Citadel CEO Ken Griffin 称 AI“几乎肯定”处于泡沫中；Trump 的执政成绩单喜忧参半

Thank you all so much for joining us this evening.

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Thank you so much for being here today. And look, I think it’s perhaps worth starting by acknowledging that this is the annual Citadel Securities Conference, and just how much has changed since last year. The world was grappling with this technological advancement when it used to be experimentation. Now it’s solving 80-year-old math problems that were once unsolvable.

I listened to a recent interview you gave where you talked about going home depressed one Friday because AI could solve PhD-level work in just a few hours. I know you get asked a lot how much your view has changed, but things are changing very quickly. Let’s start with the future of work. How much has your view changed about what AI can and can’t do?

It’s remarkable. It’s been a year, and in that year the advancement in AI models has been absolutely tremendous. There’s no doubt that in a number of fields, AI is literally game-changing.

I did give a speech at Stanford where I discussed the fact that work that used to take our PhDs and master’s degree holders 4 to 6 weeks to complete—high-level white-collar work—now takes pressing a button on a keyboard and waiting a few hours to get the exact same answer. I’ll tell you that when I went home after seeing this, it was a Friday. It was a very depressing moment, because you’re seeing all kinds of things, right? You’re seeing the threat to white-collar jobs playing out. As a business owner, you’re seeing your competitive moats being filled in by bulldozers.

Mm-hmm.

At the same time, you’re thinking that this will be a golden era for entrepreneurs and new business formation. For young entrepreneurs in this country, what a golden opportunity this is. So you really have all three emotions unleashed as you watch this rapid development unfolding. And I think all three have real implications for our economy.

For those whose careers are in the sweet spot of what AI can do, we as a country need to embrace reskilling. For example, if your expertise is in translation from English to German, you’ve probably already lost your job. That’s a difficult job to find a near substitute for. That’s where we as a nation need reskilling, and we need it in a profound way. There’s talk about it, but there’s no action on that front.

For corporate America, the filling in of your competitive moats means you’ve got to move your feet faster. You’re going to have to innovate faster, create more customer value faster, and figure out how to take costs out faster. But actually, that’s all really good for the American consumer, the American public. That force will force corporate America to really step its game up, and the American consumer will win on the back of that.

And then, for this moment where we have this golden age for entrepreneurs, what a great thing for our country. When people start small businesses, it does wonders for employment. In particular, people who have tarnished resumes have a shot at getting really good jobs. Startups do something very important in our country. They’ll hire somebody who wants to work hard but doesn’t have the perfect pedigree. For that individual, getting a chance to join a startup gives them a whole new lane to build their career in.

We don’t talk about that enough in America. We don’t talk about the importance of startups and how they really help to jump-start careers, particularly for people who have impaired pedigrees. And then these startups will unleash an enormous number of new products that you and I have never even thought of.

It sounds like your depression has morphed into optimism. Is that fair to say?

I think it is, because the history of our free market is that we go through transitions like this. To be clear, these transitions do cause incumbents to face real challenges, and it is hard on people. But ultimately, our lives are better. There’s no doubt that you and I would rather live right here in 2026 than in 1926. There’s just no comparison. And this will be part of the story of how we write the year 2126: what happened at this moment in time with AI.

Can we talk about how some of these changes are impacting you as a business leader trying to navigate this? About a year and a half ago, you said, “I can’t produce or deliver alpha.” Has your thinking changed on that at all?

At the end of the day, most of our business is fundamental-based investing. In fact, I would argue that the core of our business is actually research. It’s almost like journalism: Can you get the story right? Can you get the narrative right? Trading is how we monetize our research.

Research is the core of the business. Do we understand the business model? Do we understand the TAM? Do we understand the economics? Do we understand management incentives? AI can help shed some light on bits and pieces of that, but ultimately that narrative is still assembled by a person. Then, what multiple to future cash flows or future earnings do you ascribe to that business? How does it compare to other opportunities you have to deploy your capital?

I still firmly believe that the vast majority of the alpha we create is a testament to the creativity, ingenuity, and analysis of the people on our team who conduct fundamental research. Trading is how we monetize that. In fact, the trading part of the work has become the most automated part, the most technologically forward. If you can monetize your research well, you can run bigger positions and extract more alpha from your ideas. That’s a really important part of any portfolio manager’s job: How efficiently can I trade to maximize my return on my research?

