On 23 June 2022, Ken Griffin sent a letter to Citadel employees announcing that the firm's headquarters would move from Chicago to Miami. He repeated the rationale at the Bloomberg Wealth Summit on 8 November 2022, telling reporters that taxes were "not part of our decision to come to Florida" — a framing that, three years later, sits awkwardly next to the $670 million Griffin has personally deployed buying Brickell commercial real estate, and the $1 billion Sterling Bay-developed Citadel waterfront tower now rising at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive (The Real Deal and Fox Business, 2025 coverage).
The arithmetic that the trade press has been less willing to put plainly is worth stating. Florida levies no state income tax. New York City, for a resident principal earning $10 million a year, charges 10.9% in state tax plus 3.876% in city tax — an effective marginal rate of 14.776% on the top dollar. California's top marginal rate sits at 13.3%. On a $10 million annual income, the gross relocation benefit from New York or California to Florida is in the range of $1.3-1.5 million per year. On a hedge-fund principal earning $100 million, the same arithmetic produces $13-15 million annually. Whether or not Griffin's stated motive at the 2022 summit emphasised lifestyle, the math was unavoidable.
The pattern is now structural. Citadel's relocation triggered a wave: Paul Singer's Elliott Management opened a substantial West Palm Beach office in 2020. Carl Icahn moved Icahn Enterprises to Sunny Isles Beach. Daniel Och's Willoughby Capital decamped from New York. Blackstone opened a Miami office in 2022 with the explicit intent of scaling. Starwood Capital's Barry Sternlicht has been a Miami Beach principal for over a decade and used the relocation moment to consolidate. By the end of 2024, The Real Deal's running tally identified more than seventy financial-services firms with new or expanded Miami operations since 2020, including major presences from Apollo, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Vista Equity Partners.
Goldman Sachs' own answer to the question — where do we put the next ten thousand jobs — was more cautious and more revealing. The firm broke ground in 2024 on an 800,000-square-foot, fourteen-storey campus in Dallas's NorthEnd district, with completion expected in late 2027 and a target headcount of 5,000 employees (Goldman press release, 2025; CoStar coverage). Dallas, like Miami, has no state income tax. The choice signalled what the industry now openly discusses: New York will remain the legal and trading hub for the major banks, but the next generation of operational, back-office and asset-management expansion is going to no-income-tax states, and the firms with the largest balance sheets are voting with their construction budgets.
The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025 frames the same trend in personal terms. The UAE was projected to receive a net +9,800 millionaires in 2025, the United States +7,500 — with Florida absorbing the largest share of the US inflow. Miami real estate has re-priced accordingly. The South Florida luxury market posted record per-square-foot pricing across 2023-25 in the Edgewater, Brickell Key, Sunny Isles, Indian Creek and Coral Gables segments. Indian Creek, the private-island enclave that hosts Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump and Jeff Bezos, recorded multiple confirmed sales above $100 million between 2023 and 2025.
The reading for the UHNW principal still domiciled in New York or California is the one the advisors now deliver without much hedging. The Florida move is not a trade against the state of origin — it is a structural arbitrage that, on a five- or ten-year personal horizon, is increasingly difficult to argue against on the math alone. The hedge-fund principals were the first cohort; the family offices followed in 2022-24; the corporate relocations are now landing on a 2025-28 timeline. The question is no longer whether the migration is happening. The question, for the New York-based principal in 2026, is what the marginal cost of staying actually is — and whether the lifestyle reasons that anchor the family in the city continue to justify the seven- or eight-figure annual tax delta.
The mayor's race in New York and the renewed pied-à-terre tax conversation through 2026 are making the answer less ambiguous, not more. The relocation pattern, ten years in, has the same shape as the wealth-migration data: a one-way movement, accelerating, with the receiving cities pricing the inflow into the property market in real time.
— Camille Vedy
