Ken Griffin

Ken Griffin was running a business out of his bedroom before he left home — EDCOM, a discount mail-order operation selling education software while he was still in high school in Boca Raton. At Harvard he kept going: his first trade, a bet against Home Shopping Network stock, made 5,000 dollars, and he talked the college into letting him bolt a satellite dish onto the roof of his dormitory, Cabot House, so he could get real-time stock quotes in his room. By 1987, still an undergraduate, he was running an actual fund with 265,000 dollars in it, and had it positioned in a way that turned Black Monday's October crash into a gain rather than a loss. He graduated with an economics degree in 1989.

After Harvard, Griffin moved to Chicago and worked briefly under Frank Meyer at Glenwood Capital before founding his own fund, Citadel, in 1990 with 4.6 million dollars. It returned 43 percent in its first full year and 40 percent the next, and Griffin used the growing firm to build Citadel Securities into one of the largest market makers in American equities. By the mid-2020s Citadel managed roughly 67 billion dollars and had generated more than 90 billion dollars in net gains since its founding. The firm's ties to retail trading blew up into public controversy in January 2021, when Robinhood halted GameStop purchases and critics pointed to its order-flow payments from Citadel; Griffin testified before Congress that February, and the SEC later found the conspiracy theories unfounded. In 2022 he moved Citadel's headquarters to Miami.

Griffin built part of his public reputation on the GameStop affair, where retail traders decided he was the villain even after the SEC cleared Citadel of wrongdoing — a version of him solid enough that the film Dumb Money cast Nick Offerman to play him as a market-manipulating heavy, which Griffin calls sensationalized but which stuck anyway. Around the same time, he personally spent 53.75 million dollars helping defeat a proposed graduated income tax in his home state of Illinois, a tax that would have applied above all to earners like him. He has since given away more than 2 billion dollars to universities, museums, and hospitals, enough that Harvard renamed its graduate school after him, while continuing to fight against the kind of taxes that fund the public institutions doing similar work.

At 57, Griffin is still adding to a fortune Forbes put at roughly 51.2 billion dollars in early 2026, and spending it in ways designed to be noticed: a 43.2-million-dollar copy of the Constitution bought in 2021 and later loaned to the National Constitution Center, a 44.6-million-dollar stegosaurus skeleton in 2024, art holdings near 800 million dollars. Whether he is remembered mainly as a market-making innovator, a Republican mega-donor, or the face retail traders blamed in 2021 is not settled — Citadel's own numbers, and its move from Chicago to Miami, argue for the first version; the political fights and the GameStop backlash keep the other two alive.

Ken Griffin's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Citadel company
  Founded with 4.6 million dollars in starting assets 1990
• Citadel Securities company
  Grew into one of the largest market makers in U.S. equities 2002
• Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee speech
  On Citadel's role in the GameStop short squeeze 2021
• Griffin Catalyst company
  Umbrella philanthropic organization 2023
• National Constitution Center gift and document loans other
  15 million dollar gift plus his copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights 2025

• October 15, 1968 aged 0 Born in Daytona Beach, Florida
• 1986 aged ~18 Enrolls at Harvard College and begins trading from his dorm room Convinced administrators to let him install a satellite dish on Cabot House.
• 1990 aged ~22 Founds Citadel with 4.6 million dollars
• July 2003 aged 34 Marries Anne Dias
• 2014 aged ~46 Anne Dias files for divorce Settled out of court in October 2015.
• February 18, 2021 aged 52 Testifies before Congress on the GameStop short squeeze
• November 2021 aged 53 Buys the last privately held copy of the Constitution for 43.2 million dollars
• June 2022 aged 53 Announces Citadel's headquarters move from Chicago to Miami
• April 2023 aged 54 Gives 300 million dollars to Harvard, which renames its graduate school after him

• Warren Buffett b. 1930
  Value investor whose disciplined approach built one of the largest personal fortunes in American history. built comparable wealth by the opposite method from
• George Soros b. 1930
  Investor and founder of the Open Society Foundations, supporting democracy and human rights worldwide. donates to the opposite side of the aisle from
• Charles Schwab b. 1937
  Founder of the discount brokerage that democratized stock trading for ordinary investors. trades against the retail brokerage built by
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. donated to the foundation of, despite backing his rivals