1. AI Markets Face a Reset

The trading figures at Citadel have been hitting record after record for Citadel Securities. Part of it has been the volatility we’ve seen in markets. Ken, I’d love to get your view on this. Over the past week, we’ve seen semis log their longest losing streak since the great financial crisis. You have IPOs delayed or pushed back, and concerns about—what I mean is, is this market experiencing a reset, and was a reset necessary?

I think this market is actually experiencing people doing research. For the last couple of years, if you were on the thematic trade of “We’re going to spend hundreds of billions or $1 trillion in data centers; we’re going to build compute at a scale never seen before,” you’d ask: Which companies in that story are chokepoints in supply chains that will have abnormally high margins? Who will be the big winners from this transformation? Will it be the Microsofts? Who will be the gatekeepers to the foundational models? Who’s going to earn the economic rents?

But in some sense, it was, “I’m just going to buy them all. I’m going to buy the hyperscalers. I’m going to buy the chip companies. I’m going to buy businesses that make things I’d never even heard of five years ago in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.” Now we’re reaching a point where people are becoming more discerning. We realize that we’re seeing extremely high margins in DRAM and MLCs, in areas where there are real supply constraints. But people are now starting to look out 2 or 3 years. How long is this going to last?

I don’t want to be doom and gloom, but GPUs are like airlines, which have a very low marginal cost to run. The incremental seat on an airline that’s not full: If you can sell that ticket for $20, you’re making money on that seat. That’s one of the reasons the airline industry is such a nightmare, because the moment you have overcapacity, pricing goes into freefall.

We saw this with the telecom buildout back in 2000. We built all this dark fiber. The minute we built more fiber than we had need for—sorry, it wasn’t meant to be dark. It was never turned on; it was never lit up because we didn’t need it. We built more fiber than we had demand for, and the price of telecommunications just went straight down.

Is that what we’re heading for right now?

That’s the question mark. If we reach a point where the provisioning of GPUs exceeds demand for GPUs, marginal pricing will actually go into freefall.

Mm-hmm.

That really upends all the investment assumptions that people are working with today. That’s issue number one. Issue number two is that I think people are taking a step back and saying, “What is the useful life of a GPU?” Right here, right now, there are people earning extraordinary pricing on GPUs that are 5 or 6 years old. That probably doesn’t persist for another 5 or 6 years. There’s a growing set of concerns that I can’t give the same capitalization rate or the same revenue models to year 7, 8, or 9 of a chip in the future that maybe I was using 12 months ago.

I think we’re really grappling with just how far this demand will carry us in the marketplace. The first conversation was about all the upside of AI. There’s another important narrative: Corporate America has been very uneven in its ability to extract value from AI models. The most sophisticated companies in the United States are becoming very sophisticated at figuring out what parts of their business need to pay extremely high prices for the state-of-the-art models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and what parts can run on open-source models at a fraction of the cost.

If you look at some of the companies that have really done incredible things with AI internally, within their four walls, they are quickly becoming very thoughtful about maximizing the return on their spend.

I think all of corporate America is looking at its bills from Anthropic and OpenAI and going, “Okay, we need to think about how to make sure we’re getting productivity out of this.” And they will in many areas. But in some areas, there’s a lot of waste, and people are going to have to pivot around that.

Does that mean there’s necessarily tension in this idea that the LLMs are spending huge sums of money? The Journal had a report that Anthropic, in its S-1, is talking about $750 billion of spending to come, and that its spending is increasing. At the same time, corporate America is trying to pull back and figure out ways to cut down its costs. Is there necessary tension in those 2 things, Ken?

There is. You just answered the question as you posed it, right? Like leading the witness.

Sorry. Yes. You’re the witness? Let me just say, yes.

And the question will come down to how much Anthropic makes its models a must-have. For example, in life sciences, will Anthropic truly reach the point where it helps unlock cures for cancer or other life-threatening diseases? Will it make itself a necessity in every pharma company in the world? Will you pay any price for its know-how and tools because it will unlock health care treatments in the next century?

What we don’t know is, as these models become more intelligent, how much they’ll be able to demand extremely high pricing because they help solve problems that have vexed humanity for centuries.

Because people don’t know the answer to that, often the conversation goes to this: maybe this is a bubble. Ray Dalio thinks it is. Howard Marks says he’s on bubble watch. The BIS says it has echoes of the dot-com boom. I wonder whether it’s knowable if this is a bubble, and whether you have any particular thoughts about that—if it is a bubble, and if it’s one that looks like it’s going to burst, at least in certain parts of the different AI layers.

