Ken Griffin

Griffin was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and attended middle and high school in Boca Raton.⁠[1]

Griffin attended Harvard College, concentrated in economics, and began investing from his dorm room in Cabot House as a sophomore; he began trading in 1987 and put a satellite dish on the roof of his dorm to get real-time stock quotes. In congressional testimony, he recalled trading stocks and options as a retail investor while attending college in the late 1980s. In 1989, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard.⁠[2][3][4][5]

Griffin moved to Chicago soon after graduating and founded Citadel there in 1990, starting with $4.6 million under management. Citadel later grew into one of the world’s leading alternative investment firms, with capital partners including pension plans, university endowments, hospital systems, and foundations.⁠[1][6][4][2][4]

In 1999, his 10th reunion year, Griffin established a scholarship at Harvard named in honor of his grandfather, Wayne R. Gratz. He also served on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Financial Aid Task Force.⁠[5][5]

In 2002, Griffin and his partners founded the market maker Citadel Securities. In his 2021 congressional testimony, he said Citadel Securities was the largest market maker in the U.S. equities market and executed more trades on behalf of retail investors than any other firm.⁠[4][4]

When the financial crisis intensified in October 2008, Citadel’s funds were, by most accounts, heavily invested in the most severely affected market sectors and very heavily leveraged. On October 24, Griffin and Chief Operating Officer Gerald Beeson held a conference call to stave off rumors that the firm was imperiled; its two principal funds were then down 35% and ended the year with losses of 55%. The firm then limited investor redemptions, its flagship funds returned as much as 62% in 2009, and by early 2012 the funds’ value had been restored.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6]

In 2014, Griffin joined the board of the University of Chicago.⁠[7]

On February 19, 2014, Harvard announced a $150 million gift from Griffin, principally for undergraduate financial aid, the largest gift in Harvard College history at the time. The gift established 200 Griffin scholarships and a matching fund to inspire 600 additional new scholarships, and the Harvard College Office of Financial Aid was renamed the Griffin Financial Aid Office. The gift also included $10 million to establish a professorship at Harvard Business School.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

On November 1, 2017, the University of Chicago announced that Griffin would give $125 million through his Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund to support economics research, the second-largest gift in the school’s history, including the creation of the Griffin Applied Economics Research Incubator.⁠[7][7][7][7]

On October 3, 2019, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry announced a $125 million gift from Griffin, the largest single gift in the museum’s history, and said it would be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.⁠[8][8][8]

In 2020, Griffin spent nearly $54 million opposing an Illinois constitutional amendment for a graduated income tax that would raise taxes on the highest earners; the proposal’s chief backer was Gov. JB Pritzker. That same year, he also gave $37 million to the PAC of the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm.⁠[9][9][10]

During the surge in GameStop’s share price in January 2021, Citadel and a few other funds stepped in to rescue Melvin Capital, which had lost billions on its GameStop short bets. After the retail brokerage Robinhood abruptly restricted users from buying GameStop shares, whether the move was made at the behest of Citadel, its biggest trading partner, became a question expected to be raised at a congressional hearing; Citadel said it had not instructed any brokerage firm to stop or limit trading.⁠[11][11][11]

On February 18, 2021, Griffin testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services as Founder and CEO of Citadel and Founder and Principal Shareholder of Citadel Securities. In his written testimony, he said Citadel Securities had no role in Robinhood’s decision to limit trading and learned of the restrictions only after they were publicly announced; that on January 27 the firm executed 7.4 billion shares on behalf of retail investors; and that securities settlement cycles should be shortened from T+2 to T+1.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On November 18, 2021, Griffin bought one of the first printings of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s in New York for $43.2 million, a record price for a document or book sold at auction; it is one of 13 known copies of the first printing and one of only two in private hands. The underbidder was ConstitutionDAO, a group of about 17,000 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who crowdfunded their bid. Griffin said he intended to make the copy available for public viewing in museums and other public spaces, and he lent it to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12]

On January 11, 2022, Citadel Securities announced the sale of a $1.15 billion minority stake to Sequoia and Paradigm, and Sequoia partner Alfred Lin joined its board of directors; Griffin, then chairman, said the two investors appreciated the firm’s strengths in market making, predictive analytics, and software engineering.⁠[13][13][13][13]

