Stegosaurus Fossil Sold to Hedge Fund Billionaire for $45 Million

Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who owns Citadel Securities, bought a nearly complete stegosaurus fossil at auction Wednesday, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The purchase price was $44.6 million, breaking the old record of $32 million for the most expensive fossil ever purchased.

A Sotheby’s press release said seven bidders had placed their bids on the stegosaurus fossil, dubbed “Apex,” and that only the auction winner was anonymous. But the Wall Street Journal was first to report that Griffin, 55, had placed the highest bid, telling the newspaper he would loan it to an American institution. “Apex was born in America and it’s going to stay in America,” Griffin reportedly said.

The fossil was excavated in Moffat County, Colorado, on private land near the town of Dinosaur in 2022 and 2023. Dinosaur gets its unique name from its proximity to Dinosaur National Monument. Sotheby’s describes Apex as being “preserved in exquisite detail, exhibiting little distortion, and retaining much of its original shape and surface features.”

“Virtually complete, with 254 fossil bone elements (out of an approximate total of 319), the skeleton belonged to a large, robust adult individual, and showed signs of arthritis, indicating that it had lived to an advanced age,” the auction house said in a press release. “The specimen shows no signs of combat-related injuries or evidence of postmortem recovery, and displays a number of interesting pathologies.”

The Apex sale is controversial in scientific circles, given that most people believe that such rare and important history should not be controlled by the whims of private owners. In fact, the Washington Post notes that the original Sotheby’s auction listed the fossil as an undetermined species of stegosaurus, likely because scientists were unable to properly study the find. Clearly, Griffin’s quote to the Wall Street Journal is an attempt to make it seem like he’s doing something generous for the public good by keeping the fossil in the United States, but it’s unclear what kind of access an institution might have to the fossil beyond simply being able to display it for a period of time.

In 2021, Griffin’s firm Citadel Securities came under fire during the Gamestop stock boom, amid allegations that he had something to do with the Robinhood outages that limited trading. The hashtag “KenGriffinLied” even started trending, but the billionaire dismissed the allegations as conspiracy theories, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Griffin is reportedly worth an estimated $38 billion and has donated more than $60 million to Republicans this election cycle, according to the Financial Times. Griffin supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the primaries and has yet to donate money to Donald Trump, as far as we know. Griffin has previously said he would make his decision to support Trump after seeing who the former president chooses as his running mate. Trump picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance this week, meaning Griffin’s donations could extend to Trump in the near future, depending on how he feels about that choice.