is a stickler for the secrecy of the things that make him a lot of money, willing to go to extraordinary lengths (or make his employees do so) to keep things like Citadel’s high-frequency trading code, algorithms and the like properly proprietary. So concerned with keeping such things under his control is Griffin that he’d even rather  violators of his pecuniary privacy go unpunished than further risk its security. And surely, you’d think, after getting a young coder locked up for three years for stealing his secrets, among all of the other things Griffin has done to harry and punish those he believes to have wronged him similarly, the message would have gotten across. Alas, apparently if still allegedly, not:

[Citadel Securities] claims Leonard Lancia and Alex Casimo started raising capital and building their high-frequency trading firm, Portofino Technologies, while still working at Citadel Securities with access to proprietary information…. The pair “engaged in a brazen scheme to steal Citadel Securities’ trade secrets, lie to their Citadel Securities colleagues and raid the ranks of Citadel Securities’ employees,” the firm wrote in the complaint, filed in state court in New York….

In an internal investigation, Citadel Securities found messages and a pitch deck from Portofino’s early fundraising efforts, months before the pair announced their intent to leave the firm, according to the complaint. In one exchange, Casimo offered a potential partner information related to “latency considerations for HFT trading,” the firm alleges in the suit.

Citadel Securities previously filed a non-compete complaint against another former employee who later joined Portofino, Vincent Prieur.

Citadel Securities Alleges Ex-Employees Stole Trade Secrets [Bloomberg]

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Well, the CME Group—having already dropped the “Chicago” from its name in favor of an ostensibly meaningless initialism—doesn’t feel obliged to put up any such pretenses.

“We have sold all of our property in the state of Illinois, in the city of Chicago,” [CME CEO Terry] Duffy said. “We don’t own anything any longer.”

“In our leases, we have a language in there that says if there’s something that’s ill-conceived from the city or the state, that our leases are null and void,” Duffy said. “We’re in a very strong position. If we had to leave, we could leave.”

Well, that sounds like very slippery language for a binding contract like a lease, but Duffy’s pretty sure that new Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan for a financial transactions tax would trigger it.

“Mr. Johnson has no legal authority to impose a transaction tax on my business,” said Duffy, adding that fighting crime should be a bigger focus for the new mayor.

Well, Duffy’s only (a very rich, white) human: How long could he really have gone on without raising the “c” word, even as a non-sequitur? Surely he could just close a few more schools and libraries, or maybe sell off Grant Park, to pay for those new cops Duffy and his ilk say are so desperately needed, rather than asking them for help.

CME CEO Duffy Says Firm Is Prepared to Leave Chicago ‘If We Had To’ [Bloomberg]

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But as Ken Griffin well knows from his now 10-year-effort to cobble together a suitably large and grand piece of sandbar in Palm Beach, demolish all of the eight-figure houses sitting thereon and building something more to his taste in their place, dispossessing less but still very rich people from their place in the sun takes time. And, as far as we know, Griffin currently owns no more than seven of the 45 lots on Star Island, so he’s got a ways to go. And he’s not just going to live in one of those hovels fit for mere deci- or centi-millionaires, confronted every morning on his way out to the causeway with his inability to make all he surveys his own, his only solace being the knowledge that patience and (more) money will win out in the end. Certainly not. He’ll be content to observe the goings-on at Star from the upper floors of the Citadel tower. Until then, he’s got other accommodations to choose from.

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin is the mystery buyer behind last week’s $106.9 million deal for Adrienne Arsht’s waterfront Miami estate…. The deal, which set a record for single-family home sales in Miami-Dade County, gives the Citadel founder and CEO a waterfront home about 2 miles south of his future office in Miami….

The two homes on the property, which includes 400 feet of bay frontage, combine for 12 bedrooms and 13.5 bathrooms across more than 25,000 square feet.

I mean, he guesses that’ll do for now. Plus, it’s got a fun bit of historical irony to keep Griffin and his plutocrat guests amused will he waits.

The second house, built in 1913 by William Jennings Bryan, former U.S. Secretary of State, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ken Griffin buyer of Adrienne Arsht’s $107M estate: sources [TheRealDeal]

"Miami is a vibrant, growing metropolis that embodies the American Dream. I am excited to have recently moved to Miami with my family….”

Which is a bold statement for a man who not that long ago forced his ex-wife to stay in Chicago. Oh, and also: We (and, eventually, Ken himself) told you so.

Thursday, in a letter to employees, hedge fund manager and billionaire Ken Griffin announced that, after more than 30 years in Chicago, his investment firm Citadel would be relocating to Miami.

Mr. Griffin said the new headquarters would be on Brickell Bay, “in the heart of Miami’s booming financial district.”

Seems like KG’s recent philanthropy was more than a bit self-interested. Anyway, in an uncharacteristically gracious approach, Griffin said that Chicago had been “a remarkable home for Citadel” and didn’t mention his real reasons for ditching the Windy City: The stubborn refusal of Illinois voters—even Republican ones—to do as he pleased, and his argument that crime has made Chicago an even worse place to live than Afghanistan (a comparison which is not aging well). Which is probably for the best, because the latter, at least, is bullshit: Crime in Miami is every bit as bad if not worse than in Chicago. And it’s also probably why Griffin is not going the full Icahn and forcing his underlings to get used humidity and hurricanes, or even pretending South Florida is where all or even most of his Chicago-based team are clamoring to live.

“Chicago will continue to be important to the future of Citadel, as many of our colleagues have deep ties to Illinois,” Mr. Griffin wrote. “Over the past year, however, many of our Chicago teams have asked to relocate to Miami, New York and our other offices around the world.”

The move is expected to be a multiyear process and will involve developer Sterling Bay and architecture firms to design a new office tower. There are currently about 1,000 employees in Chicago and many are expected to remain.

"We recognize that the choice of where to call home involves personal, family, school and other considerations, and we will provide comprehensive support to meet the needs of our teams."

Ken Griffin Moving Citadel From Chicago to Miami Following Crime Complaints [WSJ]
Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Ken Griffin Moving Citadel HQ Out of Chicago, Into Miami [NBC 5 Chicago]

“I grew up in a world where we were children of mutually assured destruction,” says Griffin, 53. “It was ‘get under your desk to brace for the impact of a nuclear blast.’ To see us return to the rhetoric of that moment is a huge setback….”

“The continued unfolding of this catastrophe in Ukraine is a giant unforced error by mankind,” he says.

And, as usual in Griffin’s mind, it’s the Democrats’ fault.

The unprecedented moves by Western powers to shut off Russia’s access to capital markets heralds the weaponization of the dollar, he says.

There will be serious repercussions, with Russia, China and others seeing no option but to diversify away from the greenback. De-dollarization by a China-Russia-Iran-Brazil trading bloc could easily morph into the exclusion of American companies and investors from fast-growing markets. “Have we laid the seeds for the setting of the American era of technological superiority?” Griffin asks.

