Ken Griffin: Vision, Leadership and the Future of Global Markets | America Business Forum Miami 2025

For the following interview, Bret Baier, official host of the America Business Forum, takes the stage.

All right.

Great to see you. Great to see you.

Well, Mayor Suarez calls you and says, 'I want you to do this forum.' And what do you say?

Date, time, place. Mayor of Miami is one of the greatest mayors of any city in the world. If he asked me to jump, the only answer is, 'How high?'

Well, it was pretty high. It was pretty high because you were in Hong Kong 24 hours ago, is that right?

I was in Hong Kong yesterday. Actually, maybe today, last night.

And you just hopped off a plane, and here you are.

Mayor asked me to be here. I'm here.

You know, your firm, Citadel, just celebrated its 35th anniversary on Saturday, November 1st. When you look back at this journey from a young man, as you heard, from the dorm room at Harvard to founding Citadel, to become one of the most influential investors in the world, what were the most important turning points that you look at?

If I look at the history of Citadel, I'm gonna actually echo the words of a friend of mine who is one of the great entrepreneurs of this era. The great entrepreneurs have the right toolkit, the right skills to solve the problems that are relevant to society at that point in time. And so when I started Citadel 35 years ago, it was the intersection of computers, quantitative analytics, and finance. It was the brave new world of Wall Street. And over the 35 years, by combining knowledge across all three spectrums, we have built one of the world's most successful investment firms.

As you look back at that dorm room for a minute, what values do you think were instilled in you early in life that have been most helpful in bringing you to where you are now?

You know, when I was a young man, I played soccer. I started playing soccer when I was six years old. I actually played for about 35 years of my life. And what you realize when you're playing on a team is the power of a team. And so one of the great strengths of Citadel over the last 35 years has been our constant focus on just always recruiting the best and brightest to join our team. You learn that playing team sports, winning teams are teams that collaborate well together, they communicate well together, they row in the same direction together. We look for those collaborative skills in the people that we hire, but we really do try to find the best and brightest to be part of our team.

All right, so take us to 2008. Everything's falling apart. The headlines about your firm, they say, "Firm's steep losses, Citadel's year to forget." Take us back to that moment where it seems like the world's falling apart, and what were the most important lessons, if you talked about leadership and responsibility, you face in the face of diversity and adversity?

Look, 2008 was just an absolutely, absolutely devastating year for many firms in finance, right? The American banking system was on its knees, and our firm was caught in the maelstrom. The key is, when you're in hell, just keep walking forward each and every day. Stay focused on where you need to get to, and keep taking the actions to get to where you need to get to. So for us in 2008, again, you saw the power of our team collaborating—my partners around the world making often tough decisions about what we needed to do to persevere through that really difficult moment.

So you've built not one, but two industry-leading firms in Citadel and Citadel Securities. What are the most important factors that keep these businesses really at the top of their game?

So when you're in a competitive dynamic—and every business is—you always have to be focused on what would the startup of this moment do to compete with you and to beat you. Always important to never rest on your laurels, to never be complacent, and to think about where's the world heading, where are your most difficult, your shrewdest competitors going, and how do you get there first? So you can never rest on your laurels. The minute you start saying you're the best is the minute you start to write your own epitaph.

I mean, you've been great at attracting, retaining talent. What's one thing you look for in somebody that you hire?

So there's a couple things that we look for. Obviously, I've emphasized the importance of a person's intellectual capacity or aptitude, but those are just table stakes. What you really want is somebody who's both very bright, very driven, but who has incredible perseverance. You know, many of our colleagues are fundamental investors. They try to understand companies or predict interest rates. These endeavors are often—you make an investment choice, you're right about 53, 54% of the time. I mean, could you imagine being a surgeon and almost half your patients die?

No.

Right, so my colleagues, one of the great strengths they have to have is the resilience to cope with being wrong. One of the problems with grade inflation in the United States is we're not teaching young Americans what it's like to fall short. And falling short is what happens in business all the time. You need to pick yourself up, you need to put one foot in front of the next, and you need to move away from that place of failure to a better place, to a place of success. So there's a huge emphasis on perseverance and resilience in the people that we look for.

That's really interesting. You know, I tell my two boys, if you hustle, you can beat a lot of folks—maybe 90% of the folks, if you hustle—because there's always somebody chasing.

