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Editor’s note: Billionaires in ‘demon mode’ 

Most people move to Florida to slow down.  

Especially if they are in their 80s. 

Not Steve Ross. 

Our cover story this month looks at how the billionaire developer has forsaken New York City after decades of building its skyline, in order to reshape West Palm Beach. 

Florida, home of the Winter White House at Mar-a-Lago, is going to be even more of an epicenter of power during the second Trump administration, so maybe Ross, who also owns the Miami Dolphins, is not crazy when he talks about the future of the area. 

“I believe that all of Palm Beach County will become the most important county in this country,” Ross said recently. “This whole county in the future will become what Silicon Valley is today.”

Ross is not the only Big Apple real estate titan in their 70s or 80s moving to South Florida not to retire, but to build. Bruce Eichner, Shaya Boymelgreen and 87-year-old Harry Macklowe have been making similar plays (to be fair, Boymelgreen was temporarily banned from New York real estate). Check out the cover story.  

It’s a billionaires’ world these days, and that’s likely to be even more the case during the Trump administration. And no billionaire is in a better place in line to be the beneficiary of Trump’s largess than Elon Musk — at least until Musk basks too much in the limelight and the pair have a falling out. 

It’s a billionaires’ world these days, and that’s likely to be even more the case during the Trump administration.

We take a look at the real estate holdings of the world’s richest man

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As our Texas bureau chief Jess Hardin writes, “Elon Musk’s final frontier may be Mars, but he’s colonizing Texas first.” After famously decamping from liberal California for the red state (his last stop before the red planet), Musk’s plans include a compound for his progeny and two towns, in addition to giant factories for his companies. Hardin did some snooping around the 3,900 acres valued at $3.4 billion. 

In another story, we examine Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “demon mode” efforts to slash the federal government’s space. (“Demon mode” is how one of Musk’s ex-girlfriends described his maniacal sense of urgency.) 

The implications are huge for the office market in Washington, D.C., as well as other cities with lots of civic workers, like Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas. Some 26 percent of the D.C. office market is occupied by the federal government. Landlords could be hit hard. 

Conversely, Musk’s push to get federal workers to stop clocking in remotely could breathe new life into downtowns in many of those cities and help their office markets. 

Fortunately, it’s not only billionaires who are sharing in the spoils of the current distress in the office market. In our story “Normal People,” we profile some of the buyers who have jumped in to take advantage of rock-bottom prices, snapping up office properties while REITs and private equity sat on the sidelines. Meet “Pat Yan the Meat Man” as well as the buyer of Fort Worth’s tallest building, who read about the foreclosure auction in the news.

Finally, check out our story on what’s ahead for the real estate market in the coming year. 

Amid high interest rates, the mantra for some investors had been “stay alive until ’25.” With high rates, everything has been expensive: financing, buying and operating. Deal volume has been slow as a result. 

So what’s the prognosis now that 2025 is actually here? 

“There is the possibility that 2025 is it: the moment real estate has been waiting for,” writes senior reporter Keith Larsen. “On the other hand, instead of surviving until ’25, you might now need to survive through ’25 and then ‘let it rip in ’26.’”

Enjoy the issue and happy new year!

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