Cantor Fitzgerald

Cantor Fitzgerald’s founder was B. Gerald Cantor, a pioneer in screen brokerage services and fixed income market data products, who donated dozens of Auguste Rodin sculptures to Stanford University, where the Rodin sculpture garden in the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts is named for him. The firm marked its 80th anniversary in 2025.⁠[1][2][1][1]

In 1972, Cantor began its wholesale intermediary brokerage operations, which later became a long-established inter-dealer and wholesale brokerage business.⁠[2][2]

In 1991, Howard Lutnick, then 29, was appointed CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald; he won control of the firm in 1996 and feuded for years with the widow of the firm’s founder.⁠[1][1]

In 1996, Cantor launched its eSpeed system, providing fully electronic trading of government bonds in the inter-dealer market; eSpeed completed an initial public offering and began trading on Nasdaq in 1999, while Cantor continued to operate its voice and hybrid brokerage businesses separately.⁠[2][2][2]

In the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees were killed, including the brother of CEO Howard Lutnick. The firm lost the majority of its U.S.-based employees, and its voice financial brokerage business thereafter operated primarily in Europe.⁠[1][2]

In August 2004, Cantor announced the reorganization and separation of its inter-dealer voice and hybrid brokerage businesses into a subsidiary called BGC, named in honor of B. Gerald Cantor; in April 2008, BGC and certain other Cantor assets merged into eSpeed, and the combined company was renamed BGC Partners. In 2011, BGC acquired and developed the commercial real estate services business Newmark, which it spun off to BGC’s stockholders in November 2018; in June 2013, BGC sold certain assets of its U.S. Treasury benchmark business and the eSpeed name to Nasdaq.⁠[2][2][2][2]

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. had obtained pre-released American Depositary Receipts, directly and indirectly, when it should have known the transactions were not backed by foreign shares, violating Section 17(a)(3) of the Securities Act of 1933, and had failed reasonably to supervise its securities lending desk personnel. Without admitting or denying the findings, Cantor agreed to pay over $359,000 in disgorgement, over $88,000 in prejudgment interest and a $200,000 penalty, totaling more than $647,000.⁠[3][3][3][3]

The SEC announced that for almost five years Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. had made numerous deficient blue sheet submissions with missing or inaccurate data on about 35 million transactions, largely due to inadequate validation processes and undetected coding errors; the SEC found that it had willfully violated broker-dealer books and records and reporting provisions. Cantor admitted the findings in the SEC’s cease-and-desist order, agreed to be censured and paid a $3.2 million penalty; the SEC also found that the firm had remediated by retaining an outside consultant and adopting new procedures.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

Cantor made big bets on special purpose acquisition companies during the 2021 SPAC boom. The SEC charged Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P. with causing two SPACs it controlled in 2020 and 2021, CF Finance Acquisition Corp. II and CF Acquisition Corp. V, to make misleading statements before their IPOs: the two raised $750 million from investors and denied in filings any contact or substantive discussions with potential targets before their IPOs, although at the time Cantor personnel had already begun negotiating with a small group of companies, including View and Satellogic, which the SPACs eventually merged with. Without admitting or denying the findings, Cantor agreed to cease and desist and to pay a $6.75 million civil penalty.⁠[1][5][5][5][5]

Howard Lutnick was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 41st Secretary of Commerce and stepped down from roles including chairman and CEO of BGC Group. His son Brandon Lutnick became chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P., and another son, Kyle Lutnick, became executive vice chairman; the three heads of the equities, fixed income and investment banking businesses became co-CEOs.⁠[6][6][6][7][1][1][1][1]

Cantor’s businesses include Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., a middle-market investment bank and primary dealer, and controlling interests in the brokerage and financial technology company BGC Group and the commercial real estate services company Newmark Group; the group has more than 14,000 employees.⁠[7][7][1]

Cantor Equity Partners (CEP), a SPAC sponsored by Cantor, announced a business combination agreement with the Bitcoin company Twenty One Capital, with Tether, Bitfinex and SoftBank as parties; after the merger Twenty One would be majority-owned by Tether and Bitfinex with a significant minority stake held by SoftBank, led by CEO Jack Mallers, and expected to launch with more than 42,000 Bitcoin. On December 3, 2025, CEP’s shareholders approved the business combination proposal.⁠[8][8][8][9][9][10][10]

To comply with government ethics rules, Howard Lutnick, as trustee, agreed to sell all the voting shares of CF Group Management, Cantor’s managing general partner, to trusts controlled by his son Brandon G. Lutnick; after closing, Brandon Lutnick would be deemed to have voting or dispositive power over the Newmark shares held by Cantor, representing about 58.5% of Newmark’s total voting power.⁠[11][11][11][11]

Richard Blumenthal, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to Cantor Fitzgerald chairman Brandon Lutnick requesting information about the firm’s business relationship with Tether and its practices for detecting violations of banking and sanctions laws. The letter said that since Trump’s return to office, Cantor’s 5% stake in Tether had risen in value from $600 million to an estimated $10 billion, in addition to tens of millions of dollars a year the firm collects from the assets it holds for Tether, and that although Tether claims to operate out of El Salvador, the vast majority of its assets reside in the United States in Cantor’s custody.⁠[12][12][12][12]

The letter lists 13 requests, covering when the partnership began, Cantor’s annual revenue from it, the Lutnick family’s earnings, whether Cantor requires independent audits of Tether, its monitoring of Tether’s compliance with OFAC sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules, custody and ownership records, and the terms under which Howard Lutnick gave up his stake, with responses due by October 23; it was copied to subcommittee chair Ron Johnson. The letter is a request for information rather than a subpoena and does not accuse Cantor of breaking a specific law.⁠[13][13][12][12][12][12][14][14]

The letter followed a September 28 report by the subcommittee’s minority staff on Tether and Iran’s shadow banking network. The $10 billion valuation is an estimate from reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which Tether has not confirmed. Tether issued a statement on September 28 citing about $550 million in Iran-linked USDT it had helped freeze that year, and its CEO Paolo Ardoino said the stablecoin does not offer refuge to sanctioned parties or criminal networks.⁠[13][13][13]

Under Howard Lutnick, Cantor expanded its crypto coverage team and hosted industry conferences while others remained suspicious of the sector, and held most of the U.S. Treasury bonds backing more than $130 billion of Tether’s tokens.⁠[1]