Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel - In Good Company (NBIM Investment Conference 2026 stage)

Our next speaker started investing from his Harvard dorm room in 1986 and founded one of the world's leading alternative investment firms just a year after graduating. Ken Griffin is the founder and CEO of Citadel, which manages over $60 billion in capital. At Citadel, winning is core. They hire the top 1% and create an environment where that top 1% push each other to be even better. How do you build a culture where the best want to stay and compete? Malin Norberg, the Chief Investment Officer for Asset Strategies, joins him to find out. Please welcome Ken and Malin.

Thank you, Ken, for joining us here in Oslo today. I cannot think of a better person to talk to about winning culture. So winning is one of Citadel's core values alongside integrity, learning, meritocracy, and extraordinary colleagues. But winning is the one that stands out there. So why winning?

So first, it's just wonderful to be here today. Thank you so much for having me participate in this wonderful conference. And one of the things that is very true is that this team, which has done such an extraordinary job of managing the sovereign wealth of the nation, has been focused on delivering for the people of Norway. You have had a winning team, which has really delivered in a profound way for the people of your country. Let me be clear. Why do we actually enumerate winning as one of our core values? Because, regretfully, in the United States, we went through a period of time in which winning seemed to be out of vogue. We lost our way in the wilderness. And great firms are focused on winning.

As David Rubenstein put it, can you create a product that the consumer will value, the consumer will pay for, and what the consumer will reward you for creating and for building? Firms that are winning firms do just that. And firms that create inferior products are firms that fail. And what worried us is, in a culture where participation trophies were becoming ubiquitous, we lost our way as a country in what it took to win. And we at Citadel really do believe in the importance of winning for our clients. That's core to our business. And I was thinking about what David had to say in terms of companies and products. One thing to keep in mind is, at Citadel, there's no shame in making money. We manufacture money.

Our clients give us capital with one goal in mind. Can we manufacture more money with that capital?

You certainly manufacture money in a very impressive way. So when it comes to winning culture, Nicolai just mentioned speed as one of the pillars to winning culture. And your colleague here just told me that one thing that amazes him with Citadel is that you can still move at the speed of a startup, even though you are thousands of employees. So how do you do that?

So I wish we could. I wish we could, but as you grow, as a business grows in complexity and grows in stakeholders, grows in regulatory footprint, for example, it actually becomes necessary to have more process, more bureaucracy to make sure that what you do is on the right side of the road. So startups have greater flexibility than your established firms, but your established firms have far greater depth and resources. What you have to be very focused on is that you are controlling the size of the bureaucratic state, that you keep a constant focus on the ability to rapidly make decisions, and when a decision is made, to rapidly execute upon that decision. But because you have a bigger footprint, you're still going to have to go through a few more steps than that smaller startup might have to go through, but with more resources,

With the ability to interact with other global players on a far more stronger playing field, we're able to move quite quickly. On decision-making, though, this is one where large firms do tend to find themselves lost in the wilderness. And I'll tell my colleagues all the time, they put something to my desk for input from me. I'll give them a date. I'll be back to you in 72 hours, 48 hours, 96 hours. If you don't hear from me, I gave you a yes. It's your call. Don't let yourself in management be an impediment to decision-making by those who are junior to you. And in some sense, negative consent to move forward is really powerful because it tells people that they have agency, that they can make a decision.

One of our key internal principles is the most junior person who is closest to the information, that's the person who optimally should make the decision as often or as frequently as possible. Now, will they make mistakes? Of course they will. But they will grow much faster in a culture where they're empowered with agency to make decisions. They will learn from their successes, and they will learn from their failures. But most importantly, they are rapidly learning, and that's how we create leaders.

So it's a good point, and talking about developing people. So The Wall Street Journal reported that you spend several weeks every year reviewing the performance assessments for thousands of employees. So how—why is that where you choose to spend your time, and what does it say about the culture at Citadel?

Well, first of all, I think it says that I deeply care about how my colleagues are advancing in their careers. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking for patterns of where we are not developing talent strongly enough and aggressively enough. So where in the business are our newest hires, whether they're out of college, out of a PhD program, a lateral hire from another global investment bank or global investment management firm, where are people not flourishing? And I'm trying to understand, what do we need to do as a firm? What do we need to do differently? Whether it's professional development, whether it's the experience that people have, whether it's the trust that is placed in our newer hires, what do we need to do differently to get more out of people?

And one of the things I'm most proud of at Citadel is the extraordinary amount of human capital that we've developed over 35 years. People who run today one of the world's most successful hedge funds, who run one of the most successful securities dealers in the world, and, bluntly, countless people who run many of the financial institutions around the world whose roots trace back to Citadel. I think these are all a testament to our consistent focus on developing people to be the best that they can be.

So Citadel was a pioneer in quantitative investing, and you've been using machine learning for longer than most of us knew what that was. So how do you, with that head start—so ten years of head start on the AI movement today—how do you make sure you stay ahead?

Well, I think that's actually a wonderful story about the kind of firm we want to be. I remember when TensorFlow was released, and five of my colleagues came to my office the day it came out. And they literally said TensorFlow, which was Google's machine learning toolkit, was going to revolutionize the world, with complete conviction. And I said, "OK." And they were basically saying, "We want to go spend the next couple of weeks really engrossed in what this body of knowledge means and how we can apply it in market-making and securities." And I said, "Well, I mean, of course. Like, go for it." And really, the point of the meeting was not permission. It was their excitement over this transformative technology.

