According to a letter obtained by FOX Business, billionaire Ken Griffin has announced he will be moving his hedge-fund firm Citadel Securities from Chicago to Miami.
In a memo to employees, Griffin called Miami a city of diversity and suggested that it would offer a better up a better environment. He did not directly cite Chicago's infamous crime stats, but a source suggested that this was a factor in the decision to move the company.
Griffin has already made the move to the Sunshine State.
The move came a month after a billionaire doubled down on his attempt to boot the Democratic incumbent Gov. Griffin provided GOP candidate Richard Irvin with $25 million in campaign funds after initially providing $20 million in seed money.
It is not clear if he will try to turn the Illinois governor's seat red in a state that has trended blue in every presidential election since 1992.
Griffin's wealth will likely be a loss in Chicago, which received more than $600 million in gift donations to educational, cultural, medical and civic organizations.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the hedge-fund billionaire is one of the 50 richest individuals in the world and is believed to be worth $28.9 billion.
The future of Citadel will be important for Chicago as many of our colleagues have deep ties to Illinois, Griffin wrote. Over the past year, many of our Chicago teams have asked to move to Miami, New York and our other offices around the world. The move to Miami is expected to be a multi-year process and not all of the roughly 2,600 employees in Chicago will be expected to make the 1,200-mile move.
Griffin has long been critical of Chicago's crime rate and viewed it as a lackluster response by the Democratic governor.
The billionaire threatened to move the $51 billion business out of Illinois earlier this year and listed crime as a chief reason.
If people aren't safe here, they're not going to live here, he told the Wall Street Journal in April. I had several colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. There are countless cases of burglary. That is a really hard backdrop to draw talent to your city from. Caterpillar and Boeing, both headquartered in Chicago, announced they were moving out of the city earlier this month.