Ken Griffin was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1968 and began trading convertible bonds from his Harvard dormitory in the late 1980s. He founded Citadel in 1990 and, over the following three decades, built it into one of the most consistently profitable hedge funds in history, alongside Citadel Securities, the market-making firm that now handles a substantial share of all U.S. retail equity volume.
Citadel's 2022 fund returns were among the largest single-year profit figures ever recorded in the industry, and the firm's investments in technology, data infrastructure and quantitative research have become widely emulated. Griffin has also become one of the largest individual philanthropists in the United States, with substantial commitments to museums, universities and Florida-based educational institutions.
He has been an outspoken voice on market-structure reform, financial regulation and the governance of higher-education institutions.