Billionaire Collector Kenneth Griffin Donated $100 M. for 2024 Election, Fifth-Most for Individual Donors

Billionaire art collector Kenneth C. Griffin is among the top donors to outside spending groups for the 2024 election, which resulted in former President Donald Trump winning a second term.

The founder and CEO of the investment firm Citadel donated $100 million to conservatives, the fifth-largest amount for individual contributions to federal election spending, according to data released by the Federal Election Commission and analysis from Open Secrets, a non-profit research and government transparency group based in Washington, DC.

Open Secrets publishes data on campaign finance and lobbying. The organization was founded in 1983.

Griffin’s largest disclosed donations were to the Senate Leadership Fund, on four separate occasions, totaling $30 million. He also made donations totaling $15 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, $15 million to the Keystone Renewal PAC and $10 million to Maryland’s Future, a single-candidate super political action committee in support of Republican Larry Hogan for the US Senate.

It’s worth noting that Griffin’s contribution of $30 million to the Senate Leadership Fund was more than one-quarter (25.8 percent) of its total raised ($116.5 million), the second-largest amount raised by an outside spending organization and the largest focused on electing conservatives in the 2024 US federal election.

The billionaire individuals who donated more than Griffin for the 2024 US federal election were Mellon banking heir Timothy Mellon ($197 million), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein of the shipping supplies company Uline Inc. ($133.8 million), Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ($132.7 million), and Las Vegas Sands owner Miriam Adelson ($132.4 million). All four donated solely to conservatives.

After Griffin, the next highest individual donors were Jeffrey S. & Janine Yass of the trading firm Susquehannah International Group, Paul E. Singer of the investment firm Elliott Management, former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, philanthropist Cari Tuna and Stephen Allen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group.

In addition to his political donations, Griffin also appears regularly on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. His notable art acquisitions include $100 million on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump in 2020; a prized Willem de Kooning painting (which he bought privately for $300 million from David Geffen); as well as works by Jackson Pollock, Paul Cézanne, Jasper Johns, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and many others. His collection is estimated to be worth $1 billion.

Griffin’s philanthropy in arts and culture includes serving as a long-time trustee at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he underwrote a $19 million Renzo Piano–designed expansion in 2006; donations of $40 million to the Museum of Modern Art and $10 million to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2015; as well as donations of $25 million to The Shed and $125 million to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 2019.

Earlier this week, Griffin also gave $10 million to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. The institution will use the funds to maintain its collection and will establish a gallery in Griffin’s name. The move follows the relocation of Citadel’s headquarters to South Florida in 2022 from Chicago, where the company was originally founded in the 1990s.

In December 2022, Griffin also moved several of his most high-profile artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Norton, an art museum in West Palm Beach, Florida named after 20th-century steel magnate Ralph Hubbard Norton. The relocated artworks included Mark Rothko’s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue), 1953, Roy Lichtenstein masterwork, Ohhh…Alright… (1964), an untitled Robert Ryman, Willem de Kooning’s abstract masterpiece Interchange, and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A.