Gary Gensler

He graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton SchoolWharton SchoolThe Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. Established through Joseph Wharton’s gift in 1881, it offers undergraduate, MBA, doctoral and executive education.Open the full entry of the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry in 1978 with a Bachelor of Science in economics, and in 1979 received a Master of Business Administration from the school’s graduate division.⁠[1][2]

He was 21 when he earned the MBA; at age 20 he taught an undergraduate accounting class at Penn, a decision by the university that he later wryly described as malpractice.⁠[3]

He joined Goldman Sachs in 1979 and worked at the firm for 18 years, until 1997.⁠[3][4][1]

At Goldman Sachs he became a partner in the Mergers & Acquisition department, headed the firm’s Media Group, led fixed income and currency trading in Asia, and in his last post was co-head of Finance, overseeing the firm’s worldwide Controllers and Treasury efforts.⁠[5][4]

He went on to become one of the youngest partners in the bank’s history; he recalled thinking, during his years in the mergers department, “This is a good thing, that we actually have some rules of the road.”⁠[3]

From 1997 to 1999 he was Assistant Secretary of Financial Markets at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and from 1999 to 2001 Under Secretary of Domestic Finance, during the administration of Bill ClintonBill ClintonBill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician and lawyer, a Democrat who served as attorney general and governor of Arkansas and as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2][6]

An MIT News article of January 2021 gives his 1997–1999 post as Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions.⁠[7]

He received the Treasury’s highest honor, the Alexander Hamilton Award.⁠[2][5]

Fortune’s profile describes his years at the Treasury as an era of deregulation.⁠[3]

After leaving the Treasury he was senior advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, in the writing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002); at his 2021 nomination hearing he said that two decades earlier he had served on that committee’s staff under Paul Sarbanes.⁠[2][8][9]

In 2002 Broadway Books published The Great Mutual Fund Trap, which he wrote with Gregory Baer. The book argues that actively managed, higher-fee mutual funds generally perform worse than low-fee index funds, and it offers investment advice for middle-income Americans.⁠[6][7][2]

In written answers to senators’ questions in March 2021 he wrote that much had changed in the 20 years since he co-authored the book.⁠[10]

He was a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and an economic advisor to Barack ObamaBarack ObamaBarack Obama (born 1961) is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, the first African American to hold the office. He was previously an Illinois state senator and a U.S. senator from Illinois, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.Open the full entry’s 2008 campaign.⁠[4]

In late 2008 Barack Obama picked him to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC); the nomination was held up in the Senate for nearly five months, with Bernie Sanders among the senators holding it up. During that time he spent two hours making his case at the Dupont Circle office of Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen, and before long he had Tyson Slocum’s endorsement.⁠[3]

He was sworn in as chairman of the CFTC on May 26, 2009, and served until January 3, 2014.⁠[1][2]

After the 2008 financial crisis he advocated bringing financial reform to the previously unregulated swaps market, and Congress and Barack Obama then gave the CFTC the task of reforming that market. The results listed in the CFTC’s official biography include real-time reporting, exchange trading and central clearing in a swaps market of more than $400 trillion, registration of the world’s largest swap dealers with the CFTC and business conduct rules for them, and reformed customer protection regimes for the futures and swaps markets.⁠[2]

He helped implement the Dodd-Frank reform legislation passed in 2010; he helped shape a key provision of the act that gave the CFTC broad powers and spent the next five years working to institute dozens of new rules. Elizabeth Warren and he both worked on drafting the act.⁠[7][3]

During his term the CFTC charged five financial institutions with manipulating LIBOR and other benchmark rates, with penalties totaling more than $1.7 billion.⁠[2][7]

At his 2021 hearing he said that 85 percent of the commission’s actions during his chairmanship of the CFTC passed with bipartisan support; in his later written answers he wrote that he testified before Congress more than 50 times while chairman of the CFTC.⁠[9][10]

The CFTC’s office space grew by almost 75 percent over his five-year term; a 2016 report of the Government Accountability Office found 20 percent of the agency’s Washington headquarters, 32 percent of its New York offices and nearly 60 percent of its Kansas City offices unoccupied.⁠[3]

He pushed the traditionally nine-to-five agency to adopt Wall Street hours.⁠[3]

During his term the CFTC issued what became known as the “elevator bank” advisory, which expanded the agency’s supervision of overseas transactions; he and others defended the advisory as an overdue improvement.⁠[3]

