Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has been named as the mystery buyer behind Ken Griffin’s record-breaking sale of two full-floor condos at No. 9 Walton Building earlier this month for $19 million.

The two billionaires are long-time political rivals. Griffin donated $20 million to the failed attempt to re-elect former Gov. Bruce Rauner over Pritzker in 2018, but that didn’t stop Griffin from striking a deal, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The Citadel founder moved his company to Florida two years ago and has been pushing to sell his Chicago real estate for years, suffering significant losses on some properties.

This latest deal at No. 9 Walton is the city’s most expensive sale of the year so far and the fourth most expensive of all time in Chicago. The two unfinished, full-floor condos on the 37th and 38th floors of the Near North Side building were sold at a loss of $15 million to Griffin, who purchased the properties in 2017 for $34 million.

The property was purchased through a Delaware-based limited liability company called Chicago Skyline Properties LLC, which was formed last year. Sources familiar with the deal later revealed that the buyer was Gov. Pritzker, the newspaper reported.

“The governor and first lady recently purchased a condo in Chicago. They love the city and Chicago has been their home for many years,” a Pritzker spokesman told the Tribune, declining further comment.

A spokesman for Griffin did not immediately respond to a request for comment The real deal. One of the brokers who represented Griffin in the deal, Nancy Tassone of Sotheby’s International Realty, declined to comment Tuesday.

Pritzker and Griffin have had a long history of political rivalry in the years since the 2018 election, the Tribune reported. In 2022, Pritzker used $56 million of his own money to push (unsuccessfully) for an amendment to the state constitution to create a graduated income tax system that would have taxed residents more based on their wealth.

Griffin, in turn, poured $54 million of his own money into an opposition campaign and once called Pritzker “a shameless master of personal tax avoidance” in an email to Citadel employees.

Griffin also invested $50 million to support a Republican candidate’s gubernatorial campaign in the 2022 primary before spending another $24 million to support former state Sen. Darren Bailey in his unsuccessful race against Pritzker in the fall general election .

This led Pritzker to call Griffin and another billionaire donor “two of the biggest Republican MAGA billionaires in the country.”

Nevertheless, the two billionaires are letting bygones be bygones for the deal.

According to Forbes, Pritzker, who is part of the family that founded the Hyatt hotel chain, is worth about $3.7 billion and Griffin is worth a whopping $40 billion.

– Kelli Duncan