And, as one particular Democrat might put it, that’s something Griffin might not be entirely objective about. But no matter: There’s at least one very good thing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its sanctions-filled aftermath for Griffin: He might get a pretty decent soccer team out of it.

Sky News has learnt that the Ricketts family and the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin have hired Jefferies, the US-based investment bank, to advise on and potentially help finance a formal offer for the Blues.

Jefferies' appointment, alongside that of Lazard - another adviser to the Ricketts-Griffin bid - underlines how Wall Street banks are jockeying for roles on what could be the most lucrative sale of a sports franchise in history.

Billionaire Trader Ken Griffin Navigates A Flock Of Black Swans [Forbes]
Tale of Chinese spying the latest front in Pritzker-Griffin feud [Crain’s]
Chelsea FC sale: Chicago Cubs-owners fortify bid with new bank signing [Sky News]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The American hedge fund which owns AC Milan is among the minority backers of the property developer Nick Candy's takeover bid for Chelsea Football Club.

Sky News has learnt that an affiliate of Elliott Management, the New York-based investor, has agreed to inject a multimillion pound sum into the London side as part of Mr Candy's offer.

The owners of the Chicago Cubs, the Ricketts family, are set to launch a bid for Chelsea after joining forces with the billionaire hedge fund tycoon Ken Griffin…. The Ricketts family have a longstanding interest in Chelsea, having tried to buy the club in 2018, and are confident they will succeed this time. They feel that teaming up with Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel Asset Management, will boost their chances. Griffin, 53, is valued by Forbes at $26.5bn (£20.2bn) and is operating in a private capacity.

Chelsea sale: AC Milan owner Elliott backs Candy offer for London club [Sky News]
Chicago Cubs owners and Ken Griffin join forces in bid to buy Chelsea [Guardian]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

“I never thought we’d let our ownership stakes be dictated by a poll on Twitter,” the hedge fund manager said Wednesday at the New York Times DealBook conference. “We live in a whole different world.”

And while the Citadel chief may shake his head a bit about Elon Musk’s antics, he has to say he understands where the guy is coming from vis-à-vis wanting to get the hell out of a high-tax state and into a low-tax, poorly-governed one (although not the bit about owning no houses, as Griffin’s plan to acquire the entirety of Miami’s Star Island continues expensively apace).

Griffin, for his part, said he likes to see companies controlled by their founders, and that he doesn’t want tax policy to drive “great entrepreneurs” like Musk out of their roles.

Anyway, in order to truly prepare for this bizarro world, Ken needs some help, and also $1.15 billion, which he’s happy to accept from an anti-dollar jihadist if that’s what it takes.

Venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital and cryptocurrency investor Paradigm have agreed to invest $1.15 billion in the Chicago-based firm, the company told The Wall Street Journal. Sequoia partner Alfred Lin will also join Citadel Securities’ board…. The deal will give Citadel Securities capital to continue expanding globally, the company said, and could be a precursor to an initial public offering for the business.

Citadel Securities to Receive First Outside Investment [WSJ]
Who’s the Chicago billionaire behind the record $75 million Star Island home buy? [Miami Herald]
Griffin Calls Musk’s Tesla Poll a ‘Whole Different World’ [Bloomberg]

David Cho [will] start at $43 billion Citadel on Jan. 3 as deputy head of security, according to a spokesman for the firm.

Of course, Cho will find some familiar faces at Citadel down in the interrogation rooms.

The Blackstone Group is also doing some hiring, and it’s also going with some folks who know how to handle difficult bosses.

David Ben-Ur, who managed [Bruce] Kovner's family money, will join as chief investment officer of the unit's hedge fund solutions business. Atish Nigam, who worked at [David] Tepper's hedge fund Appaloosa Management, will become chief investment officer of the hedge fund unit's special situations investing business.

Biden’s Top Secret Service Agent Cho to Join Hedge Fund Citadel [Bloomberg]
Blackstone hires senior executives for its hedge fund unit [Reuters]

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Wall Street legend Leon Cooperman… fell off The Forbes 400 for the first time in years.

Nor can he blame the global pandemic he’s not so sure about or the fact that he’s technically retired, because neither impeded his peers’ ballooning bank accounts.

The 25 wealthiest hedge funders are worth a combined $220 billion, up an impressive $35 billion from last year…. Eighty three-year old Jim Simons, founder of quantitative trading firm Renaissance Technologies, is yet again the richest hedge fund manager in America, for the 4th year in a row, according to Forbes. Though he technically retired more than a decade ago, Simons remains co-chairman at Renaissance….

Even more galling is that those of vastly lesser intellectual means than he managed to hold on to their places. Any chance he could get that $100 million back, Saint Barnabas? No? Well, it would still leave him $300 million shy anyway, and at least he has something to take about with his old phone buddy and fellow grievance machine Donald Trump, who we’re sure is taking this news in stride.

Donald Trump is worth an estimated $2.5 billion, leaving him $400 million short of the cutoff to make this year’s Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people. The real estate mogul is just as wealthy as he was a year ago, when he stood at No. 339 on the ranking, but he is down $600 million since the start of the pandemic.

If only he hadn’t been so skeptical of cryptos or COVID vaccines, both of which minted their fair share of new members of the 400.

As far as those we’re concerned with, though, there’s not much new to report. Only one—John Paulson, of course—lost money in what seems likely to be his last year on the list, although it must be said he’s making the most of it and going out in style. As well as hedge fund managers did over the past year, they did relatively poorly vis-à-vis their fellow multi-billionaires, as most lost ground on the 400. The richest 10 hedge fund managers this year are the same as last (with the exception of Two Sigma’s John Overdeck and David Siegel, who dropped out of a tie for the last spot with David Shaw). Carl Icahn bounced back from a disappointing 2020 to leapfrog Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen, and Izzy Englander and Chase Coleman each padded their wealth by more than $3 billion to overtake a stagnant George Soros, as did Ray Dalio, although he’s still got a ways to go to catch the aforementioned retiree. But none did quite so well as Coatue Management’s Philippe Lafont, who made at least $4.5 billion over the last year to enter the list in fine style. Blackstone Group founded Steve Schwarzman, however, blows that out of the water: His net worth nearly doubled to more than $37 billion, putting him in the top 20 overall. (Oh, god, don’t tell Leon about that one.)

On the other side, joining Cooperman and Trump among the have-nots, are Ron Perelman, a fixture among the 400 for even longer than Trump; hedge funder Noam Gottesman; private equity magnates Jim Coulter, Alec Gores, Bruce Karsh, Howard Marks; man of many enthusiasms Jeff Gundlach; and Nikola Motors founder Trevor Milton, whose frankly has bigger problems to worry about.

The Forbes 400 [Forbes]
The Richest Hedge Fund Managers On The 2021 Forbes 400 List [Forbes]
The Richest Private Equity Billionaires On The Forbes 400 List 2021 [Forbes]
Donald Trump Falls Off The Forbes 400 For First Time In 25 Years [Forbes]
Oprah, Trump And 49 Other Billionaires Who Dropped Out Of The Forbes 400 Ranks [Forbes]
Six New Crypto Billionaires Join The 2021 Forbes 400 [Forbes]
Moderna’s vaccine profits propel three new names onto Forbes’s list of the 400 richest Americans. [NYT]

“It’s becoming ever more difficult to have this as our global headquarters, a city which has so much violence,” [Ken] Griffin said. “I mean Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem.”