You know, I love that word, hustle, and I lived in Chicago for about 30 years, and there's a great quote. 'Things may come to those who wait, but only those things left behind by those who hustle.' Now do you know who said that quote? It was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln gave some of the best business advice I've ever heard. Business is about hustling. It's about going the extra mile. It's about going the distance. And people forget, just to stop there for a second, successful businesses are businesses that meet the needs of their customers. And often that involves having to go the extra distance, right? You go to a great restaurant because the food's really good. Somebody makes sure that that kitchen is well run.

They care about what the customer experience is. And that's so key to business, and it's often forgotten in popular literature about capitalism. Businesses that meet the needs of customers are businesses that thrive. Businesses that don't, don't exist.

I want to talk about your passions here in Miami and education and all that you're doing, but that gives me a little entrée into breaking news. Last night, Zohran Mamdani wins the mayor in New York City. There are some people looking at that saying, you know, it's a different environment for businesses, and is it going to lead to an exodus? Will there be a ton of businesses and people who come to a place like this in Miami as a result of that? Knowing what you know, and you've obviously moved to Miami from Chicago, what do you think of last night's result there?

Well, I mean, for the people of New York, I pray that the policies that Mamdani uses to govern and lead New York are different than the talking points he used to win the mayoral race. The people of New York deserve better.

And do you think it maybe leads to an exodus down here?

Right. And so if I look at Miami and I look at why Miami is so successful, the focus on education, the focus on public safety, these are safe streets. We live in a safe city. The focus on community. This is a city that has great pride in what we've accomplished together and what we will accomplish ahead. I've lived in a failed city-state. I lived in Chicago for 30-some years. I had two colleagues who had bullets fly through their cars, and a colleague stabbed outside the front door of our office. I had 25 bullet holes at the front of my building where I lived. You can't live in a city awash in violent crime and feel proud to call that place home. So I'm grateful for the leadership in the state of Florida.

This is a great place to call home. And I hope... And I really hope that when Mamdani thinks about leadership, he thinks about the right role models. And there's a lot to copy from our great state of Florida and from this great city of Miami.

So 2022, you move your family down here. Any like welcome-to-Miami culture shocks for you?

Do you know how great it is to go to dinner and people talk about their children, and they talk about their future, and they do so with excitement and enthusiasm? We lost that in Chicago in the last 10 years. Dinner in Chicago would be about crime, about cronyism, about failed policies in the state. It is so refreshing to be in a city where people talk about tomorrow. And I think that's a really important topic here in a roundtable on business. Entrepreneurs are people that believe in tomorrow. It's really tough to start a business. Don't kid yourself. You don't own your business, your business owns you. So you have to have a great deal of optimism about the future of where you live, the community you're part of, the country you're part of to start a business.

And it is so great to see the optimism that we have here in Miami. It's really special.

It is. You know, since arriving in Miami, you've invested really heavily in this state, from education to healthcare, soccer fields, Miami Underline. Your most recent gift was support of the expansion of the Success Academy Charter Network to Miami. So when you talk about education, why is education particularly important to you, and what brought you to Success Academy and bringing it here?

So, let's be clear. Education is the on-ramp to the American dream. Every student in our country who has a world-class education has an extraordinarily high chance of living the life that we all dream to live. And our country lets down every student who doesn't have a great education, because in this world where skills are so important, that on-ramp to the American dream, that road is just closed. And I've lived in a city—you know, Illinois had 50-some schools two years ago where not a single child performed at grade level. The American dream is closed to those children. It's a disgrace. Success Academy proves that every child can get on that on-ramp. In the city of New York, where they admit children from the inner city, 100% of their graduates go on to a college education.

When you walk in their classrooms and you see the enthusiasm of the teachers, the engagement of the kids, it is so uplifting. Like, you see the future of our country and you see it in a population that too many politicians say can't learn and can't be educated. And they make up a litany of excuses. And Eva Moskowitz proves that they're just excuses, that every child in this country deserves and has the opportunity to live the American dream.

And for all the folks who say maybe the American dream is fading away, maybe it's not what it was—first of all, you didn't land on third base, with you growing up and your family history.

I mean, my father grew up one of five, both parents working to make ends meet. They certainly didn't grow up on third base. And he worked so hard to make sure that my siblings and I really did have that chance to live the American dream. In fact, what's interesting is he actually started his career when America dreamed big. He worked for General Electric on the NASA space program that put man on the moon. And I'm really grateful to have grown up in a family where there was such an emphasis on education, and frankly, such a belief in what you can do in this country. Because he was part of the team that really did change history when Neil Armstrong took the first step on the moon.

You've said that you can imagine doing what you're doing for some time. But when you look at all that you're doing, the philanthropy, the business, as you look to your legacy for the next generation, what do you see?

