Ken Griffin’s Citadel plans to open a Palm Beach office, taking over the former Neiman Marcus department store building on the Florida town’s main shopping street.
The Worth Avenue office will serve employees who live in Palm Beach, according to people familiar with the plans. The town is about 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Miami, Citadel’s new headquarters where Griffin will work.
A spokesman for the firm declined to comment.
Over the past several years, Citadel has been shifting its center of operations out of Chicago, its home since the firm’s founding in 1990. Griffin, 53, has been a vocal critic of the city’s elevated crime rate and Illinois’s high taxes.
Palm Beach is familiar territory for Griffin, who has a personal fortune of $28.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The billionaire has spent at least $350 million snapping up property in Palm Beach over the past decade, assembling its largest residential piece of land. He recently won approval from the town’s architectural commission to build a home for his mother there.
Other Citadel employees also know the town. Some of Griffin’s traders left the firm’s Chicago and New York offices and worked from the Four Seasons Palm Beach during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Palm Beach building will have a restaurant and retail space on the ground floor, with Citadel offices above, one of the people said. The location is on the ocean block of Worth Avenue, across the street from a Saks Fifth Avenue and a Starbucks. Neiman Marcus moved into the newly constructed property in 2000, then closed in 2020.
The firm expects to have a few hundred employees in Miami next year working out of a temporary office while it builds its new headquarters on Brickell Bay Drive. Griffin said in a letter to employees last month that he and his family recently moved to Miami.
