From a Harvard dorm to Citadel
Ken Griffin made his fortune in finance, starting while he was still a student. As a Harvard undergraduate in the late 1980s, he began trading convertible bonds from his dormitory, having installed a satellite dish to receive live stock prices. He raised money from friends and family to run small funds and spotted pricing gaps between convertible bonds and the shares they could be exchanged into.
After graduating in 1989, he moved to Chicago with backing from the investor Frank Meyer, who gave him capital to manage. In 1990 Griffin founded the firm that became Citadel. It began with convertible arbitrage and expanded into a multi strategy hedge fund with teams in equities, fixed income, commodities, credit and quantitative trading.
Citadel suffered steep losses during the financial crisis of 2008, but it recovered and grew in the following decade into one of the largest and most profitable hedge fund firms in the world. Griffin also built Citadel Securities, a market making business founded in 2002, which buys and sells stocks, options and other securities for retail brokers and institutions. Griffin owns most of Citadel and a large majority of Citadel Securities, and these stakes are the source of his wealth.
Citadel and Citadel Securities
Griffin's business interests center on two separate firms:
- Citadel: the hedge fund manager, which runs money for pension funds, endowments, foundations and other institutions using several investment strategies
- Citadel Securities: a market maker that handles a large share of retail stock trades in the United States and trades in many other markets, from options to government bonds
Citadel Securities sold a minority stake to the venture firms Sequoia and Paradigm in 2022. The firm has expanded into new areas such as Treasury trading and international markets, and has attracted attention for its role in handling orders from online brokers, especially during the meme stock episode of early 2021.
In 2022 Griffin announced that he was moving Citadel's headquarters from Chicago to Miami, saying the move was partly about quality of life and partly about concerns over crime in Chicago. The firms are building a new headquarters tower on Brickell Bay Drive in Miami. Griffin has also bought several high profile homes and properties in Florida, New York, London and elsewhere.
Childhood in Florida and early trading
Kenneth Cordele Griffin was born in October 1968 in Daytona Beach, Florida, and grew up mainly in Boca Raton. His father worked as a project manager for General Electric. From an early age he was drawn to computers and to the stock market, and he followed financial news closely as a teenager.
He enrolled at Harvard University to study economics and, while there, became curious about why some options appeared to be overpriced, a question that led him to study convertible bonds and the markets around them. His first fund began while he was still a student, using the dorm satellite dish to get prices quickly.
Griffin graduated from Harvard in 1989 with a degree in economics. His work at Citadel made him known for an intense, data driven management style and for hiring large numbers of engineers and quantitative researchers. He has remained the firm's founder, chief executive and largest owner, and he also serves as the non executive chairman of Citadel Securities.
Philanthropy and civic life
Griffin is a major donor to education, medicine and culture. In 2017 he funded the University of Chicago's economics department, which was renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. In 2019 Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry was renamed the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry after a large gift. In 2023 Harvard renamed its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in his honor following a large donation.
In health care, he has supported Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and medical institutions in South Florida. He has funded charter schools, including Success Academy in New York, and scholarships and education programs in Miami.
He also made headlines as a buyer at auction. In 2021 he bought a first printing of the United States Constitution and loaned it to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, where it went on public display. In 2024 he bought a nearly complete Stegosaurus skeleton and arranged to loan it to the American Museum of Natural History. Griffin is a prominent donor to Republican candidates and causes, and he has used his civic initiative, Griffin Catalyst, to support community projects.