The big picture is that there are almost certainly bubbles within this moment in time. Any radical transformation of our economy is generally intertwined with a bubble.

I remember back in 1999 and 2000, and the metrics we used to value internet companies. Let’s be clear: some of these internet companies had pretty fanciful business models. But I just wish I’d kept my Amazon stock from that moment in time. The internet, which was the great bubble, could it be more a part of our daily life today than it is?

I updated my son’s Xbox a few years ago. He was 13 at the time, and he looked at me and said, “Dad, you lived before the internet existed?” I said, “I did. I was born after the dinosaurs disappeared. But yes, there was life before the internet.” Now that’s an incomprehensible thought to a 20-year-old.

These bubbles, if we’re going to use that word, often coincide with giant technological transformations, like the railroads. But what’s left in the wake of these bubbles is often game-changing for the world. The companies on the other side of that bubble are the market leaders for decades to come.

Can I just say, I also find it quite lovely that you’re still the dad at home. Even with everything you do, you’re still helping with the Xbox, still setting it up.

2. Hedge Funds and Forced Selling

A lot of people also look at what the markets are doing in these sell-offs and say, “This is just hedge fund deleveraging.” You might know a thing or two about that, Ken. How do you look at this past week? How do you distinguish a market reset, a fundamental difference, from maybe someone just having to liquidate? Maybe there was a margin call somewhere.

Everyone’s favorite go-to answer when they’re losing money is, “Hedge funds are deleveraging.” In fact, in the last 10 years, I’ve seen the entire industry deleveraged to zero at least 10,000 times. It’s like every day there’s a phone call with somebody saying, “Oh, it’s got to be hedge fund deleveraging.” Hedge funds have recovered back up.

The reason people love that answer is that it washes their hands of accountability. You can say, “Oh, hedge fund deleveraging.” No, let’s take a step back. What prices are changing, and why? What don’t we understand? What is playing out that we don’t get? The minute I start to use an excuse, I stop learning.

I always want hedge fund deleveraging to be answer number 10 on the list. I want answers 1 through 9 to be: What don’t we understand? What does somebody else get? What are the guys at Capital Group, Fidelity, or Wellington figuring out? What thoughts have they connected that we don’t see? Somebody else here knows the story, and we don’t know it. Let’s go figure it out. If we exhaust every path we possibly can, then let’s talk about who might be deleveraging. But that’s option 10 on the list, not option 1.

How does that lens apply to what we saw in the summer with Situational Awareness? I think by any stretch of the imagination, it was a brilliant move. All the reporting suggests the timing was right: you sold into a market that was rallying. Can you walk us through how you think about taking those risks when there are clear deleveraging moments, and the ability to jump in and be confident that it can pay off?

We’ve been involved in a number of large portfolio extractions over restructurings in the last 20 years. That includes Amaranth restructuring its energy portfolio back in roughly 2006, and several other trades that have had less attention or notoriety.

Situational Awareness was in a position where, as managers of assets and fiduciaries, they needed to thoughtfully raise cash. We gave them a holistic solution to meet their needs, raise cash, and protect a substantial year-to-date gain. This was an important win for their investors. Let’s be clear: they’re up significantly for the year. When it’s all said and done, they’ve been through a bit of a journey, but their investors have to be pleased that, even with the turmoil they faced, they’re up for the year.

When we’re looking at a situation like that, we’re trying to understand what forces have been in play to create the events that unfolded. As Situational Awareness found itself in a more difficult situation, there’s no doubt that a number of the faster-money accounts in the market would start to front-run what they anticipated Situational Awareness or its contemporaries would be doing. It’s a classic playbook in finance: you think somebody is in trouble, and you start trying to anticipate the moves they’ll need to make. Whether it’s a defensive or offensive decision, you start turning a possibility into a crystallized reality.

Even if all you know is, “Gee, people watching this think they’re in trouble and they’re going to be de-risking, so I’m not going to buy those stocks, or I’m going to trim my exposures,” you start to transform a possibility into a reality. Situational Awareness found itself in a position where, again, out of an abundance of caution, it needed to raise cash.