Griffin said he personally saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in, adding that someone “tried to carjack the security detail” that sits outside his house…. “It just tells you like how deep crime runs in this city,” Griffin said. “There is nowhere, where you can feel safe today walking home at 9:30 at night and you worry about your kids coming to and from school.”

“That’s no way for our city to exist,” Griffin said….

“I told [Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker] to deploy the National Guard and he goes, ‘It won’t look good for there to be men and women on Michigan Avenue with assault weapons,’” Griffin claimed. “If that saves the life of a child, I don’t care. And he doesn’t care.”

Griffin warned if the city doesn’t “change course,” it’s only a matter of years before Citadel’s global headquarters leaves Chicago.

Having spent so much time away from the Windy City in recent years, Griffin’s only now realizing just how big a shithole it is. Not that some of the other places he’s hanging out and spending so many hundreds of millions of dollars in are any great shakes, either.

Griffin didn’t say where he might consider moving his global headquarters to, but he was asked if New York City could serve as an “antidote to the dysfunction” of Chicago.

“You guys need some new medicine, too, because some of the same problems that we have faced is now unfolding in New York,” Griffin said. “The path New York is on is a scary path.”

You guys: We all know where Citadel is moving.

Griffin’s $5 million gift on April 30 tops donations to [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis’s political action committee this year.

Which is not to say that Griffin loves everything about his native state’s leader. It’s just that actively working to increase the risk of death to one’s most vulnerable people is apparently not as bad as, well, not doing that (despite Griffin’s claim, Pritzker did, in fact, call in the National Guard—leading Pritzker's spokesman to rather acidly note that Griffin "lied to Congress last year and he is lying to Chicagoans now"—and Florida’s homicide rate isn’t that much better than Illinois’, and twice as bad as New York’s), and also trying to raise Ken Griffin’s taxes.

“I’ve been frustrated with his position on masks because it has overshadowed his messaging on vaccinations,” Griffin, the founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities, said…. “He’s caught himself up in a political maelstrom of putting the concept of personal freedom first and foremost around masks, and I understand the principle. But Florida’s a really diverse state. He should have let each county make a decision on its own.”

KG was really in fine form, it must be said.

"I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed towards making the United States stronger," the hedge fund billionaire said at the Economic Club of Chicago.

"It's a jihadist call that we don't believe in the dollar," he said Monday. "What a crazy concept this is, that we as a country embrace so many bright, young, talented people to come up with a replacement for our reserve currency."

That being said, much like making a man whose recklessness he pretends to deplore president, he’s not exactly ruling out taking up the jihadist call if it suits him.

Griffin said SEC Chairman Gary Gensler was "spot-on" when he argued crypto will become mainstream only if regulators lay out clear rules.... Citadel Securities will trade cryptocurrencies once regulation kicks in, as that would meet the needs of its brokerage partners, he said.

If you’re wondering what’s making Ken so expansive and loquacious, well:

Citadel’s multistrategy flagship fund Wellington gained 7.8% in September, bringing its year-to-date performance to 18.5%, according to a person familiar with the returns…. Citadel’s other multistrategy fund, Tactical Trading, gained 3.9% in September and is up 14.1% this year.

Hedging his bets? Illinois’ richest person compares Chicago to Afghanistan, hints of moving firm’s headquarters [Chicago Sun-Times]
Ken Griffin knocks Pritzker — and Trump [Politico]
Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin slams crypto as a 'jihadist call' against the dollar - and says regulation will oust those looking to make a quick buck [BI]
Griffin, DeSantis’s Top Donor, Wishes He’d Stay Out of Mask Wars [Bloomberg]
Ken Griffin’s Citadel flagship hedge fund returns 8% in September during market sell-off [CNBC]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

As things l’affaire GameStop really ramped up, someone at Citadel (the names have been redacted) noted to Robinhood’s deputy general counsel, “we obviously have a strong relationship between the two firms.” The day before the restrictions were imposed, Robinhood’s top brass had a 5 p.m. chat with Citadel, with founder Vlad Tenev wondering if “Maybe this would be a good time for me to chat with Ken griffin.” Why ever would that be, Vlad? An hour and a half after the call began, Robinhood President Jim Swartout said in an internal chat, “you wouldnt believe the convo we had with Citadel. total mess.”

It is indeed, Jim, for in spite of your later and potentially exculpatory bitterness toward Citadel (“I am beyond disappointed in how this went down. It’s difficult to have a partnership when these kind of things go down this way.”), Ken Griffin & co. feel compelled to deign to address it.

Citadel Securities in a statement Tuesday rejected “Internet conspiracies and Twitter mobs” that have again accused the firm of pushing Robinhood Markets Inc. and other brokerages to limit trading in GameStop and other meme stocks on Jan. 28, a move that resulted in losses for many small investors.

"Citadel Securities never requested, intimated, agreed or otherwise sought to limit or to restrict the trading of such securities," Citadel Securities said in a statement to Reuters on Tuesday.

Citadel Securities Faces New Pressure Over GameStop Frenzy [WSJ]
Citadel Securities denies involvement in 'meme stock' trading restrictions [Reuters]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

But Melvin didn’t lose more than half of its money in a single month on a single poorly-timed put alone. Oh, no: It took almost a dozen.

Melvin’s combined SEC filings for the fourth quarter listed put options on stocks that it hadn’t previously disclosed betting against, including Beyond Meat, Helen of Troy Ltd., First Majestic Silver Corp. and CryoPort Inc. Yet the shares all started surging around late January, during the height of the retail-trader mania, even without any direct link to Plotkin’s hedge fund. The moves confounded Wall Street and even the companies themselves.

Other short bets, such as ADT Inc., Macerich Co., and United Natural Foods Inc., hadn’t shown up in Melvin’s filings for at least a year. Those shares also moved sharply higher in late January -- Macerich, for example, jumped 75% in the three days through Jan. 27, only to tumble within a week.

Now, Ken Griffin may think the world of Gabe Plotkin, but he knows an opportunity for an asymmetrical deal in his favor when he sees one. And he took it.

Ken Griffin’s Citadel LLC and Citadel partners are planning to redeem roughly $500 million of the $2 billion they put in Melvin Capital Management after Melvin got slammed by bad short bets on GameStop Corp. and other soaring stocks, said people familiar with the matter….

In return for the rare intra-month investments, the two firms received non-controlling revenue shares in Melvin for three years…. Citadel will keep its revenue share, some of the people familiar with the matter said. It couldn’t be determined Friday if Citadel plans to redeem additional money later, but a person familiar with Citadel said it expected to remain a large investor….

