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The 100-story building requires special foundations and a pendulum-like device to prevent swaying

Miami’s Waldorf Astoria residential tower, poised to be South Florida’s tallest skyscraper, is a test case for new techniques meant to enable the more than 1,000-foot tall building to withstand hurricane-force winds and remain stable near sea level.

Developers broke ground on the building’s foundation in downtown Miami in October. The 100-story tower, which resembles a series of glass cubes stacked on top of each other, will feature 205 hotel guest rooms and 360 luxury condo residences. It would be the city’s first supertall structure, and the tallest residential building south of New York City when completed around 2027, according to the development team.

Supertall towers, which architects tend to define as buildings that rise at least 300 meters, or 984 feet, have been common in cities such as New York and Chicago. But no one has succeeded in building one in Miami.

A major challenge has been to create a tower that could rise that high on land near sea level, which requires digging deep into the earth, past the porous limestone and water table and into the more stable rock below it. Buildings must not tremble under the force of hurricane gales that are increasingly common in the area. Developers also had to secure permission from Miami International Airport since the supertall building would be in the flight path, which took several years to achieve, they said.

PMG, which is developing the Waldorf tower, said the structure will require Miami’s first tuned mass damper, which is like a pendulum, to be installed at the top of the building to keep it from swaying in the wind.

Developers are also utilizing a specialized technology called deep soil mixing to strengthen the ground beneath it, which they say will cause minimal vibrations to the buildings adjacent during construction.

“Where other buildings might have taken four months of foundation, it’s going to take us a year to get all that structure underground just to support this building,” said Kevin Maloney, PMG’s chief executive.

The Waldorf building is so heavy and so large that the 150-knot or 200-knot hurricane-strength winds would not affect it, said Mr. Maloney. The building’s floor plates are each around 20,000 square feet, compared with a recent supertall tower PMG built on Manhattan’s West 57th street, the Steinway, where floor plates are closer to 5,000 square feet, Mr. Maloney said.

“The building code in Miami is the strictest in the country, and that’s true about 1,000-foot towers or eight-story towers,” said Ryan Shear, Managing Partner of PMG. “There’s not a city I feel safer in than Miami in terms of hurricane code.”

Developers OKO Group and Cain International also utilized the same foundation technology in a nearby 47-story luxury condo development, known as Una Residences. During the deep soil mixing process last year, water shot up into the foundation, creating what looked like a lagoon. The flooding concerned nearby residents and caused construction delays.

A spokesman for OKO Group and Cain International pointed to the recent $17.75 million sale of a trilevel penthouse at the building, and confirmed that construction has now passed the tower’s fifth level.

The technology also caused hiccups at Miami’s Brickell City Centre development years ago.

A spokesman for the developer, Swire Properties, said that while some adjustments had to be made because of the new technique, the team felt the outcome was successful overall.

Mr. Maloney said that when deep soil mixing caused issues, the technology was “very new, and untried.” He said that it has improved since then and that PMG is already using it in another development, the E11even Hotel & Residences, a luxury 64-story condo tower building in Miami.

About 87% of the condo space in the Waldorf tower has been sold, Mr. Maloney said. Condo units that start at $2 million are sold out, while the units in the two cubes at the top of the building are still on the market, with prices starting at $10 million, he said. Buyers put down 30% of their purchase.

Those sales help to finance construction during a difficult time to build, with interest rates rising and Florida insurance costs shooting up in response to the recent proliferation of insurance claims after storms.

“There’s no question the economy is in a dark place and financing is difficult, but you have to understand also that it’s going to take all of 48 to probably 55 months to build this thing,” said Mr. Maloney, at which point he expects a completely different economic situation.

He said insurance has gone up about 300% over 18 months. For a project like the Waldorf, that means he has to put up tens of millions of dollars at the very beginning. Mr. Maloney said his financing and preconstruction condo sales can cover it, but the sharp rise in insurance is making life difficult for other new developments.