What we’ve found in moments like that is that when you acquire a portfolio in that market environment, you generally get a pretty sharp reversal in price as confidence is re-established and the anxiety about a portfolio suffering an unexpected, quick divestiture ends. In some sense, we deployed our capital on the back of that theory. We did okay. It was a complicated portfolio to buy overnight. We did the trade in less than 24 hours, and managing the risk profile of that portfolio took several days of trading in the marketplace.

That’s one of the things we do well: we’re very accustomed to analyzing portfolios. How do you cost-effectively bring down the key risks in the portfolio? Once you can nail down the key risks cost-effectively, you can start to pare out of individual positions. We’ve got the systems, know-how, and people internally who can make those moves happen on a chessboard.

Given some of the bubbly attributes of this market, if we want to use that word, do you anticipate more events like that happening? Or should we assume that, again, without being the cause of markets selling off, it wouldn’t be unusual to continue to see moments like that?

It would be a bit surprising to see another moment like this happen, in my opinion. They were caught in a pretty significant price downdraft caused by the announcement of CME, other chatter in the marketplace about the growth rate of some of the foundation model companies, and some large pension plans reshaping their portfolios at that very moment in time.

I wouldn’t say it was the perfect storm, but they got caught in 3 mid-sized storms. That pushed them pretty hard in the marketplace, and they found themselves in a bit of turmoil. I would not manage my business for that to happen any time in the foreseeable future. There will always be some member firms that find themselves in a tough spot.

I mean, Citadel was in a tough spot in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. Morgan Stanley had not achieved its funding with the Japanese and had failed. I don't think I'd be on stage today. Like every firm in financial services, if you survive long enough, part of your history will be a moment of despair. If you survive long enough, every leveraged institution will have a footnote in its history about when its back was against the wall.

Ken, if we could change gears, because one of the big disruptions or market risks that we're living with—the other one happens in 2 weeks, and that's the midterms. It comes amid a moment of rising Democratic socialist candidates, with the president's own polling at a historic low of 33%. You've committed a lot of capital to help Republican candidates, and I just wonder where your sentiment is at the moment. Are you still spending? Are you optimistic that you can make a final push to help?

I really like the last conversation better. I'm sure there's an angle in there—actually, quite an angle in this political conversation. But we can start with this first.

First of all, I think it's important to take a step back. The U.S. political process in the midterms is a check and balance on the party in power. The Republicans, President Trump, will almost certainly lose one or both houses, the House and the Senate. The House is in a really tough spot, and the Senate is going to be really close. Let's be right to the point: that's just part of the normal political cycle.

There are a number of candidates in the House and Senate whom I've supported this cycle, many of whom I've supported for many cycles. They're people I think represent values that are important to the future of our country. There are obviously candidates we might be less enthusiastic about, whom I perhaps don't support.

To be clear, it's not limited to just Republicans. I was one of Rahm Emanuel's biggest supporters in Chicago when he ran for mayor. I thought Rahm did a fantastic job as mayor. I had the notoriety of being an elite bundler in the United States for both parties in an election cycle. We did an early fundraiser for President Obama during the primary. He was my senator in Illinois, and I thought it was important for my team members to have a chance to meet with someone I thought could be the future of the United States. He came in and absolutely knocked the ball out of the park.

Number one, I want all my colleagues at Citadel to be involved in politics. I want all my colleagues to think about politics in America. In my firm, roughly a slight majority are probably Democrats, which would leave Republicans in the minority, and that's okay. I love that there are good, healthy debates in our hallways, but it's never a point of friction.

Mm-hmm.

This is what I think we should look like as a people: having good, healthy debates about who the right people are to run our country. To be clear, I really hope all my colleagues who support Democrats do what I do on the Republican side, which is try to support candidates with the right values and perspectives, who put our country first and care about the issues I think we all agree on: K–12 education, safe streets, a strong national defense, and good alliances around the world. There are lots of areas where we can find common ground between our two parties that are important to the future of our country.

Okay, that aside, let's talk about the midterms. The president is going to have some challenges here. Parts of his policy have been very unattractive to the American people. For example, the war on Iran is very unpopular. I think he's done a very poor job of explaining why. I think it's of existential importance to our country that we wake up in a world where Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. I don't think the president has made that case in a powerful, meaningful way to the American people.

I think the way we deal with illegal immigrants is disgraceful. If you've come to our country at a time when our borders were open, you didn't view yourself as breaking the law at that moment. You came in with millions of people. If you're here with your family or by yourself, gainfully employed and working to find a better life for your family, there needs to be a way to stay in our country. It may not be a path to citizenship, but it should be a path to being a contributing member of our society. We need to grow our economy. This is what's lost in Washington. If we're going to make good on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements, we need to grow our economy. It's that simple, and hard-working people are a big part of how we're going to make that happen.