Melvin has produced a 25% return since Feb. 1 through the end of July, making it one of the top performing hedge funds for the period. But its losses in the immediate wake of Citadel’s and Point72’s investments cut significantly into those funds’ gains on their January wagers on Melvin, said people familiar with the matter…. Mr. Plotkin has told people he didn’t necessarily expect Citadel to keep its entire investment in Melvin long term, said people briefed on the conversations.

That being said, Plotkin & co. clearly think they’re not doomed.

A person familiar with Melvin said it plans to replace the outgoing money with investments from new and existing clients.

Melvin has raised roughly $1 billion in recent months, helping bring its assets under management to more than $11 billion, and it has made new hires. It has also signed a lease for a Miami Beach, Fla., office that it will keep in addition to its New York office.

Citadel to Redeem About $500 Million From Melvin Capital [WSJ]
Melvin Ramped Up New Bets Against Stocks Before 55% January Rout [Bloomberg]

Luckily, Anne Dias learned hedge fund management from the very best, and key negotiation and motivation techniques from her ex-husband. And so, after two years of laying the groundwork, she’s ready to get back into the game that he forced her out of in the first place.

Dias, 50, began fundraising last month for a long-short strategy to be managed by her Aragon Global Management. The New York-based firm, with roots dating back two decades, has been operating as a family office for her personal wealth in recent years…. She… worked as a portfolio manager for industry heavyweights including George Soros and Andreas Halvorsen before starting her own firm in 2001 with seeding from another billionaire, Julian Robertson….

It wasn’t until May that Aragon filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to become a registered money manager, a status that permits the firm to accept outside capital. The registration took effect in June, when Aragon Partners, the onshore version of the long-short fund, also began raising money.

Anne Dias Returns to Money Management With New Long-Short Fund [Bloomberg]

Thing is, the only way Griffin was going to get legal satisfaction over the matter would have been to let other people—judges and lawyers, specifically—see the secrets he works so hard to keep secret so as to allow them to determine just how secret the secrets were, because GSA rather irritatingly insisted that there wasn’t really anything very secret about the things it had seen, regardless of how secret it aimed to keep the fact that it was trying to see them, and anyway it wasn’t trying to launch a high-frequency trading strategy anyway, in spite of requesting a trading plan from a high-frequency trader. And so, unusually, to preserve whatever secrecy was left, and unusually in a legal battle over his beloved secrets, Griffin has apparently decided, in this one instance, that discretion is the better part of valor.

Ken Griffin’s market maker and GSA Capital Partners LLP reached a confidential settlement, GSA said in a statement Thursday…. The two firms “recognize and respect the importance and value of the other’s rights over their confidential information and intellectual property,” GSA said.

Citadel Securities didn’t respond to a request for comment. The firm was seeking at least $40 million in damages.

Citadel Securities Settles With Fund Over Secret Algorithm [Bloomberg]

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But, well, how good? Bloomberg calculated it was really, really, really good for Coleman, who it said earned a cool $3 billion all for himself (and his wife’s handbag collection). The retired Simons smoked the rest of the competition with $2.6 billion, followed by Englander on $2.2 billion and Mandel at $1.8 billion (alongside Ken Griffin). But hold on! Someone thinks those numbers are a little off. And that someone is the dean of how much money did hedge fund managers make last year, Institutional Investors’ Stephen Taub, and he’s got a little lesson to teach the Bloomberg upstarts in this, his 20th year marinating in more money than any reporter could possibly imagine in any tangible way.

Volatility increases and stock markets soar — regardless of their connection to the real economy — a select group of men (and yes, it is all men on II’s 2020 Rich List) stand to make bank. It may not be seemly, but it remains fact. And Steve Taub, alone among his peers, consistently gets it right.

So what does Professor Taub’s markup of Bloomberg’s work look like? Well, they nailed Simons and Griffin, and got close enough with Steve Cohen, Philippe Lafont and Bill Ackman. But, uh, have they heard of David Tepper? Because by Taub’s count, he made $1.7 billion last year. And what about Scott Shleifer? They know that more than one person works at Tiger Global, yes? And that the other one earned a cool $1.5 billion in 2020? Guess not. You know who else did? Andreas Halvorsen, which is $577 million more than Bloomberg had.

Oh, and speaking of Tiger Global, Chase Coleman certainly had a very good year. Just not as good as Bloomberg figured: He made a half-billion less, good enough only for third place rather than first. But all that pales in comparison to whatever arithmetic atrocity gave them a paltry $2.2 billion for Englander. Why, with that sort of paltry payday the Millennium chief can hardly buy up the necessary real estate for he and the wife to hide from their family. Luckily for him, the folks at Bloomberg don’t know what they’re doing, because at $3.8 billion in 2020 earnings, Izzy can not only buy as much of the Upper East Side as he needs, but he comfortably slots in at first by roughly a Bill Ackman, give or take.

All in all, Bloomberg: D-. Get it together or get out of the game.

The 20^th Annual Rich List, the Definitive Ranking of What Hedge Fund Managers Earned in 2020 [II]

"The recent short squeeze in certain securities is nothing new," Loeb wrote. "As targeted securities have started to come back to earth, wiping out fortunes on the way down as they did on the way up, we can see that this was a bubble no different than other manias over time, going back to the Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania in the 17th century. What is different today, however, is the rapidity of the rise and collapse of bubbles, fueled by retail trading platforms and social media. Large short interests were also an accelerant in this conflagration…."

"It is tempting to think that lower nets imply lower risk, but recent events are a stark reminder that leverage, in all its forms, is a double-edged sword," Loeb said.

The short squeeze is no more. Shares have settled at around $50, not $1,000, so if you got in by mid-January you still did pretty well for yourself: not as well as Fidelity did, but much better than GameStop itself did. And that, combined with other recent events, can mean only one thing: We unfortunately have to talk about bitcoin again, again.

Bank of New York MellonCorp. , the nation’s oldest bank… said Thursday it will hold, transfer and issue bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on behalf of its asset-management clients…. “Digital assets are becoming part of the mainstream,” said Roman Regelman, chief executive of BNY Mellon’s asset-servicing and digital businesses.

Sigh.

“We’ve done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should they ask to be paid in bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they ask to be [paid] in bitcoin and whether we need to have bitcoin on our balance sheet should that happen,” [Twitter CFO Ned] Segal said. “It’s something we continue to study and look at, we want to be thoughtful about over time, but we haven’t made any changes yet.”

Say what you will about GameStop, but at least it’s not Ether. Can we please—PLEASE—talk about something else the r/WallStreetBets hordes and their acolytes might do with the GME winnings or good money thrown after bad in its wake? Anything at all?

Wall Street has found a combination even more faddish than blank-check companies and electric vehicles: Blank-check companies and Jetsons-style flying taxis.

Nope, we’ve changed our minds… ugh, it’s too late.

On Wednesday, electric air-taxi developer Archer announced a merger with Atlas Crest Investment, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, led by billionaire investment banker Ken Moelis…. The SPAC frenzy of recent months has focused on electric vehicles as well as other “cool” startups such as space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic….