On June 23, 2022, in an email to employees, Griffin announced that Citadel and Citadel Securities were moving their global headquarters to Miami, calling Miami a city that “embodies the American Dream” and saying he had moved to Miami with his family. The new headquarters was planned for a new tower on Brickell Bay; until it was built, the two firms would lease space in the city, with a few hundred employees expected to be based in Miami in 2023. The two firms then had more than 1,000 employees in Illinois, and Griffin said Chicago would continue to be important to Citadel’s future.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

Griffin had often cited violence and the political environment in Chicago in voicing frustration with the city and state political leadership, and in May of that year he told Bloomberg that “if things don’t change, we’re gone.”⁠[1][1]

In the 2022 Illinois gubernatorial election, Griffin gave $50 million to Republican candidate Richard Irvin, the mayor of Aurora, accounting for nearly 95% of Irvin’s campaign funds, with the aim of defeating Gov. Pritzker’s bid for reelection; state Sen. Darren Bailey won the June Republican primary and Irvin lost. Over the past two decades, Griffin has contributed about $179 million in state and local elections in Illinois.⁠[10][9][9][9][9][9]

According to estimates by LCH Investments, Citadel made $16 billion for its clients in 2022, surpassing John Paulson’s 2007 gain and becoming the largest annual profit in hedge fund history; since its founding in 1990, Citadel’s total gains reached nearly $66 billion, and it managed $62 billion in assets at the time.⁠[14][14][14][14][14]

On April 11, 2023, Harvard announced an unrestricted $300 million gift from Griffin to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the graduate school was renamed the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; his giving to Harvard over four decades totals more than $500 million. Harvard also said that the Griffin Leadership Challenge established by his 2014 gift inspired alumni and other donors to establish 654 new scholarships over a four-year period.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On December 12, 2023, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center announced a $400 million gift from Griffin and David Geffen, the largest single donation in its nearly 150-year history, to support cancer research and the development of new treatments.⁠[15][15][15]

In August 2024, Griffin filed plans with Miami-Dade County for the global headquarters of Citadel and Citadel Securities at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive: a 54-story, 1,032-foot tower with 1.7 million square feet, including about 1.3 million square feet of office space and a 212-room hotel, designed by Norman Foster’s firm. Citadel bought the roughly 2.5-acre waterfront site for a record $363 million months before announcing the move. The project was first proposed in 2022 at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion, and a spokesperson said groundbreaking was expected in the third quarter of 2025; in the meantime, the two firms were based at 830 Brickell, a nearby office building.⁠[16][16][16][16][17][17][16]

In January 2026, Griffin partnered with Miami developer Goldman Properties to buy the Wynwood office building 545Wyn from Sterling Bay for $180 million. At that time, the Brickell headquarters tower was being developed by Griffin with Related Companies, and Citadel and Citadel Securities were temporarily leasing space at 830 Brickell and the Southeast Financial Center.⁠[18][18][18][18]

On April 15, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video outside Griffin’s New York home announcing a pied-à-terre tax on secondary homes valued at over $5 million and named Griffin. Griffin called the video “creepy”; in May, at the Milken Institute conference, he said Citadel was reassessing its plan to build a roughly $6 billion office at 350 Park Avenue and suggested the firm could shift from Manhattan to Miami.⁠[19][20][20][20][19][19][19]

On August 4 of that year, Vornado CEO Steven Roth said on an earnings call that Citadel would move forward with the 350 Park Avenue redevelopment as a roughly 1-million-square-foot anchor tenant and an approximately 60% partner, and Citadel verified these comments to Fortune.⁠[20][20][20][20]

On September 30, 2026, Carnegie Mellon University announced a $3 billion gift from Griffin, which it called the largest individual gift in the history of higher education. Of this, $1 billion will support the Pittsburgh campus, half as flexible support for the university’s highest priorities and $500 million for the School of Computer Science, which will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science; another $2 billion will support the launch of CMU Miami, a 35-acre campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood that aims to begin enrolling students in 2028, with plans subject to regulatory approvals. Griffin will also join the university’s Board of Trustees.⁠[21][21][21][21][21][21][21]

Griffin Catalyst is Griffin’s civic engagement initiative encompassing his philanthropic and community efforts, focused on six areas: education, science and medicine, upward mobility, freedom and democracy, enterprise and innovation, and communities. As of mid-September 2026, he had given about $2.7 billion to philanthropic causes, with recent beneficiaries including Success Academy, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and nonprofit hospitals in Miami.⁠[22][22][3]

Griffin Catalyst: Official website: https://www.griffincatalyst.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]