The founder of hedge fund Citadel is the world’s second-richest investor and, as of a few hours, the owner of Apex, “the largest and most complete stegosaurus ever discovered.” Kenneth C. Griffin paid $44.6 million for the skeleton, which measures 11 feet (3.3 meters) tall and nearly 27 feet (8.2 meters) long from nose to tail., The dinosaur skeleton was sold Wednesday at Sotheby’s. The final price exceeded pre-sale estimates of $4 million to $6 million. It was the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur skeleton, surpassing the $32 million Abu Dhabi paid four years ago for Stan, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Discovered just two years ago on private land in an area of Colorado’s Moffat County known for its Upper Jurassic deposits, Apex immediately stood out because it is one of the few skeletons found intact, according to the auction house. It is composed of 254 fossil bone elements out of an estimated 319. Its future will likely now be in an American museum, as Griffin noted that “Apex was born in America and will stay in America.”
This isn’t Griffin’s first Jurassic adventure, having donated $16.5 million to a Chicago museum in 2018 to fund an exhibition of a cast of the largest dinosaur ever discovered, but it is one of the first known forays by Wall Street’s bigwigs into a market that has so far been more popular with Hollywood figures like Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage. Until now, Griffin’s career as a collector has been limited to the art world, where he is known for his strong bids at auction and on the private market. In 2020, he paid $100 million for a Basquiat, compared to $500 million five years earlier in a transaction in which he managed to get his hands on two works, one by Jackson Pollock and the other by Jackson Pollock. Number 17A and Willem de Kooning ExchangeIt was a small feat for an investor worth $37 billion, more than a billion of which he used to build a home for his mother in the most luxurious neighborhood of Palm Beach, Florida, even though it previously meant having to buy and demolish a total of 13 different properties.
The origins of his love of collecting go back, by his own admission, to a trip to New York in 1999 where, by chance, he walked into Sotheby’s and saw a sculpture of one of Degas’ famous ballet dancers. He tried to acquire it, but without success. “I was outbid, I was outbid, I tried to buy it, the hammer fell, it wasn’t my offer, I wasn’t prepared to go that high,” he admitted in statements collected by Vanity Fair “I had never been so frustrated in my life. I hung up the phone and called Sotheby’s the next day to offer more money to buy it, and that was the beginning of my passion for art,” he added.
Griffin’s taste for collecting is shared by a good handful of large fund managers, who also benefit from significant tax advantages. This is the case of J. Tomlinson Hill, former chairman and CEO of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, now one of the largest art collectors in the world. On the walls of his collection are works by Rubens, Warhol, Picasso, Bacon and Caravaggio. “I don’t collect. I look for works of art that challenge me and that can then dialogue with the other pieces that I own,” he explained to EL PAÍS a little over two years ago. The origin of his collection is a Campbell’s soup can painted by Warhol for which he paid around $340,000.
Steve Cohen has many hobbies. The founder of the hedge fund Point72 is also the owner of the New York Mets baseball team and owns, among other works, the The dream, A painting for which he paid $155 million in 2013 to casino magnate Steve Wynn. But his collection, which circulates every quarter among the fund’s various offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia, is much larger and is valued at more than a billion dollars. It represents a small part of a fortune estimated at more than $13 billion.
But it’s not all lavish foundations and Manhattan apartments decorated with multi-million dollar works. In 2021, one of the pioneers of the hedge fund world, Michael Steinhardt, was forced to return nearly 200 works of art valued at more than $70 million. A federal investigation found that the works were stolen from sites in a total of 11 countries, including Egypt, Greece, Israel, Syria and Turkey. As investigators determined at the time, the investor, whose fortune exceeds $1.2 billion, had for decades displayed a “voracious appetite for looted objects with no regard for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grave cultural harm he caused around the world.” Steinhardt avoided prison, but in exchange had to accept a lifetime ban on collecting art.
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