In 2014 he received the Tamar Frankel Fiduciary Prize.⁠[6][11]

After leaving the CFTC he joined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as chief financial officer.⁠[4][3][12]

Politico Magazine included him in its 2016 list of 50 people transforming American politics.⁠[4]

From 2017 to 2019 he was chairman of the Maryland Financial Consumer Protection Commission.⁠[11][6]

He was also a member of the New York FedFederal Reserve Bank of New YorkThe Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of the twelve regional Reserve Banks of the Federal Reserve System and serves the Second District. The largest Reserve Bank by assets and volume of activity, it conducts open market operations for the Federal Open Market Committee and stores monetary gold for official institutions.Open the full entry Fintech Advisory Group.⁠[4]

He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018. The MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab announced a joint appointment: at the MIT Media Lab he became senior advisor to the director and senior advisor to the lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and its Ethics and Governance of AI project; at the MIT Sloan School of Management he became a senior lecturer in the Global Economics and Management Group.⁠[7][12]

The two institutions’ announcement said that at the MIT Sloan School of Management he would teach graduate classes on public policy and the private sector and on the functioning of global markets and co-teach a new course, “Public Policy and the Private Sector,” with Professor Simon Johnson, and that at the MIT Media Lab he would work on an array of projects, including blockchain technology, the future of accounting, the application of cryptography and machine learning to markets and accounting, and viral communications.⁠[12]

Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, said in the announcement that he would be a tremendous asset to the research teams, particularly in exploring the emerging standards that would help support more decentralized solutions to the exchange of value, like cryptocurrencies; he himself said he was honored to be joining MIT and very excited to collaborate with MIT’s scholars “trying to create a better future through blockchain technology” and the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence.⁠[12]

He later became Professor of the Practice of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-director of MIT’s Fintech@CSAIL.⁠[11][4]

After his time on the Hillary Clinton campaign he was invited to teach at MIT, noticed that no class on blockchain was offered there, and in 2018 began teaching one himself; he said he did his best to “teach it from the middle,” as neither a BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry maximalist nor a Bitcoin minimalist. The course was called “Blockchain and Money” and covered Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, smart contracts and central bank digital currencies.⁠[3][13]

He won the MIT Sloan Outstanding Teacher Award for 2018–19, which is based on student nominations.⁠[7][4]

In January 2021 President-elect Joe BidenJoe BidenJoe Biden (born 1942) is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025. He was previously a U.S. senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009 and the 47th vice president, under Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2017.Open the full entry picked him to chair the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and formally nominated him on February 3; before that he had served as a team captain on the Biden-Harris Agency Review Team for independent financial regulatory agencies.⁠[7][11][10]

On March 2, 2021, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held the nomination hearing remotely, together with that of Rohit Chopra, nominated to be director of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection; the committee’s hearing page lists him as “of MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry,” nominated to be a member of the SEC.⁠[14]

In his opening statement he said that Congress created the SEC to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets and facilitate capital formation; that clear rules and active enforcement support economic growth; and that rules should be updated as markets and technology change, with financial technology able to be a force for good so long as the SEC’s core values guide its use.⁠[9]

At the hearing he said he would be “firmly grounded in the concept of materiality” when considering what disclosures might be required, and committed to reviewing the SEC’s recent regulatory actions on the proxy voting marketplace; asked whether public companies should have to disclose political donations, he said he could not prejudge specific issues, adding that investors rightly want to know what the companies they own are doing in the political arena. He also said that mandated corporate disclosure of political spending and climate risk merited a closer look given strong investor interest.⁠[15][16]

In his written answers after the hearing he wrote that he would review questions of whether a cryptocurrency is a security and that the SEC should be technology neutral as crypto evolves; on payment for order flow he wrote that the practice raises a number of policy questions, including whether and how it enables best execution for investors; he also wrote that he would explore the possibility of shortening settlement cycles.⁠[10]

On March 10 the committee, meeting in executive session, voted 14–10 to advance the nomination to the full Senate; two Republicans, Mike RoundsMike RoundsMike Rounds is an American Republican politician who has served as a U.S. senator from South Dakota since 2015 and was governor of South Dakota from 2003 to 2011; in November 2026 he won a third Senate term.Open the full entry and Cynthia Lummis, joined all 12 Democrats on the committee in voting in favor. The nomination covered two appointments: completing a term as a member of the SEC ending on June 5, 2021, and a subsequent term ending on June 5, 2026.⁠[17][18][16]