It is doubtful that the Uber-style air taxis that many backers have in mind can develop anytime soon. For one, these vehicles will need dedicated landing pads. Also, a joint analysis by Ford and the University of Michigan found that a fully loaded eVTOL vehicle reduces carbon emissions in trips above 62 miles, but ends up polluting more than gasoline cars if flown for under 22 miles. This limits the technology to the kind of airport-feeder traffic that United envisages.

We hate to go all Coop on you guys here, but seriously: This will end in tears, but almost certainly not in the flying cars we’ve been promised for 180 years.

Bitcoin to Come to America’s Oldest Bank, BNY Mellon [WSJ]
Twitter Has Studied Using Bitcoin, CFO Says [WSJ]
Next Stop for Electric-Vehicle SPAC Mania: the Jetsons [WSJ]
Citadel’s Ken Griffin Expected to Testify at House GameStop Hearing [Bloomberg]
Hedge fund honcho Dan Loeb of Third Point talks short selling madness [Fox Business]
Fidelity Cashes In Most of GameStop Stake [WSJ]
How GameStop missed out on capitalizing on the Reddit rally [Reuters]

Since then, Griffin’s appetite for residential living space has only grown, and with Citadel Miami in the offing, 21 acres and counting in Palm Beach and 12,000 square feet at Faena House simply were not going to cut it, especially since the latter turned out to be a real dump. All of Star Island, on the other hand, might just fit the bill. So while he methodically works to dispossess the owners of the other 41 plots on Star—should we just start calling it Citadel Island now?—he feels secure enough in his future there to rid himself of the penthouses four miles away before things get worse there.

Griffin sold his larger penthouse for $35 million and is in contract to sell his second penthouse, which is on the market for $12.5 million…. Even if Griffin, the founder and CEO of his Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, sold the second penthouse at asking price, he would still sell the units at a loss of at least $12.5 million….

In September, the condo association sued the developer, general contractor and subcontractors for a laundry list of alleged construction defects at the 17-story building, including a broken elevator in the penthouse, missing art, cracking in the concrete and chalky paint.

Some owners at Faena House, including Griffin, also have opposed the planned development of a 250-foot tall tower next door….

Billionaire Ken Griffin parting with Faena House penthouses in Miami Beach at a loss [TheRealDeal]

Citadel’s founder made clear that he is not a hardliner, and indeed supportive of certain tax hikes to counteract the federal government’s current radical deficit levels.

“I would have the capital gains rate be lower, and corporates pay taxes at the corporate level,” Griffin told Tudor Jones at the private event. Investors would still be paying indirectly, as part owners in the corporations shouldered with a fiscal burden, he pointed out.

Of course, this isn’t pure selfishness on the part of a man who’s purchased more than a billion dollars’ worth of houses and apartments in the last few years. It’s patriotism.

Doing away with the low rate for long-term capital gains, which many professional investors pay rather than regular income tax, would injure America itself, Griffin said…. “We’re going to see liquidity be lower, multiples be lower, the cost of capital be higher, less job formation,” if investor gains simply counted as income, Griffin predicted. “A multiyear headwind? Absolutely. When taxes are at 39 percent, you’re not going to sell your winners. You’re going to stay in those positions longer than you otherwise would have. That means there’s less capital flowing from those companies to the next new idea. That’s heartbreaking. Part of the reason that the U.S. economy works so damn well is that we move our capital as a nation to the next new idea continuously... It’s the mobility of the capital in our system that makes that happen.”

And how, exactly, would that manifest itself? Well, uh, not really at all, but, still, please don’t do it.

Should a new U.S. administration make that tax code change, “stock prices will be lower, but not as much lower as you would think, because so much of the equity market is owned by players that aren’t paying taxes — pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutions.”

And certainly don’t raise his taxes even indirectly the help those who are actually suffering from the effects of a global pandemic except in a way that would directly benefit him.

But Tudor Jones’ suggestion of further economic stimulus, perhaps another round of unemployment top-ups, made Griffin balk. He would happily pay to get Americans back to work — but not to keep them out of it…. “We can’t let the American worker’s skills fade away. We want to pull people back into the workforce as fast as we possibly can to protect their future income stream. You and I would both in a heartbeat be in favor of stimulus to do so, I believe.”

Nice try, Paul: You may be doing your best to keep both yourself and your friends from that march to the wall, but Ken Griffin would prefer not to live in a world in which capital paid more taxes than people actually working, however few of those there might be.

In Leaked Remarks Among Hedge Fund Managers, Citadel’s Ken Griffin Opens Up on Taxes [II]

Anyway, all of the above and whatever else we don’t know about are definitely not enough for Ken Griffin.

In Los Angeles, luxury real-estate agents said Mr. Griffin has eyed several properties, including a $125 million Bel-Air mansion owned by plastic surgeon and rhinoplasty specialist Dr. Raj Kanodia and Owlwood, a historic Holmby Hills estate once owned by Sonny and Cher and listed for $115 million….

Mr. Griffin has also eyed an apartment at the Peninsula London, an under-construction development less than 2 miles away [from his Carlton Place mansion]…. He could “choose depending on the mood he’s in which one he wants to stay in,” he joked of Mr. Griffin.

(Oh, and also: We were totally right about that other place in Miami Beach Griffin just bought to go along those aforementioned penthouses four miles away:)

In August, Mr. Griffin spent a combined $69.5 million to purchase three sites on Miami’s Star Island, a tiny enclave of roughly 30 homes and whose residents have included Rosie O’Donnell and Gloria Estefan…. A person familiar with Mr. Griffin’s search said he often buys properties near his companies’ offices or family, and said his recent purchase on Star Island came in advance of Citadel opening an office in Miami in the next year or two.

Nor is Ken focused exclusively on real-estate dominance.

Electronic trading giant Citadel Securities will bolster its already huge presence at the New York Stock Exchange by buying the NYSE market-making business of smaller rival IMC Financial Markets…. If it is completed, Citadel Securities would oversee trading for more than half of the securities listed on the exchange. It would also reduce the number of DMM firms at the Big Board to three from four, potentially raising concerns that the DMM business is becoming overly concentrated….

Citadel Securities trades more than one in five of the shares that change hands in the U.S. stock market each day. It

And just how much will it cost for Griffin to become the undisputed king of the castle of capitalism? Well, a hell of a lot less than he’d spend on an actual castle, that’s for sure.

Terms of the Citadel Securities-IMC transaction weren’t disclosed, but a person familiar with the matter said the price was in the tens of millions of dollars.

How Citadel CEO Ken Griffin Built a $1 Billion Private Property Portfolio [WSJ]
Citadel Securities to Buy NYSE Market-Making Unit of Smaller Rival IMC [WSJ]

You won’t find it at the top of the list, among the Bezoses and former Bezoses and Buffetts. It’s not that the Medallion fund continues to provide Jim Simons with a very comfortable retirement, indeed, or that the coronavirus pandemic has been a $2 billion pain for Ray Dalio. Nor is it that Ken Griffin is $2.3 billion richer, and richer than Steve Cohen at that, or that Carl Icahn, his COVID jollies notwithstanding, is $3.6 billion poorer.