I think the tariff battles with Canada, Europe, and our allies have been a disaster. I talked about this when he first started doing it in his presidency. To be blunt, I hate to say it, but I've been right. It's been pro-inflation. It has certainly taken supply chains around the world and severed them. We're not going to industrialize efficiently in our country. Unemployment is low. If you have this dream of an industrialized America, number one, most people don't want to live that dream. They don't want to be in factories making Nikes and T-shirts; they want to wear those. A comedian came up with that line, and I have to give credit where credit is due.

What we should really be doing is embracing robotics. One of the reasons I recently gave $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University is its leadership in robotics. We want to reindustrialize America as a truly industrialized country, with robotics running our factories. That's forward thinking. That's how our country secures greater independence from the rest of the world on items important to our national interests.

Of course, some of the things you do really well, like closing the borders, have long since been forgotten.

Mm-hmm.

I have to tell you, I think the vast majority of Americans agree that closing our borders—which we were told for 4 years could not happen, but happened more or less overnight—has been a big win. So it's a mixed scorecard. We have a midterm here where the American people are going to vote. I hope they vote thoughtfully.

I'm not so worried about the rise of the Democratic socialists. What's funny is that my friends who have connections or ties to the South don't even have it in their vocabulary. This is just a New York bubble kind of thing. It's New York, Illinois, Michigan, California—a bit of a bubble. If you want to look at where socialism leads, look at France last weekend. It's the socialist dream. The country spends 60% of its GDP at the government level, and yet the streets are awash in turmoil. It's heartbreaking.

But, Ken, if I may: Paris looked pretty much like Chicago in 2021 and 2022. Isn't France an isolated case? They try austerity, and the government doesn't survive. The people are willing to riot in protest at anything. Is that really the future the U.S. might be looking at?

It's the future. I lived in Chicago. I could look out my window at the Dior store. They were very efficient: they would take a van and drive right through the front glass, creating a giant space for 50 people to run in. They could empty the store in about 300 seconds. Maybe we're more efficient than the French, even at looting.

But Paris, I think, would be a real wake-up call to every single young American. France is the dream the left talks about: the liberal safety net, rich socialist Europe. And here's France. That dream is a nightmare. I left Chicago. That dream doesn't belong in our country. An economy and a society where it comes down to how much you can take from others—first you take their property, and then you take their personal rights—isn't a society we want to create.

Do you see candidates you're actually fearful are taking us down that path?

I very much do. J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, yes, 100%.

Where does the conversation go after this if it is a drubbing, if these candidates you fear increase in number? What then? What does the Republican Party do? Should the blame lie with the president?

When a party's power is checked in the midterms, that's what happens. The American people have spoken their mind, and you better damn well listen. I hope that if Trump takes a beating here in the midterms, he doesn't double down. He takes a step back and says, “What do I need to do to better reflect the voice of the American people?”

J.B. Pritzker ran a bill in Illinois to raise taxes and put in place a progressive tax system. A bit of background: before he was seated as governor, I met with him and said, “We both know the pensions in Illinois are out of control. It's a huge problem. The promises made to government employees in the state of Illinois are simply unsustainable.”

I said, if you will put a constitutional amendment up to reform pensions, I will publicly support you in raising taxes. I was the largest taxpayer in the state of Illinois, and my firm represented almost 2% of the state’s income tax revenue. He told me to pound sand.

He then ran a constitutional amendment to create a progressive tax regime. He called it the Fair Tax Amendment, and he lost. Rather than take that loss and pivot to “The voters have spoken. I need to get costs under control. I need to address the spending addiction we have in our state,” he lashed out at me instead. It was like, “You’ve missed the narrative. You missed the fact, Governor Pritzker, that the voters have said enough of the spending and corruption in Springfield. Go put your house in order, then come back and talk about taxes.”

This message in this midterm—I hope whatever that message is, the leaders in the House, the Senate, and the White House listen carefully to the American people.

It’s Republicans that have increased a lot of spending, too, at the federal level. Actually, I think the Republicans have their hands dirty with the tax cuts of the last 2 years and with spending increases.

Right, right. If you want to be critical of the economic policies of this administration, it’s an interesting debate. Back when he cut taxes, circa 2018, the view was that this would reignite American productivity and entrepreneurship. I think he was spot on.