On April 14 the Senate confirmed him as SEC chair by a vote of 53–45; the Republicans who voted to confirm were Cynthia Lummis, Charles E. Grassley and Susan CollinsSusan CollinsSusan Collins (born 1952) is an American Republican politician who has represented Maine in the U.S. Senate since 1997 and chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. Seeking a sixth term in November 2026, she conceded to Democrat Troy Jackson on November 4.Open the full entry, and Mike Rounds did not vote on the floor.⁠[16][11]

Patrick J. Toomey, the committee’s ranking Republican, announced that he would vote no, saying that his comments at the hearing could lead to requirements for companies to disclose information on global warming, political contributions and equity, and said, “I am concerned that he would use the SEC to advance an agenda not in its purview.” Sherrod BrownSherrod BrownSherrod Brown (born 1952) is an American Democratic politician who served as Ohio secretary of state and as a U.S. representative, and represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 2007 to 2025, chairing the Senate Banking Committee. On November 3, 2026, he defeated Republican Senator Jon Husted in Ohio’s U.S. Senate special election.Open the full entry, the committee’s chairman, said he had shown that he “has the guts to take on bad actors no matter how big and how powerful they are.” Cynthia Lummis said that his commitment to financial innovation outweighed her concerns about his views on climate disclosure; in a statement she said that as China and several European nations continued to make strides in financial innovation, the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry must not only keep pace but pull ahead in distributed ledgers and digital assets.⁠[16]

On April 17, 2021, Senator Ben Cardin administered the oath of office and he became the 33rd chair of the SEC.⁠[11][8]

In his statement on taking office he said he would be guided by the SEC’s mission of protecting investors, facilitating capital formation and promoting fair, orderly and efficient markets, and thanked Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee for her leadership and the other commissioners for their advice.⁠[11]

He began his tenure in the immediate aftermath of the GameStop market events.⁠[5]

For the $28 trillion U.S. Treasury markets, the SEC during his tenure adopted rules promoting central clearing and narrowed the circumstances in which broker-dealers are exempt from registering with a national securities association.⁠[5]

The SEC made the first significant updates in nearly 20 years to the $55 trillion U.S. equity market: the commission unanimously adopted updates to the National Market System rules, the settlement cycle was shortened to one day, and the commission unanimously adopted rules updating the information disclosed on brokers’ execution quality. In his end-of-term video he said that the minimum increment for stock quotes had been narrowed from a penny to half a penny and that the one-day settlement cycle applied to stocks, corporate bonds and municipal bonds.⁠[5][19]

On corporate governance, the SEC updated the rules on when corporate insiders may sell shares, required executives to return compensation based on erroneous financial reports, required disclosure of executive pay versus performance, introduced universal proxy cards in contested director elections so that shareholders can vote for their preferred mix of candidates, and required faster disclosure by those who seek control and buy more than a 5 percent stake in a company.⁠[5]

On disclosure, the SEC adopted rules to enhance disclosure of public companies’ cyber and climate risks and disclosure by companies seeking to go public through special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), and required certain broker-dealers and investment advisers to notify customers of data breaches that could put their personal information at risk.⁠[5]

The SEC amended Form PF, the confidential reporting form for certain SEC-registered investment advisers to private funds, to require large hedge fund and private equity fund advisers to make current reports on certain events to the commission, further amended the form jointly with the CFTC to improve the quality of the information the two agencies receive, and adopted money market fund reforms; in his end-of-term video he put money market funds at $7 trillion and private funds at $30 trillion.⁠[5][19]

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which the SEC oversees, negotiated a Statement of Protocol with the Chinese market authorities that for the first time allowed it to inspect and investigate fully the auditors of China-related companies listed in the United States; in his PLI speech of November 2024 he said the protocol was signed in August 2022. The SEC said in November 2024 that for the previous two years the PCAOB had been able to carry out its inspection and enforcement responsibilities for audit firms in China and Hong Kong, and that since he was sworn in the PCAOB had updated 18 interim standards and two other standards; in the PLI speech he put it that 42 of the 49 interim standards were still in place when he started at the SEC and that in the following three years the PCAOB updated half of them.⁠[5][20]

