Billionaires (and their corporations) do not make for good neighbors. While they claim to bring prosperity for everyone, their primary concern is to capture our local governments and take whatever they can get from our communities in land, labor, and resources – all for their private profit. The result? Billionaires have become exponentially richer as the rest of us live with a growing affordability crisis. This series is about the impact billionaires have on our everyday lives when they move into our backyards.
On February 2nd, 2026, several messages projected onto city center buildings lit up downtown West Palm Beach in South Florida. The messages read: “We Pave the Way for Growth. They Block It.” and “Enter the Growth Capital. Leave Legacy Cities Behind.” These advertisements, intended for corporate leaders around the country, were put up by a business group called the Florida Council of 100 and paid for by billionaire CEOs Stephen Ross and Ken Griffin. Ross and Griffin each gave $5 million to the new campaign behind the projections, launched that very evening, called Ambition Accelerated, an effort intended to persuade corporations to move to Florida just as they did just a few years ago at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The case these billionaires are making to other corporate CEOs and wealthy individuals is that, along with its great weather, Florida, after years of conservative leadership, has become a model state for pro-business conservatives. In an interview with CNBC, Stephen Ross laid out his argument: “People decide where their business will be based, on if they can attract talent … Florida is such a great business state. Florida’s constitution prohibits an income tax – that’s a good place to start.”
Stephen Ross, who moved from New York City, and Ken Griffin, who moved from Chicago, are far from the only billionaires who have made Florida their permanent residence in the past decade. The number of billionaires living in Florida has more than tripled since 2015, growing from 35 to 117 billionaires. Behind California, this was the biggest jump in new billionaire residents in the span of a decade.
Figure 1: Number of Billionaires in Florida from 2015 to 2026
Recently, media pundits have attributed this growth in billionaires in Florida to new taxes on the wealthy in states like New York and California. However, historical data from the Forbes billionaires list shows that this growth in billionaires is not just happening in Florida – it’s happening everywhere. The New York Times reported that from 2017 to 2025, the number of billionaires in the US increased by 50% and while billionaire wealth jumped by 22% or $1.5 trillion last year alone.
As the richest people in the country expand their wealth, they’ve also expanded their influence over federal, state, and local politics. As Ross and Griffin are pointing out to their fellow elites, Florida comes with several benefits for billionaires. Not only does the state have the most unequal state tax structure (that benefits the wealthiest in the state) and a conservative majority in the state legislature that blocks attempts by cities to regulate corporations, but it also gives billionaires unprecedented access to power. President Trump’s permanent residence in Palm Springs, the Mar-A-Lago Club and Beach House, has become a destination for billionaires, corporate executives, and foreign leaders seeking to influence United States domestic and foreign policy.
Ross and Griffin claim that Florida has “access to talent, regulatory predictability, cost structure and quality of life,” that make it an attractive state for business. However, being an attractive state for business has not meant a better quality of life for everyone in the Sunshine state. In fact, working-class Floridians now face acute challenges like underfunded public education (Florida ranks 48th among US states in economic resources put towards public education), poor access to healthcare, and an increasingly unaffordable cost of living for families. Ambition Accelerated seems to highlight the real goal of conservative leaders in Florida: to attract and cater to the ultra-wealthy without demanding they contribute anything back to the state or its working people who provide much of the labor that makes them wealthy.
This series will dive into just a few of the billionaires that have moved to Florida in the past several years and explore the real impact they’ve had on the state’s people.
President Donald Trump, Palm Beach, Florida
On October 31st, 2019, President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would officially move out of New York City and make Palm Beach, Florida his new permanent residence. In his announcement he complained that he had been “treated very badly by the political leaders” in New York despite paying millions of dollars in taxes to the state (his tax returns would later show years of tax avoidance).
A year before moving to Florida permanently, Trump had a major impact on the competitive race for Florida’s Governor in 2018. In an election that experts said was a referendum on Trump’s first term as President, Trump’s endorsement of then underdog Ron DeSantis gave the young candidate a bump that ultimately led to his victory. Since 2019, DeSantis claims to have signed nearly $10 billion in tax cuts through the Florida State budget process. DeSantis’s tax cuts came after former Florida Governor Rick Scott claimed to have cut $7.5 billion in taxes. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, from 2010 to 2024, as Florida became the state with the most regressive or unfair tax structure in the US, the tax burden rose for middle class Floridians by up to 1.6% while only rising 0.4% for the top 1% of Floridians in the same time period.