Playing that playbook just a year and change ago, there was one huge difference between 2018 and a year and a half ago: the spending orgy of the pandemic.

Yeah.

Our country went from a difficult fiscal situation. People forget this: we spent as much money during the pandemic, as a percentage of GDP, as we basically spent to win World War II.

Mm-hmm.

That was the cost of us sitting on our couches. We didn’t have the fiscal space to renew the tax cuts, in my opinion, a year and change ago. With the federal deficit at $40 trillion, the question of crowding out is now becoming front and center again. Why are mortgages so expensive? Why is that 30-year yield so high? It’s multifactorial. Inflation has been unchecked, but our fiscal house is clearly not in order, and we need to put it in order.

What gets it in order, though? I know you say that in Illinois, maybe voters wanted a cutback in spending. But for the most part, politicians seem hesitant to cut any sort of programs or raise taxes. Is it, as you say, because of this competition for capital? Is it the bond market, do you think?

I think, first and foremost, as a country, we really need to play the party card as hard as we can.

Mm-hmm. All right.

In order of priorities, number one: grow the damn economy. To grow this economy, you actually want to push the Europeans to grow their economy. The tariff war with Europe is a fiasco, because at this moment we should use all of our political capital. “Europe, you want us to pay for your defense? Guess what? You’re going to go back to work in France.” There are strict limitations on how many hours you can work a week. It’s ridiculous. The French want the Americans to provide the defense for Europe, and they don’t want to go to work. This just doesn’t work for the American people.

We’ve got to grow productivity. That means we need to support the AI revolution. We need to make sure data centers are built in America. We need more oars in the water. We need more focus on nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, batteries, and robotics. We need more focus on the technologies that will unleash productivity for the next 20 years. That should be the singular focus of our administration from an economic policy perspective: grow our economy and push our allies to engage in meaningful reforms that grow their economies.

The entire Western world is in the same boat together. We’re not going to get out of these waters by torturing each other. We’re going to get out of these waters by making the pie bigger for all of us. That’s number one.

Number two is we have to fix education. We cannot have a country with broken schools and expect to have the prosperity we’ve enjoyed over the last 50 years. Back to Illinois: easy talking points 2 or 3 years ago—53 schools without a single child at grade level. Let me just let that sink in: 53 schools. Not one student in these schools could perform at grade level.

What we do know works is something like Success Academy here in New York with Moskowitz. I’ve had a chance to walk into a classroom of seniors and feel, frankly, quite humbled. You walk into the art history class: “Here’s a painting. Who’s the artist? What was the year? What was the country? What was the social issue of that moment in time?” I don’t know a lot of art. I don’t even know this artist. Some kid in the classroom puts his hand up and says, “That’s so-and-so. France, this year. These were the issues at the time.” It is so heartwarming and impressive at the same time.

Then number three: how do we recreate Simpson-Bowles? How do we create the up-or-down vote on needed entitlement reforms in our country? In particular, we have to honor the promises we’ve made to our retirees and your retirees. But we need to have a really deep, thoughtful conversation about how you work one or two more years, or how we motivate you to work for 2 or 3 years before you take Social Security.

And then immigration. Just right to the point: every single brilliant person around the world, I want them to live in America. I want them here. Our colleges—our elite schools—are often 15% to 20% foreign students. Here’s your degree. Here’s your green card. We want them here in our country.

So does all of this essentially mean that there is a path to grow our way out of deficits? When the bond market starts flashing yellow and red lights, it’s not as alarming because there is a path out of it, and it’s through growth. Is that the direction?

That’s the only direction.

So you’re not concerned, for example, when you see bond yields at multi-decade highs?

Oh, no, I am worried. Voters get to say their views of the House and Senate here in a few weeks, and the bond market is speaking pretty loudly now, too. The market is telling the House and Senate they need to start putting the fiscal house in order. But what the bond market doesn’t communicate as clearly is that you’re going to get the house in order by getting productivity up. Every talking point from Washington, D.C., should be about entrepreneurism, productivity gains, how we’re going to grow our economy, and how it’s going to be an economy where everyone feels like they’re getting ahead.

The bond market is speaking. Do you think they’re listening?

Not yet.

What happens if they don’t?

We’re going to see higher inflation, the dollar weaken, and our standard of living fall.

