Ken Griffin Spent $54 Million to Fight a Tax Increase on The Rich

Citadel’s Ken Griffin spent $54 million to fight a tax increase on the rich that would raise the rate from 5% to 8% according to ProPublica.

This increase would have cost $51 million every year in extra tax.

In especially good years — in 2018, Griffin reported income of almost $2.9 billion — he might have been forced to pay more than $80 million more according to sources.

By the time Illinois voters streamed into voting booths on Election Day in 2020, Citadel’s Ken Griffin, then Illinois’ wealthiest resident, had made sure they’d heard plenty about why they should not vote to raise taxes on him and the state’s other rich people.

Ken Griffin spent tens of millions of dollars in relentless ads and flyers to vote against an initiative that would raise higher tax rates for the wealthy.

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Ken Griffin spent millions to influence public opinion

According to ProPublica, Ken Griffin spent approximately $18 for every one of the 3.1 million votes against the initiative.

A Citadel spokesperson responding on Griffin’s behalf pointed out that, according to ProPublica’s previously published data, Griffin paid the second-highest amount of taxes of any American from 2013 to 2018.

“Over the past decade,” he said in a statement, “it is almost a certainty that Ken has been the largest individual taxpayer in the State of Illinois — a state notorious for profligate spending and rampant corruption.”

Ken Griffin has said he’s not against raising taxes; he opposed the measure, he added in his statement, because “Illinois needs to put its fiscal house in order before burdening hard-working families with yet more taxes.”

But he’s often referred to as a predator in the financial markets, stealing millions from retail investors who chose the market as a means to begin building wealth for their families.

Ken Griffin’s Citadel participates in PFOF (payment for order flow), where they pay brokers a fee in return for retail’s orders.

These orders are traded though foreign exchanges and dark pools, benefiting Citadel and devaluing retail’s monetary demand in the lit exchange (NYSE).

Chicago Tribune said Citadel Securities’ dark pool targets small investors and also accounts for as much as half of the U.S. stock market activity.

This makes trades much more susceptible to market manipulation and introduces much unneeded conflicts of interest.

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Related: Robinhood and Citadel Colluded Night Before Trading Restrictions

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