WGM Weekender: Stephen Ross Didn’t Come to West Palm Beach to Retire. He Came to Build.

How the 70-mile corridor from Miami to Palm Beach became the most powerful stretch of real estate in America.

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What’s Inside:

• $15 Billion Offer. One Answer: No. The Stephen Ross story you need to read

• NORA District: West Palm’s new cultural center is open and already iconic

• The Vineta Opens Tonight: Palm Beach’s most anticipated hotel in a decade

• Larry Ellison Moves In: what his $277M resort acquisition really means

• Aman Comes to Palm Beach: 41 units, 20 years in the making

• Mary Lou’s: the Worth Avenue legacy hiding behind a bait shop door

• The New Gold Coast: How the 70-mile corridor from Miami to Palm Beach became the most powerful stretch of real estate in America

Someone offered Stephen Ross $15 billion for the Miami Dolphins.

To be precise, they offered close to $15 billion for the Dolphins, Hard Rock Stadium, and the F1 Miami Grand Prix, the entire sports entertainment empire he’s spent years assembling. Ross bought the Dolphins in 2009 for around $1 billion. A $15 billion offer would have been the largest sports transaction in history, nearly double the record set when the Los Angeles Lakers sold for $10 billion last year. And he turned it down.

“Pretty high numbers,” he told Bloomberg in January, almost laughing. “But where would you put the money? Then what would I do with it?”

What he’s doing with it, all of it, the capital, the attention, the energy of a man who made his name building Hudson Yards over the New York rail yards, is happening 70 miles north of Miami on a stretch of Intracoastal waterfront that, until recently, most of South Florida’s luxury class casually ignored.

West Palm Beach and its legendary neighbor across the bridge, Palm Beach, are not rising in spite of Miami. They’re completing it. Think of the relationship the way New York breathes through the Hamptons, or the way Manhattan professionals decompress in Westchester. Different registers of the same chord. What’s being built up the coast right now is the other half of a story that Miami started, and the pace of it, taken all together, is staggering.

The Man Who Stayed

Stephen Ross is 85 years old. He splits his days between a West Palm Beach office and his Palm Beach home, cutting back on travel anywhere outside Florida except for Dolphins games. Mornings start with a workout. Days end late. By every account, this is his idea of a great time.