As you were talking about Governor Pritzker calling you out, I can’t help thinking about how you’ve been a punching bag in recent years for various politicians. You’ve been particularly outspoken about Mayor Mamdani. When he started that, yes, he did. I think everybody knows that, Ken, and everybody remembers the moment. You called it “creepy” and “weird,” too. I think that stuck with a lot of people. He has since moved on to other issues, notably stopped name-dropping you, which I assume you’re quite happy about. The tax he was proposing was stalled by the courts. Is there a relationship between you and the mayor? How do things stand there?

There’s not a relationship between the mayor and me, and that’s okay. I’ll be right to the point: I live in Miami. I’m involved in politics in Florida. I hope that New York picks really good leaders, but I just don’t want to be involved in New York politics.

I do have 2,500 employees here who are deeply involved in New York politics, and I encourage that. But I really do think that New York needs to sort out the leadership it needs for this great city. New York is the greatest city in America, arguably the greatest city in the world, and New York deserves one of the greatest mayors in the world.

Where do you see Citadel’s center of gravity? You mentioned the strong employee base here. You have your Miami headquarters, too. Where’s your center of gravity, Ken?

It’s somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, between London, Miami, and New York. Our center of gravity is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and I think that’s the right place for it to be. It’s a firm that’s highly interconnected across the Western world, principally Europe and the United States.

It’s been interesting to look at some of the numbers on the growth of financial professionals in Miami among you and your competitors. It’s in the tens, perhaps 20 to 50 investment professionals, and that actually shrank in the past year. I wonder what you make of that. Is something missing in terms of growth in investment professionals in Miami? Is it happening at the rate you’d expect?

I think the trajectory of cities is written over decades. It’s not written overnight. Frankly, that’s good. People put down roots and become part of communities.

They become engaged in that community. We don’t want a nation of nomads. We want a nation where people put down roots and call someplace home. The forces that have pushed people toward Miami are strong: an incredibly pro-business environment, a very high quality of life, safe streets, and good schools.

And then there are challenges. The high cost of housing and transportation are real challenges. So many people have moved to Miami over the last decade, and the roads are really congested. I mean, I can’t—it’s like California now. Did California just send all their billionaires to Miami? It feels that way. Big picture, Miami has experienced tremendous economic growth over the last 20 years and an enormous surge in wealth as a city.

I can’t tell many people I’ve met whose parents came here and never saw their parents again. They came here with nothing. They came here to live the American dream, and they came here and had families. They’re not about to embrace socialism or give up their personal freedoms. That just permeates the culture of Miami: this sense of, “I’ve come here for the American dream. I’m going to reject things that are an affront to the values this country was founded on. I’m going to make sure my kids are well educated. I’m going to put in the effort to run my business, and I’m going to have safe streets.”

The Cuban community in Miami is really important to the ethos of that great city, and I’m grateful for that. We see this in the entrepreneurism in the city, and I really do believe that when Carnegie Mellon comes to Miami, it will only help accelerate it further. If you look at Pittsburgh, it’s undergoing a second industrial revolution, this one led by robotics. There are 100 companies in the field of robotics around Carnegie Mellon University’s campus.

People forget that CMU leads the world in robotics. It’s number one in computer science, number one in AI, and number one in cybersecurity. It’s an extraordinary community of students and faculty. For them to build a campus in Miami with thousands of undergraduate and graduate students will transform the city of Miami in a profound way.

Ken, we’re just about out of time, but I want to ask you finally about community. You’ve been very clear about it within Citadel’s culture. At COVID, you were one of the first leaders to say it’s important to have people together. How do you think about that? If the center of gravity is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, how do you ensure cohesion as a team?

Number one, we keep the teams within Citadel in one geographical location as much as possible. If you look at the top level of the business and then go down the verticals of what we do, those verticals are very geographically centered because we think it’s very important for teams to work together physically whenever possible. Nothing beats a whiteboard and a good debate.

You walk into my office, and there’s a big whiteboard. You walk into all of our boardrooms, and there are big whiteboards. The walls in many of our offices are writable. You just get up and write on a wall. Nothing beats that person-to-person interaction. For our younger team members, being in an immersive environment with your boss, who’s your mentor, and with your peers, who are also, in many ways, your mentors, is the best way to develop talent. Nothing beats that physical proximity. I think it creates a really special place.

I think that’s a wonderful note to end on. Ken, thank you so much for spending the time.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, everyone. Please join me in thanking Ken Griffin.

Thank you.