In such a polarized country, even billionaires like JB Pritzker and Ken Griffin won’t let their political archrivalry get in the way of doing business. The Illinois governor earlier this month paid the founder of the Citadel investment firm $19 million for the top two floors of a 38-story luxury building on Chicago’s Near North Side where Griffin once resided, sources familiar with the transaction told the Tribune. The combined purchase at the 9 W. Walton St. building represents the highest price anyone has paid this year for a Chicago-area residence, and it’s the fourth-highest price anyone has ever paid for any home within Chicago’s city limits. But it also meant that Griffin, who relocated to Florida along with his company two years ago, lost more than $15 million on the two condominiums in the real estate deal with his political nemesis. A Pritzker spokesperson would only say “the Governor and First Lady recently purchased a condo in Chicago. They love the city and Chicago has been home to them for many years.” A spokesperson for Griffin did not immediately respond for comment. The Pritzker-Griffin rivalry goes back to at least 2018, when the Democrat largely self-funded his campaign to defeat one-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, a wealthy equity investor whose reelection bid was backed by more than $20 million from Griffin. The battle of the billionaires escalated two years later, when Pritzker spent more than $56 million of his wealth to unsuccessfully push a proposed state constitutional amendment to switch Illinois to a graduated-rate income tax system with higher levies based on wealth. Griffin led the opposition to the proposed amendment, also spending nearly $54 million of his own money. At one point during the back-and-forth over the highly publicized proposal, Griffin sent an email to Citadel employees in which he accused Pritzker of being a “shameless master of personal tax avoidance.” As Pritzker ran for his second term in 2022, the two were at it again when Griffin funded a slate of Republican candidates to run for every statewide office, including Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin for governor. Despite Griffin’s $50 million backing of Irvin, he finished third in the GOP primary that was won by former state Sen. Darren Bailey. Leading up to the primary, Pritzker contributed $24 million to the Democratic Governors Association, which in turn ran TV ads that backhandedly encouraged Republicans to vote for Bailey by calling him conservative and “too extreme” for Illinois. Pritzker ended up defeating Bailey by about 12 percentage points in the general election. Also that year, Griffin moved back to his home state of Florida, offering harsh criticisms of Chicago’s crime rate as he departed. Pritzker has referred to Griffin and Richard Uihlein, a billionaire funder who backed Bailey’s unsuccessful bid for governor, as “two of the nation’s biggest MAGA Republican billionaires.” Pritzker, the heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, is worth about $3.7 billion, according to Forbes. When he lived in Illinois, Griffin was long dubbed the state’s wealthiest resident. The latest Forbes ranking pegs Griffin with a net worth of more than $40 billion. He founded Citadel in Chicago in 1990, building it into one of the largest hedge funds in the world. He was also a philanthropic force for a variety of civic causes in Chicago over the years, giving more than $600 million to institutions like the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Chicago. Earlier this year, the Museum of Science and Industry officially added Kenneth C. Griffin to the front of its name, a rebranding that had been in the works since his $125 million donation in 2019. An entrance to the condo building at 9 W. Walton St. in Chicago’s Near North Side neighborhood on Nov. 25, 2024. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) So far, Pritzker is not identified explicitly in any public records as the individual buyer of Griffin’s two condos on Walton. Public records reviewed by the Tribune show that Chicago Skyline Properties LLC, a Delaware limited liability company that was formed last year, was the buyer of the 15,000-square-foot unbuilt space, which includes a private rooftop pool and pavilion. Real estate agent Katherine Malkin, who represented Pritzker, and agents Nancy Tassone and Emily Sachs Wong, who represented Griffin, all declined to comment Tuesday on the transaction. Griffin bought the two full-floor units in late 2017 — each containing 7,500 square feet of raw space — for $21,166,000 and $12,949,500, respectively, or a total of $34,115,500. The Nov. 12 sales of the 38th-floor top level — complete with its private rooftop pool, deck and pavilion — and the 37th floor for $10 million and $9 million, respectively, mean that combined, Griffin lost more than $15.1 million on the building’s top two floors. Altogether, Griffin paid $58.75 million in late 2017 for four floors, which he never built out and finished. Of the other two floors he still owns, Griffin currently has the 7,500-square-foot, 36th-floor unit at 9 W. Walton actively for sale at present, for $8.5 million, while the 35th floor is not actively being marketed publicly. Pritzker would not be the only billionaire residing at 9 W. Walton. Steven Crown of Chicago’s venerable Crown family paid $17.4 million in 2022 for the full-floor unit on the 34th floor, just one level below Griffin’s four units. Pritzker’s package purchase of the two units represents the fourth-highest recorded amount that anyone ever has spent for a Chicago residence. Some who have built their own mansions likely have paid more, but in terms of properties changing hands, the Pritzker-Griffin transaction trails only Griffin’s previous $58.75 million package purchase of the 9 W. Walton units in 2017, Mexican billionaire German Larrea’s $20.56 million purchase in 2022 of a 10,000-square-foot, 71st-floor penthouse at the Residences at the St. Regis Tower and private-equity executive Bryan Cressey’s $20 million purchase in 2022 of the full-floor, 14,260-square-foot penthouse on the 89th floor of the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Also, billionaire retired filmmaker and “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, paid $18.75 million in 2015 for the full-floor penthouse unit on the 65th floor of the Park Tower, and then the couple paid $11.2 million eight years later for the 8,000-square-foot, full-floor penthouse condominium on the 66th floor of the Park Tower. That means that though the two deals were eight years apart, Lucas and Hobson now have spent a total of $29.95 million to assemble a 16,000-square-foot duplex unit in the Park Tower that they are creating and finishing. Still to come is what Pritzker will do with the two side-by-side mansions he owns on Astor Street on the Gold Coast.  Through a Delaware LLC, Pritzker paid $14.5 million in 2006 for his primary residence — a vintage 12,500-square-foot mansion on Astor Street — and he paid another $3.675 million later that year for a vintage 6,387-square-foot mansion next door.  The $14.5 million he paid in 2006 for the larger mansion was the highest price anyone ever had paid for a Chicago residence up to that point. The adjacent mansion is one that Pritzker left vacant and then, according to a Cook County inspector general’s report, the future governor in the early 2010s famously had contractors remove five toilets from it in a rehabilitation project as a way to persuade the Cook County assessor to classify it as “uninhabitable” in order to lower its property tax burden. The breaks initially saved Pritzker $330,000 in property taxes. In 2018, he agreed to pay the Cook County treasurer back that $330,000. Bob Goldsborough is a freelancer.