The hedge fund billionaire betting Miami can rival New York’s Wall Street

That is the premise of a new Fortune feature by my colleague Shawn Tully, which explores Griffin’s efforts to reshape Miami and influence American politics. For CFOs weighing corporate footprint decisions, Griffin’s Miami playbook offers a compelling case study. In 2022, Citadel moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, becoming one of several investment firms that shifted to Florida post-pandemic.

For Griffin, the relocation was a long-term financial strategy. He’s investing not only in his firm, but in Miami as a future financial hub that he believes could one day compete with New York City. The move highlights how location decisions have become a core lever for cost, talent, and growth.

Citadel now employs about 500 people in Miami, including Griffin; Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao and president Jim Esposito; and Sebastian Barrack, who has run the commodities trading franchise for a decade. New York and London remain larger by headcount, but Miami is Citadel’s fastest-growing outpost by far. Griffin told Fortune that he feels “optimism in the air here.”

Many other companies have also planted roots in Miami. Since the pandemic, a growing roster of large firms, including ServiceNow, Wells Fargo’s wealth management unit, Palantir, Thoma Bravo, and Thiel Capital, has committed substantial operations to South Florida. McKinsey’s Miami office has become one of its fastest-growing in North America, expanding to several hundred employees over the past four years, while Banco Santander is developing a 41-story tower in Brickell, notes Tully.

Still, there are risks. Miami’s growth is straining housing and infrastructure, which could erode some of its cost advantages over time. But the broader trend is clear: Companies are rethinking where and how they operate. Griffin’s bet may be unusually high-profile, but it reflects a broader corporate shift toward markets with lower costs, faster growth, and deeper talent pools. The data reinforces that trend: CoStar analysts project the U.S. office market will add roughly 10 million square feet of occupancy over the next year, with growth driven almost entirely by Sun Belt landlords.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

R. Brent Jones, EVP and CFO of Avantor, Inc. (NYSE: AVTR), a provider of life science tools, will leave the company on or before June 21. Steve Eck, SVP and chief accounting officer at Avantor since 2019, will serve as interim CFO upon Jones’ departure. Avantor has initiated a search for the next CFO.

Peter Kuipers is stepping down as the CFO of Clover Health Investments, Corp. (Nasdaq: CLOV), a physician enablement company, effective March 30. Kuiper’s will remain as an advisor through April 24. Clay Thornton, the current CFO of Clover’s insurance plan, was appointed interim CFO, effective immediately. 

Big Deal

Global M&A surged in Q1 2026, with mega deals—those valued over $10 billion—reaching their highest quarterly count since 2008, according to new research from WTW and Bayes Business School. Twelve such deals closed in the quarter, pushing total completed deal value to a five-year high of $438 billion, a 155% jump versus Q1 2025.

European dealmakers outperformed their regional benchmarks and were among the strongest performers globally during the first quarter of 2026. However, North American acquirers underperformed their regional index by 5.4 percentage points, with 117 deals completed in the last three months—marking a sharp reversal from the 16.1 percentage-point outperformance and 96 deals recorded in the final quarter of 2025, according to the report.

Although boardroom confidence remains strong, the duration and scale of the Middle East conflict risks “denting deal momentum, with corporate executives likely to stretch timelines and deepen due diligence,” Jana Mercereau, head of Europe M&A consulting, said in a statement.

Going deeper

AI has shifted from a discretionary budget item to a core strategic investment — and CFOs are now at the center of the decision-making. Deloitte’s latest CFO Insights report identifies three key challenges finance leaders must navigate: costs, risk, and accountability.

On costs, AI spending is fragmented across teams, demanding AI-specific P&L views to accurately measure ROI. On risk, AI expands the organization’s cyber attack surface, requiring defense investments that keep pace with AI adoption. On accountability, CFOs need governance frameworks to scale AI economics responsibly. Deloitte’s Finance Trends 2026 survey found that 57% of finance executives now count themselves among the top leaders driving companywide strategy.

Overheard

“SpaceX serves as a signal that public markets are once again open at scale, but the math alone confirms that by the time unicorns like SpaceX, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks go public, the exponential value creation is already gone.”

—Jeffrey Stewart, managing director at GPO Fund, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled “The SpaceX IPO is great — but it won’t deliver 100x returns.” Elon Musk’s SpaceX has reportedly taken a massive step toward the public markets by confidentially filing for an IPO that could value the aerospace giant at over $1 trillion. “The next generation of outsized returns won’t come from trillion-dollar IPOs,” Stewart argues. “They will come from smaller companies, listing earlier in their lifecycle, before global capital has fully priced them.” He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and the author of “Global IPO: The Great Rewiring of Capital Markets.”