The enforcement and examination figures for his tenure that the SEC published in November 2024 are: more than 145,000 tips, complaints and referrals received; approximately $1.5 billion awarded to whistleblowers; more than 2,700 enforcement actions filed; approximately $21 billion in penalties and disgorgement orders obtained; more than $2.7 billion returned to harmed investors between fiscal years 2021 and 2024; and more than $250 million recovered for harmed investors through examinations.⁠[5]

At the SEC town hall of January 2025, looking back on his tenure, he said that the commission had completed 46 rules and taken more than 4,000 votes together; in his end-of-term video he said that the SEC’s staff oversees more than 30,000 registrants and conducts more than 3,000 examinations a year.⁠[21][19]

On November 14, 2024, he reviewed his tenure in a speech titled “Car Keys, Football, and Effective Administration” at PLI’s 56th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation in New York. He used the traffic rules that apply when a daughter borrows the car keys and the rules of the NFLNFLThe NFL (National Football League) is a U.S. professional American football league of 32 clubs. Founded in 1920 as the APFA and renamed in 1922, it is organized into the AFC and NFC, with the season culminating in the Super Bowl.Open the full entry as analogies, saying that without rules and referees there would be mayhem on the field, and said that the securities laws had helped make the U.S. capital markets worth more than $120 trillion, more than 40 percent of the world’s capital markets against the 24 percent of the world economy that the United States represents.⁠[20]

By the count of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), he issued 62 percent and 91 percent more rule proposals in his first 30 months than his two most recent predecessors respectively; a BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry article of August 2023 found his record of getting rules adopted to be the slowest in decades. At a House hearing in September 2023 he testified that his rulemaking was part of a coherent agenda based on authorities granted by Congress, and said the agency valued the public’s input.⁠[3]

The SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule would require public companies to account for their emissions and climate-related risks and would require some companies to report indirect emissions caused by their supply chains; politicians and industry leaders argued that the rule went far beyond the SEC’s scope, and affected industries called such a rule onerous and unconstitutional. By November 2023 the proposals already implemented included rules on mutual fund fees and cybersecurity disclosures, and a rule cracking down on corporate “greenwashing” had also passed; a proposal to replace payment for order flow with an auction system met vigorous opposition from Charles Schwab CorporationThe Charles Schwab CorporationThe Charles Schwab Corporation is a financial services company headquartered in Westlake, Texas, United States, whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SCHW). Through its subsidiaries it operates wealth management, securities brokerage, banking, asset management, and custody businesses, and it was founded by Charles R. Schwab in 1971.Open the full entry, the New York Stock ExchangeNew York Stock ExchangeThe New York Stock Exchange is a securities exchange on Wall Street in New York City. It traces its origins to the Buttonwood Agreement signed by 24 stockbrokers in 1792, has used its present name since 1863 and has been owned by Intercontinental Exchange since 2013.Open the full entry and others.⁠[3]

He chose a corporate defense lawyer as his enforcement chief, who quickly resigned; staff attrition at the SEC rose from an average of 4 percent in the three years before he took over to 6.3 percent in 2022 before declining to 4.7 percent in 2023.⁠[3]

During his tenure he posted a series of explanatory videos at the SEC, “Office Hours,” which had passed 30 episodes by November 2023. On October 3, 2022, he shared one of them, a special edition on the perils of celebrity-sponsored investment products, with his 250,000 followers on Twitter; the SEC had obtained a $1.26 million settlement from Kim Kardashian over her failure to disclose that she had been paid to promote a cryptocurrency token on Instagram.⁠[3]

In the release of November 2024 announcing his departure, the SEC said that during his tenure the commission continued the work begun under his predecessor Jay ClaytonJay ClaytonJay Clayton (Walter Joseph Clayton III) is an American lawyer and government official who has served as U.S. Director of National Intelligence since August 2026 and, from October of that year, also as the White House’s head of artificial intelligence affairs (“AI czar”). He practiced at Sullivan & Cromwell for more than two decades, chaired the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 2017 to 2020 and was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2025 to 2026.Open the full entry to protect investors in the crypto markets, bringing actions against crypto intermediaries for fraud, wash trading, registration violations and other misconduct; by the figures of the SEC’s Office of the Inspector General, 18 percent of the tips, complaints and referrals the SEC received in the last full fiscal year were crypto-related, although the crypto markets make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. capital markets. The release also said that court after court had agreed with the commission’s actions to protect investors.⁠[5]

