Ken Griffin's $238M ($188M) penthouse at 220 Central Park South, the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, is valued by New York City for tax purposes at somewhere between $9.4M and $15.5M, depending on which city record you read. That gap sits at the centre of America's loudest 'tax the rich' fight, and the second-home tax it helped trigger took effect on 1 July 2026, set to more than double the annual bill on Griffin's flat.
When mayor Zohran Mamdani stood on the pavement outside the building on Tax Day to announce a charge on luxury second homes, the tower behind him was no accident. It houses the four-floor penthouse that the Citadel founder bought in January 2019. The clip became one of the mayor's most-watched, drawing tens of millions of views across platforms, per the mayor's office. The policy it launched matters far more to New Yorkers than the row that made it go viral.