There are many things that I believe define each of our legacies in life. I think one that strikes close to home is the children that we raise. And I really do hope that my children have the values to be contributing citizens to our country. That's really important to me. That's first and foremost on my list. Beyond that, I'm actually incredibly grateful for all my partners who've invested so much, and the colleagues who've worked at Citadel. Not only is Citadel incredibly successful, but people who've left Citadel have gone on to accomplish great things and, I think, really run firms. They drop the acorns of success on the ground that grow into the trees that create other success stories across our country.

And we've put a lot of seeds in the ground. I'm really proud of what my colleagues both at Citadel and I have done over the years. And I do believe we played a pivotal role in transforming markets. We played a really important role in the democratization of finance. When I was in college, in the good old days, to trade a stock, you'd pay a commission of $40, you'd pay a bid-ask spread of 25 cents, and you'd wait five minutes to get your trade done. Today in America, as a retail investor, you trade for no commission, pay a spread of about a penny, and your trade is done in about a tenth of a second. Why do I care about this? Because roughly half of all American households own equity in America.

They own stocks. They're partaking in the American dream as co-owners of our country. And we want to expand that ethos of all of us being invested in America. It helps all of us to save for our retirement, to create more jobs and more prosperity, and to understand and appreciate the importance of good laws and good policy.

You know, as we said, you just got off the plane from Hong Kong and you were speaking over there. As you're in Asia and you think about the economy and how it feels, what do you come away with?

So when I travel the world, in every country there is a profound respect for the entrepreneurship of our country. In fact, that's been a really incredible source of talent for the United States. Around the world, people dream of coming here to start businesses, to build their dreams. You see it in the Fortune 500. Roughly 50% of all the Fortune 500 companies are run by immigrants or the children of immigrants. The majority of American AI startups were started by immigrants.

There you go. There is a disconnect today between the success on Wall Street and big companies really doing well and how people feel at home. And it's, you know, whether you use the word affordability, whether you talk about inflation, whether you talk—however it is, there is this dichotomy between the two. As you look at that, is that a major problem that we need to fix as a country?

So first of all, I absolutely agree with you. I agree with you. And this is why good policy is so important. The fruits of our economy need to be spread broadly across our people. And that's where really important and thoughtful economic policies come into play. In Washington, how do we lift all boats? That's a really key question. And we need to take a step back and say, what are the right incentives, the right changes that we need to make in society so that everyone partakes in the prosperity and wealth of our country?

So to that point, what are the key drivers in this economy, the U.S. economy, over the next 12 months?

Key drivers over the next 12 months?

Because it's pretty volatile now.

One of the biggest changes that we're grappling with as a country is the change in immigration policy. We've gone from a country that was creating roughly a quarter million jobs a month to about 30 to 40,000 jobs a month as we've radically shrunk the labor force. And that has profound implications, in particular for startups. Startups really need access to talented people for their founders to grow and thrive, and we've changed the dynamics of the labor pool. What really concerns me are those who've chosen not to come to our country, who bring the skills, the talents, and the ambition that helped to create the American success stories. If I look at Citadel, my most senior partner was born in Ecuador.

My other most senior partner was born in Australia, and one was born in Taiwan, if you sort of understand the picture. I am so grateful for all the incredibly talented people who have come to our country to call this country home. And I really do hope that we take a step back from where we are right here, right now. And let's be clear, there's a lot of anger and frustration about the chaos on our southern border that played out under the Biden administration. The unfettered immigration of millions of people, we didn't know their backgrounds, we didn't know why they were coming here. President Trump did something really great for our country in securing our border. But we need to make it clear, if you're coming to America to live the American dream and to help build this country, there's a path to citizenship.

Every student from abroad who graduates from an American college should have a green card stapled to their diploma.

There you go, could be a policy in the making. Last thing, Ken, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of small businesses, a lot of folks who want to succeed. If you had one piece of advice as you're leaving this group, what is it?

One piece of advice. I'll go back to that opening statement. Having really good partners around you is really critical to your success. And finding somebody who complements your skills is an extraordinary, extraordinary asset. You know, when I think about the start of Citadel, I really surrounded myself with people who were different than I were. And that made for such a strong firm. It's so important to have complementary skills around you. And then, it's really important to be thoughtful about where you're heading and to stay focused on what you need to do to accomplish that task. It's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, but it's very important to always take the time out to think and give consideration as to where you want to go and then make that happen.

Ken Griffin, thank you so much for the time.