In his PLI speech of November 14, 2024, he said that he and Jay Clayton had both said that Bitcoin is not a security and that the commission’s focus had been on some of the 10,000 or so other digital assets; apart from Bitcoin, EtherEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry and stablecoins, the rest of this market came to about $600 billion, less than 20 percent of the whole crypto market and less than one quarter of one percent of the worldwide capital markets.⁠[20]

In the same speech he said that shortly after he arrived in 2021 the first Bitcoin futures ETF went effective after consultation with SEC staff, and that in 2024 the commission approved exchange-traded products (ETPs) holding physical Bitcoin and Ether; the SEC had rejected multiple applications for spot Bitcoin ETFs for years before approving them in January 2024. He also said that before he arrived in 2021 the commission under Jay Clayton had already brought some 80 crypto actions, including the case against RippleRippleRipple is an American fintech company, legally named Ripple Labs Inc., that provides banks, payment providers, funds, and businesses with blockchain- and digital asset-based cross-border payments, digital asset custody, a U.S. dollar stablecoin, prime brokerage, and corporate treasury management services. Its business makes extensive use of the public XRP Ledger blockchain and its native token XRP, but neither is the same as the company itself; from 2020 to 2025, the company fought a nearly five-year legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over whether its XRP sales were unregistered securities offerings.Open the full entry, and that since 2018 such cases had generally made up between five and seven percent of the SEC’s overall enforcement efforts.⁠[20][13]

During his tenure the SEC pursued lawsuits against CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry, BinanceBinanceBinance is a global digital asset trading and multi-asset financial platform launched in 2017 and co-founded by Changpeng Zhao and Yi He. Its business has expanded from spot trading to derivatives, wallets, payments, a public blockchain ecosystem, market data, traditional securities, and artificial intelligence interfaces; its history also includes security incidents, regulatory enforcement across multiple jurisdictions, a 2023 U.S. criminal settlement, and subsequent compliance restructuring.Open the full entry, KrakenKrakenKraken is a digital-asset trading platform founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu and launched for trading in 2013. As Payward’s flagship brand, it has expanded into spot and derivatives trading, equities, tokenized assets, custody and payments through jurisdiction-specific entities.Open the full entry, Ripple and other major crypto firms; in suing Coinbase and other exchanges it argued that they were offering cryptocurrencies that were not registered as securities, among other offenses. He repeatedly said that most crypto assets other than Bitcoin are unregistered securities and urged crypto firms to “come in and register” the way securities broker-dealers and exchanges do; critics called the approach “regulation by enforcement” and said he had failed to provide a clear framework for registering. He argued that his approach to crypto was to prioritize protecting investors; others held that his enforcement actions targeted bad actors rather than crypto itself.⁠[13][3]

In an interview with Fortune in early November 2023, on the sidelines of a financial technology conference in Washington, he said, “I don’t spend the majority of my time on crypto,” and declined to say whether Ether is a security. In his first days at the SEC he had said in Congress that there should be new legislation to regulate the industry; as of November 2023 Congress had passed none. One Halloween he tweeted: “If Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, released the first Bitcoin software and launched the blockchain in 2009, and stopped public activity around 2011; the person’s true identity has never been confirmed.Open the full entry went as Satoshi Nakamoto for Halloween, would we be able to tell?”⁠[3]

Summer Mersinger, a CFTC commissioner, cited an enforcement action against a Coinbase employee caught insider-trading tokens: the CFTC, intending to bring a case of its own, considered some of the cryptocurrencies to be commodities, but was informed by the SEC that they would be treated as securities; she worried that courts could throw out the lawsuit over the question of jurisdiction, and said the two agencies’ enforcement divisions had always had a good working relationship but that it had become “more than a little bit strained.”⁠[3]

