Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been named as the mystery buyer behind the record-setting $19 million sale of two of Ken Griffin’s full-floor condos at the No. 9 Walton building earlier this month.
The two billionaires are long-time political rivals, with Griffin giving $20 million in a failed attempt to reelect former Gov. Bruce Rauner over Pritzker in 2018, but that didn’t stop Griffin from striking a deal, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The Citadel founder moved his company to Florida two years ago and has been pushing to sell off his Chicago properties for years now, taking significant losses on some properties.
This most recent deal at No. 9 Walton is so far the city’s priciest sale of the year, and fourth-priciest of all-time in Chicago. The two unfinished, full-floor condos on the 37th and 38th floors of the Near North Side building sold at a $15 million loss to Griffin, who purchased the properties for $34 million in 2017.
The property was purchased through a Delaware limited liability company called Chicago Skyline Properties LLC, which was formed last year. Sources familiar with the deal later revealed the buyer to be Gov. Pritzker, the newspaper reported.
“The Governor and First Lady recently purchased a condo in Chicago. They love the city and Chicago has been home to them for many years,” a Pritzker spokesperson told the Tribune, declining to comment further.
A spokesperson for Griffin did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Real Deal. One of the brokers who represented Griffin in the deal, Nancy Tassone of Sotheby’s International Realty, declined to comment Tuesday.
Pritzker and Griffin have a storied history of political rivalry in the years since the 2018 election, the Tribune reported. In 2022, Pritzker used $56 million of his own money to (unsuccessfully) push for an amendment to the state’s constitution to create a graduated-rate income tax system that would have taxed residents more based on their level of wealth.
Griffin, in turn, put $54 million of his own money into an opposition campaign, at one point calling Pritzker “a shameless master of personal tax avoidance” in an email to Citadel employees.
Griffin also put $50 million into backing a Republican candidate’s gubernatorial campaign in the 2022 primary election before shelling out an additional $24 million to support former state Senator Darren Bailey in his unsuccessful race against Pritzker in the general election that fall.
This prompted Pritzker to call Griffin and another billionaire donor “two of the nation’s biggest MAGA Republican billionaires.”
Still, the two billionaires let bygones be bygones for the sake of the deal.
Pritzker, who is part of the family that founded the Hyatt hotel chain, is worth about $3.7 billion and Griffin is worth a whopping $40 billion, according to Forbes.
— Kelli Duncan