“This is the reason most projects won’t get out of the ground in Florida,” he said.

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Establishing such a process will take at least a few more weeks, Musk says

Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. won’t let anyone who was removed from the service for violating its rules back on the platform until “we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks.”

Mr. Musk said on Twitter early Wednesday that he spoke to a number of civil-society leaders about how the company “will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies.”

Bad news for Charlie Munger and the China bulls

In February 2020, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man Charlie Munger gave a harrowing outlook on the news business to shareholders of the Daily Journal, a California legal news provider that he has chaired since 1977. “My best advice, I think you would be happier if you reduced your expectations,” he said.

Despite the dismal forecast, the Daily Journal was actually in an enviable position compared to its peers: the paper began investing in stocks after the 2008 financial crisis, and has managed to generate millions of dollars in dividends as its peers have struggled to stay afloat.

The portfolio has been so successful that on certain days it has overtaken the value of the entire company, which in addition to owning a handful of newspapers sells software to US courts and probation offices. But even the legendary investor is capable of making a bad bet, as the FT’s Eric Platt and Anna Nicolaou report.

Munger, now 98, stepped down as chair of the Daily Journal last year but continues to direct the publisher’s investment portfolio, which as of June has been sitting on $187mn of unrealised gains on a $342mn portfolio thanks to its investments in Alibaba, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chinese carmaker BYD among others.

The strategy hasn’t been without its risks. In 2021, the company went on a buying spree of Alibaba stock and had amassed shares worth nearly $72mn by the end of last year.

Munger himself executed many of these purchases, even as other investors were dumping their shares in response to Beijing’s regulatory crackdown on the tech sector. Alibaba stock has fallen 45 per cent this year, and is down 71 per cent since the Daily Journal first disclosed a stake in 2021.

“[We] invested some money in China because we could get more value in terms of the strength of the enterprise on the price of security than we could get in the United States,” Munger said at the Daily Journal’s 2022 shareholder meeting in February.

The Berkshire vice-chair isn’t the only one to have made a call on China that isn’t looking good. Chase Coleman’s hedge fund Tiger Global and Edinburgh-based investment group Baillie Gifford have also taken hits on their Chinese equity portfolios.

How so many famed stockpickers missed the signs is no longer the most pressing concern on investors’ minds. The more urgent question is how they intend to claw their way back.

‘Self-financing’ and the fall of an aluminium tycoon 

When Chinese businessman Liu Zhongtian placed a bet on an Australian superyacht builder in 2017, the deal was supposed to help his aluminium powerhouse Zhongwang cruise into the marine sector “at full speed”.

Five years on, the wind has all but disappeared from its sails, leaving the company bankrupt with more than $60bn in debt, the FT’s Cheng Leng reports.

In September, a Chinese court approved an application for bankruptcy by creditors of Zhongwang, Asia’s biggest manufacturer of aluminium extrusions.

Its 252 affiliates and parent were “manifestly insolvent”, the court said.

Liu was once the richest man in China’s Liaoning province. As the economy cooled, and demand for Zhongwang’s products waned as the country’s property sector plunged, its business collapsed.

In a US judgment in April, six companies tied to Liu were ordered to pay $1.83bn in restitution after allegedly evading $1.8bn in import duties. But neither company representatives nor Liu appeared in court, the US Department of Justice said. It said China Zhongwang remained a “fugitive”.

In better times, Zhongwang had funded its own expansion. The company effectively financed itself, sourcing credit from its subsidiary Zhongwang Finance.

A crackdown on financial leveraging in China sent Zhongwang’s financial arm into bankruptcy on the same day as its parent, leaving Liu overleveraged and with limited options.

“The [lesson from] the fall of Zhongwang is the failure to crack down on these alleged self-financing activities,” said Shanghai lawyer Eugene Weng. “Such practices are a ticking time bomb and can hardly be tolerated by Chinese courts.”