On June 5, 2023, the SEC under his chairmanship filed thirteen charges in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Binance Holdings Ltd. (Binance), BAM Trading ServicesBinance.USBinance.US is a cryptocurrency trading platform for U.S. users, established in 2019 and operated by BAM Trading Services separately from the global exchange Binance. After the SEC sued its operator in 2023, the platform became crypto-only; it restored U.S. dollar deposits and withdrawals in February 2025, and the SEC dismissed its case that May. Stephen Gregory has been chief executive since March 2026.Open the full entry Inc., which operates Binance.US together with Binance, and their founder Changpeng ZhaoChangpeng ZhaoChangpeng Zhao (commonly abbreviated CZ) is a Canadian entrepreneur and the founder and former chief executive officer of Binance. He entered the Bitcoin industry with a background in trading-systems engineering and founded Binance in 2017; in 2023 he pleaded guilty in the United States to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and resigned, personally bearing a $50 million criminal fine and a $150 million CFTC civil penalty, while Binance as a company separately bore billions of dollars in criminal and regulatory settlements; he served four months in prison in 2024 and received a U.S. presidential pardon in 2025. Since then he has mainly been involved in education, investment, and advisory work on digital asset policy.Open the full entry, and alleged that BAM Trading and BAM Management US Holdings, Inc. had misled investors about non-existent trading controls over the Binance.US platform.⁠[22]

The SEC’s complaint alleged that Binance and Changpeng Zhao publicly said U.S. customers were restricted from trading on Binance.com while secretly allowing high-value U.S. customers to continue trading; that the two publicly described Binance.US as a separate, independent platform while secretly controlling its operations behind the scenes; that they exercised control of the platforms’ customers’ assets and could commingle or divert them as they pleased, including to Sigma Chain, an entity owned and controlled by Changpeng Zhao, which engaged in manipulative trading that artificially inflated the platform’s trading volume; and that billions of dollars of investor assets were commingled and sent to a third party, Merit Peak Limited, which he also owned. It further alleged that since at least July 2017 Binance.com and Binance.US had operated as unregistered exchanges, brokers, dealers and clearing agencies, earning at least $11.6 billion in revenue; that Binance had made unregistered offers and sales of BNBBNBBNB is the native crypto asset of BNB Chain. It was launched by the Binance ecosystem through a token offering in 2017, originally ran on Ethereum, migrated to Binance Chain in 2019, and has since been used for fees, staking, and governance on BNB Smart Chain. Its supply mechanism combines the periodic Auto-Burn with the BEP-95 real-time burn.Open the full entry, BUSD and the crypto-lending products “Simple Earn” and “BNB Vault,” and that the staking-as-a-service program of Binance.US was likewise unregistered; and that Changpeng Zhao was liable as a control person for the respective registration violations of Binance and BAM Trading.⁠[22]

In the release he said the SEC alleged that Changpeng Zhao and the Binance entities had engaged in an “extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law,” and warned the public to beware of investing any of their hard-earned assets with or on these “unlawful platforms.”⁠[22]

On the day the charges were announced, Binance said it was “disappointed” with the SEC’s decision, that it had cooperated with the regulator’s investigations, and that it would “defend our platform vigorously.”⁠[23]

On November 21, 2024, the SEC announced that he would step down effective at 12:00 pm on January 20, 2025. In his statement he called the SEC “a remarkable agency,” thanked Joe Biden, Congress and fellow regulators in the United States and abroad, and named the commissioners he had served with: Allison Herren Lee, Elad Roisman, Hester PeirceHester PeirceHester Peirce is a lawyer and financial regulator who served as a Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from January 2018 to October 2026 and was appointed in January 2025 to lead the agency’s Crypto Task Force. She long advocated clear rules for crypto assets, opposed regulation by enforcement, and proposed a token “safe harbor.”Open the full entry, Caroline Crenshaw, Mark Uyeda and Jaime Lizárraga.⁠[5]

On January 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C., he held his last SEC town hall as chair and gave remarks titled “The SEC’s Unusual Capacity to Serve the Public,” thanking Joe Biden for nominating him, the Senate for confirming him, and his chiefs of staff Prashant Yerramalli and Amanda Fischer; he recalled having spoken at a similar town hall when he left the CFTC eleven years earlier.⁠[21]

On January 17 he wrote a farewell note to the SEC’s staff, “One Last Note to SEC Staff,” saying that serving alongside them at the agency had been “an honor of a lifetime” and that he would not pick a favorite among the many roles he had held; he signed it “Gary.” On January 18 the SEC released his end-of-term video.⁠[24][19]

His tenure ended on January 20, 2025, the day of Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDonald Trump (born 1946) is an American politician and businessman, a Republican who ran the real estate company the Trump Organization and starred in the television series The Apprentice. He served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has been the 47th president since 2025.Open the full entry’s inauguration; Republican Commissioner Mark Uyeda then took temporary charge of the agency pending Senate approval of Paul Atkins, whom Donald Trump had nominated as chair.⁠[8][13]