They wanted to bring me behind the curtain to think about what machine learning was going to mean for our business. And I remember calling one of those colleagues about four weeks later and saying, 'Okay, so what are your initial findings? What have you gleaned so far from using TensorFlow?' He goes, 'Well, it's in production.' And I'm like, 'What do you mean it's in production?' He goes, 'We use it to quote the U.S. equity portfolio. We've been doing that for the last two weeks.' And I'm like, 'It's been four weeks since the meeting.' He goes, 'No, no, a group of us work pretty much every single day, 12 to 14 hours a day, because this is one of the coolest things we've ever worked on, and this is going to transform the world.'

And we're already using it in production. That's a winning culture.

That's a winning culture. And around technology, so with Gen AI technologies, not only for the technologists, but for everyone. So have you changed the culture around how you manage, well, the culture around technology adoption in the firm?

So I think it's important to remember that about one in three people at Citadel are a software engineer. So the firm is very, very deeply invested, invested in technology. It's core to what we do. I think it's just important to keep that in the back of your mind when you touch on this topic. So for us, with generative AI, I think frankly one of the biggest problems out of the gate was there was perhaps too much enthusiasm for embracing Gen AI. The early generation large language models were really, really fascinating to people. Because for the first time, machine learning didn't create a vector of zeros and ones, it created the written word. You could write a poem, you could write a song, you could write a story, you could write a narrative.

I mean, it interacted with people in a way that technology has rarely interacted with individuals. And it was incredibly alluring to people to, how do I use this to change what I was doing at work? One of the tougher conversations I had with a colleague is I said, 'All right, I want a list of all the Gen AI-based projects that we have at Citadel.' And he came back with 200 projects. And I said, 'No, no, five. We're going to do five.' And he's like, 'Well, what about the other 195?' I said, 'We're going to kill all those. We're going to do five. We're going to actually push them really hard. We're going to see what works and what doesn't work. But we can't afford to let everybody be pursuing random ad hoc projects.'

It's just too expensive. It's too much of a distraction. Now, of the five that we pursued, we had a real success with just over half. Now, of note, the Gen A models have gotten markedly better. I don't think we incurred any cost of killing 195 projects. And I do believe that over the course of the last six months, with the introduction of OpenAI 5.0, with Claude 4.6, 4.7, I think you have a transformative sea change taking place. You've got many more use cases today that are practical, that are implementable, that are meaningful in impact than you did two years ago. So I think one of the key challenges for a business is always that dilemma between being on the bleeding edge and being on the leading edge.

And I think good companies think very long and hard about where's it worth being on the bleeding edge, so it was with TensorFlow, and where do you want to be on the leading edge? Where do you want to be a fast follower? Where do you want others to sort of pave the way in front of you? And you can follow quickly and capitalize on their learnings. I think it's very important in running a big business to think about when do you want to be on the bleeding edge? When do you want to be on the leading edge? And pick that path with volition. Don't let that come down to random happenstance.

So one of the places where you're in the leading edge is hiring the top people. So you have hundreds of thousands of applications every year. And you said Citadel hires winners in life and not just winners in business. So say I'm applying for a job at Citadel and I'm sitting next to you for a job interview. So what's the one question you would ask me to see if I was the right cultural fit for Citadel?

Oh, I wish one question would do the trick.

What's the most essential question?

Look, I don't think there's... It's not one. It's a mosaic, okay? We're all people. We're complicated. And what you want to understand is, what is the mosaic of this person, and how does that fit into our team holistically and the team they're gonna be a part of? So there are a few things that I'm deeply interested in learning about you. Nicolai, you spoke about ambition. I actually prefer the word aspiration over ambition, because I think it appeals to our deeper inner meaning more directly. What do we aspire to do in this world? What do we aspire to create or to change? I wanna know your ambitions or aspirations. I wanna know what does success look like to you? You know, I had a young man from Harvard with me years ago, and I asked him, you know, this is gonna be right to the point.

If you made $10 million, what would you do? And he goes, I would quit, and I would climb the highest peaks around the world. I said, okay. I said, I don't think this is the right firm for you. And he goes, well, you've already made an offer to me. I said, that's wonderful. I strongly urge you not to accept it. Because I don't want to hear from somebody who's 22 years old that there's some number that represents their magic number. If they made that much money, they're going to climb mountains around the world. I want to hear how they're going to climb the next mountain at Citadel, how they're going to grow a business for us, how they're going to change the firm, how they want to lead our Asian business.

Or like, look, if I made $10 million, I'd like to think it was done because I was very successful at X, and then I'd have more responsibility here to have a bigger impact on the firm. That's what I want to hear. So I look for people's aspirations. I look for their track record of being a winner. I love people who competed in competitive sports in high school and college. They're not gonna play tennis for Citadel's tennis team, but their willingness to get up every single day and go to practice, their willingness to put it all out, in this case on the court, and to win or to be beaten says a lot about their resiliency and their perseverance. And those are really important life skills that you learn in playing competitive sports.

In fact, in choosing to compete in any arena, speech and debate, as a musician, competing in any arena, tells me that you are willing to win and to lose. And that is such an important life skill. You know, people forget that my average equity portfolio manager is right about 53% of their stock picks. Could you imagine, like, you're going to your surgeon, he goes, yeah, about 53% of my patients live. What a humbling job. You're right about 53% of the time. If you're right about 53% of the time with the right upside-downside ratio, you're actually extraordinarily good as a portfolio manager. But that means you go home a lot of days really wrong and really humbled. Do you have the mental fortitude to come back to work the next day and get right back at it?

Well, I think that is some great advice and insights into a winning culture. And I think that's a good note to end on. So thank you so much, Ken. This has been very insightful.