Ken Griffin: Amazon Opting Out Of New York Is Heartbreaking

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Billionaire Ken Griffin said he’s losing interest in bringing Citadel’s headquarters to New York City because of the political climate that spurred Amazon to abandon plans to build a mega-campus in Queens. “Amazon opting out of New York is heartbreaking,” Griffin said Thursday in an interview with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg Television.

Ken Griffin: Amazon Opting Out Of New York Is Heartbreaking

Transcript

Recent days are I’d say recent years so you have become well known as well for buying a lot of real estate. So you have bought the most expensive apartment ever a New York City and maybe in the United States you have also bought a lot of property in Palm Beach and in other places London so forth so you’ve got a lot of attention for this as the attention disturbing for you. And why have you bought all this realize that you can’t live in all these places so what’s behind it.

Well you and I would probably be in competition for our spent on a plane. I think I probably spend 800 hours a year on a plane. So I’m actually I’m actually in New York every single week. We have hundreds of employees here. We pay the New York investment bank roughly a billion dollars a year in revenues. So this is this is my second home in some sense this is home away from home. I have I have we run a huge number of our businesses from New York today. This is a huge part of sedulous footprint and I’m here all the time I’m I have three little kids my ex-wife and I debated do we make New York home and the apartment represents the possibility that this might be home for me and they sit up might be headquartered in New York one day I’m a bit frustrated by the political winds in the city over the last few months. Amazon opting out of New York is heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking because when you bring a firm that is such a great use of technology into your city it’s not just about the success story of Amazon. It’s about the fact that you now have a talent magnet that creates an entire ecosystem of success story around it. So if I look at Chicago a huge number the hedge funds in Chicago or my former perves Mednick are run by Al fluids. Alex was incredibly talented very professional 15-20 billion dollar hedge fund. So when you see success stories those success stories are not always success stories unto themselves. The plant the seeds of other success stories.

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