Citadel’s planned office tower in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood — long expected to cost more than $1 billion — will probably be closer to $2.5 billion with construction likely to begin mid-to-late next year, founder and Chief Executive Officer Ken Griffin said.
“I wish it were a billion dollars,” Griffin said, when asked on stage about the building at a Citadel Securities conference in New York on Monday. “Due to inflation in the cost of construction, that’s going to be about a $2.5 billion tower.”
A spokesperson for Griffin said a “more fully developed site program” also helps explain the price tag. As of last year, Citadel was planning a 54-floor-story tower at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive with 1.7 million square feet, combining offices and a roughly 413,000-square-foot hotel on the upper floors, according to plans filed with Miami-Dade County.
The waterfront project had been expected to break ground in the third quarter of 2025, a spokesperson said at the time.
Griffin, who moved his financial conglomerate to Miami from Chicago in 2022, has become one of the most influential businessmen in Florida. He has an estimated net worth of $48.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Despite the higher cost, Griffin said he isn’t worried about finding tenants to his Miami tower.
“If we build it, they will come,” he said. “Miami has a huge deficit of Grade A office space.”
On financing, he said “we’ll cross that bridge in a year and change.”
He praised South Florida for its safe streets, oceanfront homes, sense of community, schools and strong property appreciation over the last few years. But when asked about adding to his real estate portfolio, he said “at this point, I have enough.”
One firm is accusing the other of stealing its business model that has been the key to its nationwide success. The other insists that it didn’t steal anything, and it would never do business the way the accuser does.
In one corner is Sokolove Law, which back in the 1980s was among the first law firms to advertise on television and use a toll-free phone number. Sokolove has since represented thousands of clients across the country and recovered more than $10 billion. Sokolove now consists of 64 employees and more than 140 co-counsel firms.
“This case is about the wholesale theft of a business model,” Sokolove asserted in its opening salvo filed in August. Sokolove maintains that its competitor Jason Stone Injury Lawyers has built its recent success “not on innovation or hard work, but on trade secrets and proprietary information” stolen from Sokolove.