After leaving the SEC he returned to MIT: the MIT Sloan School of Management announced in a statement that he was Professor of the Practice in both the Global Economics and Management Group and the Finance Group and co-director of FinTechAI@CSAIL, an initiative of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) that explores new AI technologies, opportunities, technical challenges and applications within finance; his research and teaching focus on artificial intelligence, finance, financial technology and public policy.⁠[13][6]

In the statement he said, “I am honored to return to MIT,” and that he was thrilled to collaborate once again with MIT’s scholars.⁠[13]

On May 29, 2025, after he had left office, the SEC filed a joint stipulation with Binance Holdings Limited, BAM Trading Services Inc., BAM Management US Holdings Inc. and Changpeng Zhao to dismiss, with prejudice, the civil enforcement action it had filed on June 5, 2023 (Case No. 1:23-cv-01599). The SEC’s litigation release states that the commission had determined, in the exercise of its discretion and as a policy matter, that dismissal was appropriate, and that the decision did not necessarily reflect its position on any other litigation or proceeding.⁠[25]

Binance called the outcome a “huge win for crypto” in a post on X and thanked SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and Donald Trump’s team for pushing back against “regulation by enforcement”; Binance.US said on X that the outcome confirmed that it had not violated U.S. securities laws.⁠[23]

An article published by the MIT Sloan School of Management on March 31, 2026, describes his remarks at the 2026 MIT Sloan Investment Conference, held the month before. He spoke in conversation with Peter R. Fisher, a distinguished senior fellow at the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy and former head of fixed-income portfolio management at BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, and both framed their remarks as investing analysis rather than political commentary or investment advice. He said that every investor should have an AI thesis, without which “you’re probably going to miss out”; he voiced concern over the gap between AI spending and AI revenues, saying that revenue generated directly from generative AI products and services had been about $50 billion the year before, said, “There’s a disequilibrium,” and added that he saw more downside risk than upside potential.⁠[26]

He also said that the markets had become “a little bit too confident about the pivots” in policy, that “The U.S. is withdrawing from the global order, and that means risk is higher,” and that there needed to be a higher risk premium somewhere in the system.⁠[26]

As of November 2026 the faculty directory of the MIT Sloan School of Management lists him as Professor of the Practice in two academic groups, Global Economics and Management and Finance.⁠[6]

The SEC’s 2021 press release describes him as a native of Baltimore, Maryland; Fortune’s profile states that he spent his childhood in Baltimore.⁠[11][3]

In his PLI speech of November 2024 he said that his parents, Sam and Jane Gensler, never worked in finance or completed college, and that they invested their savings and benefited from the rules of the securities markets. At his 2021 nomination hearing he said that he came from a working family and that his father used his mustering-out pay from World War II to start a small business, which helped pay for him and his four siblings to go to college.⁠[20][9]

Fortune’s profile states that his father supplied cigarette and pinball machines, from which the young Gensler would help collect the nickels. At the SEC town hall of January 2025 he said that three of his grandparents never got past eighth grade.⁠[3][21]

He has a twin brother; Fortune’s profile states that both of them earned college degrees, unlike their parents.⁠[3]

Fortune’s profile states that his wife died in 2006, which led him to reevaluate his priorities, and that he has not remarried; he finally bought a new car after his late wife’s station wagon was no longer safe for the road, and his daughters set up Bluetooth in the new car.⁠[3]

He has three daughters. At his nomination hearing in March 2021 he said that his daughter Isabel was with him in Maryland and that her older sisters, Anna and Lee, were watching remotely, and called them “the lights of my life.”⁠[9][8]

A witness biographical sketch submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives while he was chairman of the CFTC states that he lived with his three daughters outside Baltimore; the biography on the CFTC’s website gives his residence as Maryland.⁠[1][2]

His page at the MIT Media Lab states that he has completed nine marathons and the JFK 50-mile race.⁠[4]

In November 2020 his paper “Deep Learning and Financial Stability,” written with Lily Bailey, appeared as MIT Sloan Working Paper 6223-20.⁠[6]

He is a co-editor of The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration, published by CEPR Press in 2025.⁠[6]

He co-hosts the podcast “Power and Consequences” with Simon Johnson.⁠[6]

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: Official website: https://www.sec.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Commodity Futures Trading Commission: Official website: https://www.cftc.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

MIT Sloan School of Management: Official website: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

MIT Media Lab: Official website: https://www.media.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]