Meanwhile, in Trump’s first term as President, he passed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that capped the State and Local Tax deduction to $10,000, meaning that higher earners in states with higher income taxes would not be able to deduct as much as they could in the past. The Florida Bar Journal cited this change as one of the main reasons why high income earners in states like New York were looking to change their permanent residence — at least on paper — to Florida. On top of these tax savings, closer proximity to Trump’s Mar-A-Lago offers an added benefit to corporate leaders, such as recent Florida transplant Larry Ellison, who have multi-billion dollar deals dependent on the President.
For his part, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis welcomed the influx of billionaires with open arms – while also cashing in for himself. According to campaign finance aggregator, TransparencyUSA, DeSantis has raised over $282 million since running for his first term and even broke a state record for fundraising in the 2022 election cycle. He did this by accepting multi-million dollar checks from some of the richest people in the world including:
- Ken Griffin (worth about $50 billion) – gave $10.75 million
- J. Christopher and Jude Reyes (worth about $13 billion) – gave $2.95 million
- Jeff Yass (worth $67 billion) – gave $2.6 million
- Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein (worth $7 billion) – gave $1.9 million
- Paul Tudor Jones (worth $8 billion) – gave $1.25 million
- Joe Ricketts (worth $8 billion) – gave $1 million
In addition to not having to pay any state income taxes, the investments in Governor DeSantis made by many of these billionaires with permanent addresses in Florida continue to pay off. In 2026, Governor DeSantis reaffirmed his support for a bill that would drastically reduce property taxes in Florida – legislation that would potentially save these Florida billionaires millions of dollars each year.
Citadel Founder Ken Griffin, Miami and Palm Beach, Florida
Ken Griffin is the Founder & CEO of Citadel and Founder & Non-Executive Chairman of Citadel Securities. His net worth is about $50 billion, making him the 36th richest person in the world. In 2022, Griffin announced publicly that he would be moving his company and his permanent residence to Miami, Florida. He cited rising crime in Chicago combined with lower taxes and less regulations on business in Florida as his reasons for moving. In interviews, the billionaire seems to downplay his interest in paying no state income tax. In a sit down with Miami’s former Republican Mayor Francis Suarez, Griffin said that what drew him was Florida’s “focus on delivering traditional values for the community.”
In just the past four years, Ken Griffin has reshaped the real estate and political landscapes of the state.
Griffin’s Record Breaking Real Estate Portfolio
Griffin set the record at the time for buying the highest priced residence in Miami-Dade County with the purchase of his $107 million Coconut Grove mansion. He also spent about $169 million on multiple properties on the exclusive Star Island. Griffin did not stop there. He also needed space for his $175 million SuperYacht, Defy, so in 2023 he purchased a 3.7 acre private megayacht marina at the tip of Miami Beach’s Terminal Island that will eventually include spaces for six superyachts, a resort-style club with pools, pickleball courts, a gym, a sauna, and a private lounge for yacht owners.
North of Miami, Griffin is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build an enormous estate on 25 acres of land along the coast in Palm Beach. This property is less than a mile from President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate.
Griffin’s financial firm, Citadel, is also getting its own new 62 story skyscraper in downtown Miami. Bought for $360 million, the site is being developed by the Related Companies to be a 1.7 million square foot mixed use tower and new headquarters for Citadel. The tower will change the skyline of Miami as the tallest building in the city, built at the maximum height allowable for skyscrapers in the city.
Privatizing Florida’s Schools
His influence in state politics has been just as significant as his real estate footprint. Since moving to Florida, Ken Griffin has spent more than $35 million on state level elections, making him the top individual donor in the state.
In 2024, he gave $12 million to a PAC opposing the legalization of marijuana in Florida. He’s given a total of $12.5 million to the Republican Party of Florida since 2020 and $10.5 million total to the Republican House Campaign Committee and Senatorial Campaign Committee.
One of Griffin’s goals since moving to Florida and spending more than $35 million in state elections is to privatize the education system. In Chicago, Griffin cheered on public school closures and told Miami Mayor Francis Suarez in an interview that public schools push a “woke ideology” and indoctrinate kids. He has praised DeSantis’s education policies by saying “It’s amazing how a school devoid of ‘woke’ ideology lends itself to happy children.”
In addition to financially supporting politicians that share his goal of privatizing education, Griffin has used his wealth and access to supercharge the expansion of charter schools in South Florida. In 2025, Griffin gave $50 million to the New York City based charter school network, Success Academy, to expand to Miami. The charter school network says it wants to build 40 new schools in the span of just 10 years. Griffin also reportedly used the lobbying firm Capital City Consulting (lobbyist Megan Fay), a firm he hired through Citadel, to work with Success Academy lobbyists to help pass Governor DeSantis’s school privatization legislation – an expansion of the Schools of Hope program – that would allow charter schools to co-locate in public school facilities.