Indeed, you’ll have to scroll past a lot of familiar names and fortunes: Chase Coleman’s is up by more than 50%, Revlon-owner Ron Perelman’s is down by $1.5 billion, Stan Druckenmiller has built a perfect parabolic curve over the last five years, Dan Loeb managed not to lose money last year, and Leon Cooperman is not taking retirement well. You’ll have to go beyond even Forbes’ latest lie about the dear leader, implying the Trump presidency has been even worse for the Trump business than Trump leading it was. You’ll have to go all the way to the bottom, to the 10-way tie for last place. Paupers, you might say, with a mere $2.1 billion apiece. Names you needn’t remember like Peter Thiel’s, because they won’t even be here next year. And perhaps that’s true. But among those names, for the first time since 2015, is one Bill Ackman, a man who just over a year ago was dangerously close to not even being a billionaire anymore. Yes, Virginia: The Ackmanaissance is very real, and poised to power its namesake straight up the Forbes 400 in the years to come.

The Forbes 400 [Forbes]

Well, something in this calculus has changed.

A company tied to billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin paid $37 million for a double-lot on Miami Beach’s Star Island…. Star Island — home to celebrities including Sean “Diddy” Combs, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, and most recently, Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez — is experiencing some resident turnover. Lopez and Rodriguez last week spent $32.5 million for the mansion at 13 Star Island Drive, next to the property that Miller just sold.

Surely, you say, there’s a good explanation for this. For one, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to live next door to the next owners of the New York Mets, if for no other reason than to tweak Steve Cohen again? Plus, he never really gave up on Miami, since the sale of the two aforementioned penthouses did not actually go through. And, really, why not? Griffin owns ridiculously expensive homes in all sorts of cities where he doesn’t spend much time at all, and even owns a ridiculously expensive seaside getaway from the most ridiculously expensive of those.

Well, we here at DB quarantine HQ—a luxurious 1,000-square-foot second-floor apartment with a shared driveway somewhere in between Griffin’s midtown aerie and his Hamptons compound—have a theory of our own. Citadel is, as we say in these days of the plague, becoming ever-more decentralized, with new offices in Austin and now Singapore joining Citadel’s other 15 bases, which include two growing ones in China.

Now, Griffin’s got two homes in the vicinity of Citadel’s second city of New York (and which are convenient enough to its offices in Greenwich) and a rather spectacular new place just a tube ride away (ha ha ha) from its third-most important center, London. And, of course, Griffin’s got the most expensive residence (such as it is) in Citadel’s nominal hometown of Chicago.

But his growing real-estate portfolio in South Florida is entirely of the residential variety: Neither Citadel nor Citadel Securities list an office in the sunshine state. You can chalk up the Palm Beach condo to regular old billionaire stuff, but why the need for all the bedrooms in Miami? Is the Four Seasons Palm Beach simply too uneconomical a future headquarters, and anyway where will all of the Citadelers live after the entirety of Palm Beach is just Mar-a-Lago and the Griffin Estate anyway? Is Citadel planning to join Icahn Enterprises and Appaloosa Management in the home state of Griffin’s favorite U.S. Senator? (tips@dealbreaker.com is the e-mail address to use if you know the answer, by the way.)

Billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin pays $37M for Star Island property [The Real Deal]

But, possibly because New York is so empty these days anyway, Ken Griffin does not need to own all of it, at least not yet. At the very least, he does not require all 414,000 square feet at 220 Central Park South, where unlike in Florida, he will, in fact, have neighbors.

A sprawling penthouse on the top two floors of 220 Central Park South sold for $99.9 million in July, becoming the year’s most expensive closing in New York City…. The month’s other top sales were also at 220 Central Park South: Two full-floor apartments sold for $55.5 million and nearly $54 million, and they, too, went into contract with anonymous buyers before the coronavirus outbreak.

Duplex Sells for Almost $100 Million at 220 Central Park South [NYT]

Billionaire Ken Griffin is adding a Hamptons house to his growing portfolio of trophy real estate, this time buying the oceanfront property of fashion designer Calvin Klein, according to sources familiar with the transaction.

The roughly 7-acre property on coveted Meadow Lane in Southampton wasn’t formally on the market. The price couldn't be immediately determined, but an agent familiar with the market said the property could be worth as much as $100 million.… Mr. Griffin was eyeing the property for several years before finally making a deal with Mr. Klein, according to a person familiar with his plans.

This, of course, means that Ken Griffin, who does not live in New York and who once gave a second thought to renting the most expensive offices in New York City, now owns two nine-figure residences in the state, fully half of his $100-million-plus property portfolio, at least until he finds something suitably magnificent in Shanghai.

Ken Griffin Adds Calvin Klein’s Hamptons Compound to Collection of Luxury Homes [WSJ]

Citadel Securities has big expansion plans and has set its sights on prying open the trillion-dollar financial markets in China, the world's second-largest economy. If history is a lesson, working with the Chinese government won't be easy (witness recent U.S.-China trade tension), but it's likely to pay off, given that the Asia-Pacific region is already Citadel Securities' second-biggest market, behind the U.S.

There is, of course, another matter. It’s not coronavirus—Griffin and Ray Dalio have already fixed that for substantially less than $100 million. But it will cost $100 million—for a suitably magnificent place for Ken to rest his head.

For Citadel, it’s full speed ahead in China [Crain’s Chicago Business]
Citadel Securities Agrees to $97 Million Settlement in China [Bloomberg]

And, truth be told, they’re almost certainly not. But they’re bad enough to require twice as many layoffs as those at Deutsche, and Sankey’s job is looking a lot less global.

HSBC Holdings PLC said it would cut 35,000 jobs and $100 billion in assets in the next three years as it scales back operations in the U.S. and mainland Europe, as well as its investment bank…. Chief Financial Officer Ewen Stevenson told journalists there would be “meaningful job cuts” in HSBC’s investment bank and headquarters in London.

Well, that’s unfortunate. The good news is that HSBC is going to double down on its fast-growing business in Asia….

HSBC has reduced its expectations for Asian economic growth in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, Chairman Mark Tucker said. The bank said loan losses could rise and revenue could fall if the outbreak is prolonged.

Luckily on that front, Ray Dalio has fished a few coins out of the contemplation pond at Bridgewater HQ, and Ken Griffin from his couch, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Billionaire Ray Dalio’s family charity and his hedge fund Bridgewater Associates LP are donating $10 million to help support China’s coronavirus relief efforts…. Citadel founder Ken Griffin’s hedge fund and securities firm have put up $7.5 million to help contain the deadly virus.