Ken Griffin sits on the board of an influential corporate-led nonprofit in Miami called the Partnership for Miami that supported and publicly praised both the expansion of Success Academy in Miami and the passage of the Schools of Hope expansion. Around the same time, Griffin gave a quarter of a million dollars to a new PAC called Excellent Public Schools PAC along with fellow billionaire Florida transplant Reed Hastings, who gave $350,000. Much of that money has gone to Florida Senate Majority Leader Jim Boyd and the Conservatives for a Better Florida PAC, which has given $500,000 to gubernatorial candidate and school privatization advocate Byron Donalds.
Public school students in Florida are seeing the impact of Griffin’s efforts. With the expansion of school voucher programs and private school options in Florida combined with a drop in immigration to counties like Miami-Dade, public schools in Miami are seeing a steep decline in enrollment. Griffin’s large donations to Governor DeSantis have come alongside dramatic cuts to public education in recent state budgets – cuts that have left public school districts with multi-million dollar budget deficits. To deal with cuts and declining enrollment, Broward County Public Schools, the sixth largest school district in the country, proposed eliminating 800 jobs. The district proposed eliminating school counselors and social workers – positions that research shows have a positive impact on student outcomes in K-12 education.
Massive Tax Savings
ProPublica reported that, between 2013 and 2018, Griffin had the fourth-highest income in the country, taking in an average of $1.7 billion annually. By simply moving to Florida where there are no income taxes, Griffin likely saved upwards of $100 million per year. Now, on top of that, Florida lawmakers are now proposing eliminating property taxes in Florida. Griffin, one of the largest donors to Republicans in Florida, would save at least an extra $10 million in annual taxes if the proposal was signed into law.
Griffin recently doubled down on his plan to expand Citadel’s presence in Miami after he was named by New York City Mayor Mamdani in the Mayor’s proposal to tax luxury properties in New York worth over $5 million and owned by people that do not live in the City, like Ken Griffin. Griffin also complained that Mayor Mamdani’s mention of him was triggering after the “trauma he went through in Chicago.” Despite these complaints, Griffin admitted to the Wall Street Journal that Citadel would likely still move forward with their plans to develop 350 Park Avenue in Manhattan.
RelatedRoss Founder Stephen Ross, Palm Beach, Florida
Billionaire Stephen Ross is the founder and Non-Executive Chairman of real estate company, Related Companies, and owner of the Miami Dolphins. Worth $17 billion, Ross moved to Palm Beach in 2021. The 85 year-old is far from retiring in South Florida, however. When he moved, he founded Related Ross, a new real estate company devoted to developing West Palm Beach into the Wall Street of the South – or an ultra-wealthy community for Wall Street executives and their families.
Creating the Wall Street of the South
After developing office space in West Palm Beach, Ross has been successful in attracting big name financial institutions like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase to his 360 Rosemary commercial property. To bring Wall Street executives to the area, Ross has focused on creating private education opportunities for wealthy families. He opened a private school in the area called Wingrove Academy and gave $50 million to Vanderbilt University to open a campus in West Palm Beach focused on tech and artificial intelligence.
Ross also focused on retail and leisure options that would appeal to his preferred new residents. In main shopping centers, he pushed out more affordable retailers in favor of high end luxury brands like Lululemon and Herman Miller. In a speech at a Beach Club luncheon, the billionaire told the crowd that as more corporations move to South Florida, they will also need to build more golf courses. Ross took it upon himself to build a 1,200 acre ultra-luxury private retreat and golf club.
Of course, Ross also needed to give the new Wall Street executives and their employees places to live. In 2027, he plans to open the South Flagler House, a condominium with 105 luxury residences where the most expensive condo is priced at over $72 million. For residents concerned about affordable housing in West Palm Beach, Related Ross announced a new project in 2026 that the firm claims would have 164 affordable units. In Palm Beach County, an affordable unit is reserved for individuals earning up to 80% of the Area Median Income – which for the increasingly wealthy West Palm Beach, 80% of Area Median Income would be about $90,000 per year.
If Ross’s intent was to make West Palm Beach a community by and for the ultra-wealthy, he seems to have succeeded. In the past few years, home and condo prices rose dramatically – largely driven by the luxury and ultraluxury market. Related Ross is also now the largest commercial landholder in West Palm Beach.