HSBC to Cut 35,000 Jobs and $100 Billion of Assets [WSJ]
Bridgewater, Dalio Donate $10 Million For China Virus Fight [Bloomberg]

Well, it turns out that Griffin actually spent $238 million on his Manhattan pied-a-terre, and that’s still more than anyone is willing to pay for 65,000 acres of north Texas, no matter how many presidents have visited (two), how lush the “river bottomland” is, how many square feet of porches and patios the main house has (10,000), how many stories the pub is (two), how many free-standing gun rooms it boasts (one), how many bird dogs it includes (all of them), or how much sex Pickens had there (lots, according to wife number five). But now that Pickens is dead and the realtors can drop the sentimental premium, the Pickens heirs and charities will have to deal with selling the most expensive ranch ever, and KG will still be sitting atop the real-estate league tables.

Brokers selling the late T. Boone Pickens's 101-square-mile Texas Panhandle ranch have knocked $30 million off its original $250 million price tag….

“It’s like a five-star resort—it’s just a gorgeous place,” he said. “It’s got man-made lakes, waterfalls, a man-made river, a golf course, a huge airport, a 35,000-square-foot lodge and T. Boone’s Lake House.”

You never know: Griffin might buy Mesa Vista. He’s probably looking for a place in Texas anyway, and even though the ranch is 500 miles from Austin, it is the most expensive that Texas offers, and it does have an airport.

After Price Cut, Former Texas Ranch of T. Boone Pickens Now Lists for $220 Million [Mansion Global]

Things got a little awkward when, at one point, the president name-checked Illinois’ wealthiest resident. “Ken Griffin. Citadel. What a guy he is,” the president said, referring to the Chicago-based hedge fund billionaire Griffin, who founded Citadel and now serves as the company’s CEO.

Of course, this being Trump, he hadn’t bothered to check that Griffin had actually shown up—according to Citadel, he hadn’t, and in spite of what Trump’s aides told Thornton, had made clear he wouldn’t. And, this being Trump, he wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to take a few petty shots at someone who not only snubbed him, but who gave money to literally every other Republican running for president four years ago, and who has occasionally expressed unhappiness with the tone emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Like this one, assuming that all people of means are exactly like him.

Trump continued: “Where are you, Ken? Where the hell is he? He’s trying to hide some of his money. Look he doesn’t want to stand up. Where the hell is Ken?” before finally adding, “He’s very quiet about it. He’s in here someplace, he just doesn’t want to stand.”

Giving his Florida neighbor some grief and potentially giving the former Mrs. Griffin some ammunition to reopen their divorce was not the only cringeworthy moment in the East Room, for Trump was in all his triumphal, back-slapping, credit-seeking, insecurity-oozing glory.

“Will you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President at least?” Trump asked Mary Callahan Erdoes, a senior JPMorgan executive, referring to the bank’s surprisingly strong earnings reported just hours earlier. “Say hello to Jamie.”

At White House ceremony, President Trump calls out for no-show Chicago billionaire Ken Griffin: ‘Where the hell is he?’ [Chicago Tribune]
Trump asks absent hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin to stand at trade signing [Thornton/N.Y. Post]

Ken Griffin promoted James Yeh to president and co-chief investment officer at Citadel….

“James has been a phenomenal contributor to Citadel’s success for nearly three decades,” Griffin, 51, said in an emailed statement. “Much of our success can be attributed to James’ efforts.”

At different times in his career at the firm, Yeh, a Ph.D. physicist, helped build the firm’s statistical arbitrage business, led Citadel Global Equities and helped found its quant business, which he ran until April.

Unlike over at KKR, however, this isn’t a matter of succession: Not only is Griffin a couple of decades younger than Kravis, he’s two years younger than Yeh, and has never needed to take a few years off. Which can only mean one thing: James Yeh is going to be Ken Griffin’s most spectacular firing of all time. They’re going to have to dye the Chicago River pink and hold a Ferris Bueller-style parade up Dearborn Street, led by Yeh carrying his things in a cardboard box.

Citadel’s Griffin Taps Longtime Partner James Yeh as Co-CIO [Bloomberg]

Warren B. Kanders, a vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, had just been driven out by a cascading protest over his company’s sale of law enforcement and military supplies. And his fellow trustee Kenneth C. Griffin was livid.

So hours after Mr. Kanders resigned in July, Mr. Griffin, a hedge fund titan and one of the world’s richest men, followed him out the door, quitting in outrage during a conference call with other board members.

That’s right. Ken Griffin would take his money where it would be unquestionably appreciated, like West Palm Beach. Whoever would help pay for the photocopies of Daily News covers and videos attacking Whitney board members and whatever else makes up the Biennial? As it happens, thanks to the intervention of a less excitable billionaire, it will be Ken Griffin.

By the end of the day, Mr. Griffin had changed his mind. But according to people privy to the events, he did so only after Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics scion and the museum’s powerful chairman emeritus, phoned Mr. Griffin from a boat to coax him back….

“I have great admiration for Leonard Lauder’s leadership in building the Whitney into one of the greatest institutions of American art in the world,” the statement said. “I will continue to support Leonard’s vision for the museum, and am proud to serve with him on its board.”

New Scrutiny of Museum Boards Takes Aim at World of Wealth and Status [NYT]

A former lawyer for Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities LLC and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been tapped to lead the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission unit that monitors derivatives markets and reviews new products.

Dorothy DeWitt, who served in senior legal and compliance roles for Citadel, will oversee the CFTC’s division of market oversight, the regulator said in a statement on Tuesday. She has been a top attorney at Coinbase since last November, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Ex-Citadel Attorney Picked for Top Market Oversight Job at CFTC [Bloomberg]

After having all of their fingernails pulled out, a select few are invited into the tabernacle to prepare for their ultimate rite of passage, all under the all-seeing, all-spooning eye of Ken Griffin, at least when he’s not buying another eight-figure property in Palm Beach. Not everyone is strong enough to complete the journey; some flee before their molding and training is complete. But for those with the right stuff, and who can survive the months or even years of, let’s call it mentoring, the moment will eventually come: The moment in which they lose Ken Griffin some money, and they are called to the bima to be yelled at and then escorted out of the building. 

And when they hit the sidewalk with their cardboard box in both hands, they are reborn, and truly ready to face the future, for the future can bring nothing more terrible than a Citadel apprenticeship. And so we offer our congratulations to the latest boys to have run the gauntlet, and emerged at the other end as men. Bravo.

The fund has let go of Colin Lancaster, who ran its macro strategies unit after joining from Balyasny Europe Asset Management in 2017…. Sources suggested Lancaster and his colleagues aren't the only PMs to have left the fund in recent weeks: David Levary, a portfolio manager who spent five years with the fund after graduating from Harvard is also undertood to have gone. Oliver Townsend, a portfolio manager who joined from Morgan Stanley in 2013, is understood to have left a few months ago.

Sources said Citadel's global fixed income fund was down 1.75% in August. However, the fund is still in positive territory for the year.