Investing in Politicians that Keep His Taxes Low
Ross has been influential in both Florida state politics and West Palm Beach local politics since moving to the state. Since moving to West Palm Beach in 2021, Ross has personally given $671,000 in Florida campaign contributions and his company Related Southeast LLC has given $202,000. Ross himself has given $210,000 to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, another $125,000 DeSantis’s Florida Freedom Fund, and $150,000 to the Republican Party of Florida. His company has also given $100,000 to Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. Before Ross stepped down as Chairman of the separate firm he also founded, Related Companies, in July of 2024, the company PACs (Related Urban Development Group LLC and RUDG LLC) spent a total of $400,992 in Florida elections – giving mostly to the Republican Party of Florida and the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committees.
On a local level Ross seems to use his political spending and power to further his real estate development goals while paying as little in taxes as possible. In early 2026, Related Ross put forward a proposal for the development of a new hotel by the Palm Beach convention center. The proposal includes a plan for Ross’s firm to sell the development site, which it owns, to Palm Beach County for $1 and then lease the property for 99 years. The scheme was designed so that Related Ross would not have to pay property taxes on the project. The seven Palm Beach County Commissioners will have to approve the proposal that would potentially cost the County millions in taxes. In April, the Palm Beach Post reported that Palm Beach County Mayor Sara Baxter attended the College Football Championship game in Miami and sat in Ross’s private suite alongside Governor Ron DeSantis around the time that Ross’s no tax hotel proposal went in front of her and the Commissioners. Ross and his company PAC had already given Baxter about $32,500 in campaign contributions.
Ross has always seemed to find ways to avoid paying taxes, but when he sees government agencies struggling financially he shifts blame away from wealthy tax avoiders like himself and onto public sector unions. Responding to questions about labor disputes as the owner of the Miami Dolphins, Ross once stated “The unions have kind of exceeded their bounds, if you know what I mean, in just about every aspect of life … Every single industry that is union dominated, those companies are in trouble. You look at every state and city government, they’re all bankrupt.”
Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos, Indian Creek Village, Florida
In 2023, the fourth richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos announced he was relocating from Seattle to Miami. Now the richest person in Florida, Bezos is worth an estimated $277 billion. Much of his wealth, of course, comes from owning about 9% of Amazon, which he founded in 1994.
Amazon is the fourth largest employer in Florida, with over 50,000 employees in the state. Despite being the largest corporation in the world in terms of revenue, Amazon has received $33.3 million in grants and tax credits from the state and local governments in Florida since 2014. The justification for these tax incentives relies on the number of jobs that Amazon brings to a state or city, but studies in recent years show that the quality of those jobs fails to live up to the promises made by the company. Many of the jobs created by Amazon are seasonal or part-time jobs that do not provide benefits or opportunities for growth. Combined with high injury rates, difficult work quotas, and union busting strategies, Amazon often has an extremely high turnover rate relative to other warehouse employers.
Despite Amazon making up the majority of his wealth, Bezos cited a different company with operations in Florida as one of the reasons behind his move. In 2000, Bezos founded the company Blue Origin, a space exploration company and rocket manufacturer that made headlines for launching pop singer Katy Perry into space in 2025. The project seems to be more of a hobby than a profit maker for Bezos; nevertheless it received over $65.5 million in subsidies from the State of Florida in 2015 when the company announced that it would build a launchpad site at Cape Canaveral.
More recently, Bezos’s Blue Origin announced major expansion plans to build an 800,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on its Merritt Island campus. The company has been fined by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection several times for its failure to conduct the proper wastewater samples and follow water management practices. Seeing this poor track record, Brevard County residents have criticized a new Florida DEP permit that would allow Blue Origin to dump 15,000 gallons of industrial wastewater per day into the Indian River Lagoon. The community had recently voted for a slight increase in local sales taxes to fund clean up efforts that would protect the Lagoon – a project that would likely cost local community members even more if Blue Origin was legally allowed to further pollute the Lagoon.
Bezos does not spend much money on politics like his neighboring billionaires. While he has certainly cozied up to Trump at Mar-A-Lago, Bezos builds goodwill and soft power through philanthropy in communities where his companies have a significant presence. For example, through his project called Day 1 Families Fund, Bezos has given $28.75 million to organizations in Florida working to end homelessness. While these efforts earn Bezos good headlines and goodwill from some local nonprofits, the amount he’s planning to give over three years pales in comparison to what Bezos saved in taxes by simply moving to Florida. CNBC estimated that in just one year Bezos would save over $600 million dollars in state capital gains taxes alone.
While figures like Trump, Griffin, Ross, and Bezos have already left an indelible mark on the lives of everyday Floridians, there are many more billionaires that have moved to Florida in recent years who are benefiting from the political landscape and working to shape policy to their will. The next part of this series will highlight more of these billionaires and continue to consider the question – what happens when billionaires arrive in your backyard?