Citadel said goodbye to some big-name portfolio managers [eFinancialCareers]

This undoubtedly made Ken Griffin angry, and you know what Ken Griffin does when he gets angry: He buys more real estate. So $85 million went to the four-acre estate south of his Blossom Way properties, and he bought and tore down the house across the street, because why not, and also because it finally made his estate bigger from an acreage standpoint than Nelson Peltz’s. He finally closed on his New York apartment, and threw another $38 million at what was already the most expensive place in town, and then bought a $120 million place in London. Still, sitting in the wholly inadequate Florida hovel he’d spent tens of millions of dollars on as a temporary measure, gazing upon McCourt’s 3.7 acres and 320 feet of beachfront—acres and beachfront that were his by right, goddamnit—Griffin could do nothing but allow his fury to build.

Luckily, however, this story has a happy ending. For the low, low price of $99.13 million—on top of the $350 million-plus he’d already spent—Griffin finally gets to take an ax to the Blossom Way Street sign, and McCourt gets a cool $22 million profit after just two years, which is probably all he wanted in the first place.

The sale of the beachfront house at 60 Blossom Way, on the north side of Griffin’s estate, is the second biggest-dollar single seller/single buyer deal ever in Palm Beach, according to courthouse records…. The off-market deal adds 3.7 acres — and about 320 feet of beachfront — to the 17 acres of ocean-to-lake property Griffin already owned. In all, Griffin now has nearly a quarter-mile of beach frontage, or about 1,188 feet.

That’s right, Palm Beach’s second-biggest sale of the year is a 27,000-square-foot, 19-year-old teardown, so that Griffin’s guests won’t have to cross what’s left of a quiet residential street to reach the rest of his sprawling property and the main house, whenever it should be finished. Oh, and about the biggest sale?

A Delaware-based limited liability company paid a record-setting price of at least $105 million for the ocean-to-lake estate built by the late investment-bank heiress Terry Allen Kramer on Palm Beach’s Billionaires Row, according to just-filed deeds…. La Follia stands next door to the mostly vacant estate of Chicago billionaire hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin….

Ken Griffin squares off massive Palm Beach estate with $99M house buy, sources say [Palm Beach Daily News]
Palm Beach homes: Deeds say company paid $105 million in record-setting sale [Palm Beach Daily News]

Martin Chavez, Goldman Sachs ’s departing coder-in-chief, is listing his townhouse in New York’s West Village for $19.95 million amid a planned move to the West Coast.

The four-story, four-bedroom property—one of a handful of townhouses built as part of the Superior Ink condominium project—has a distinctive white, highly modern look.

Well, that sounds nice. 

Altogether, the property spans about 5,150 square feet with an additional 1,525 square feet of outdoor space, according to the listing agents.

At that size and price, Marty's house could make a nice little guest house for Ken Griffin to house tagalongs when he's in the city. And there's a garage for him to keep wantaway Millenium and D.E. Shaw PMs during their lockup periods. At "less" than $20 million, that's a deal.

Actually, why is Marty letting go for so cheap?

Mr. Chavez bought the townhouse for $10.5 million in 2011, public records show.

Getting a not quite 100% return on your West Village townhouse in just under a decade? Oh, Marty Chavez, you were just too damned relatable to ever wear the Goldman Sachs crown.

Goldman’s Departing Coder-in-Chief Lists West Village Townhouse for $19.95 Million [WSJ]

Well, it turns out the Point72 may still have a bit of a talent problem: About 20 portfolio managers have left the firm this year, and not all of them after an expletive-laden temper tantrum from the boss ending with the words, “you’re fired.” And would you look where they’re going?

The departures at Mr. Cohen’s new firm come largely from Point72’s stock-focused division. At least a dozen portfolio managers out of roughly 50 in that division’s U.S. and London offices have left this year, according to the people familiar with the matter…. At least five left for rival Citadel LLC, a development that has upset Mr. Cohen, people familiar with the matter said. After one portfolio manager announced earlier this year he was taking a job at Citadel, Mr. Cohen refused to shake his hand, some of the people said.

Point72’s spokeswoman said that in spite of the raft of departures, “our portfolio manager retention rates are best in class because we invest in people’s careers and develop talent organically.” Unfortunately for the firm, that investment doesn’t seem to be showing up in people’s paychecks.

In recent weeks, Mr. Cohen has expressed surprise by how much Citadel has offered and has sought ways to pay more, people familiar with the matter said.

Citadel has offered pay packages that include millions of dollars—guaranteed regardless of whether the portfolio managers make money for the firm, according to people familiar with the contracts.

Because, of course, it can:

Point72’s flagship fund is up roughly 9% through the first six months, while Citadel’s has gained about 14%, according to people familiar with the funds.

Still, there is something Steve Cohen and his spokeswoman want you to know:

She declined to comment on Mr. Cohen’s reaction to the departing managers, but said three managers have left Citadel for Point72 this year.

Steve Cohen’s Point72 Loses Long-Tenured Money Managers [WSJ]

If that is, in fact, Dias’ plan, she’s going to have to bring it, because her ex is in rare form at the moment, beating back all comers and making enough to start buying the most expensive home in whatever city he doesn’t already own it.

The billionaire’s three equity businesses led profits for Citadel’s flagship hedge funds, which gained 2.4%, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The firm’s commodities and quantitative strategies were also top performers…. May’s gain extended the funds’ returns for this year to 12.6%, beating the S&P 500 Index, the broader hedge fund industry and Griffin’s biggest hedge fund rivals.

Citadel Crushed It in May, Widening Lead Over Fund Rivals [Bloomberg]

However, the kids are growing up (relatively speaking; the youngest is only six or seven), the prenup held and, as Ken himself helpfully pointed out, Dias could very well make a nice living again as a hedge-fund manager herself if she so chose. And, after five years quietly managing her own not-insubstantial-if-not-Illinois-record-setting fortune, she might be ready to do just that. Be careful what you wish for, Kenny.

She has discussed a potential launch with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and others in the industry, people familiar with the matter said….

In the years since closing her hedge fund, Ms. Dias has invested her own assets at her family office, gaining investment acumen outside public markets, according to a person who spoke with her…. In conversations with industry executives, Ms. Dias has discussed converting her family office to include money from outside clients, including a potential timeline and fees, people familiar with the matter said. Her family office operates in Chicago and Paris. Ms. Dias is originally from France.

Female Hedge-Fund Veteran Has Contemplated a Comeback [WSJ]

Uber Technologies Inc. has chosen electronic-trading giant Citadel Securities LLC to manage its hotly anticipated initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, people familiar with the matter said.

That's definitely one way.

Bringing in Ken Griffin and his guys to handle this is definitely a way to make sure that as little goes as wrong as possible. Spotify chose Citadel as its DMM after its direct listing, and things are going pretty well over there.

In fact, using Citadel only makes sense considering that Citadel has made huge strides in the specialist game since it jumped in a few years ago. But that's to be expected considering that Ken Griffin is not a fan of mediocrity. The only thing we don't like about this partnership is that Travis Kalanick is no longer around to give us the gift of two performative nerd Alphas trying to get along when the CEO of Uber shakes hands with Ken Griffin.

Uber Chooses Citadel Securities to Handle Its IPO [WSJ]