Griffin’s Doors

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“My job is to manufacture money.” — Ken GriffinI haven’t had a chance to visit Citadel’s new global headquarters in Miami, and it’s a while since I visited the firm’s offices in New York, but I’m told that on his elevator doors, CEO Ken Griffin has emblazoned a slogan informing all who enter that his is the “#1 Most Profitable Hedge Fund Manager of All Time.”The message celebrates Citadel’s position atop LCH Investments’ rolling scoreboard of hedge fund gains. Since founding the firm in 1990, Griffin has delivered net gains to investors of $90.4 billion after fees – over $10 billion more than any of his closest peers. His flagship fund has generated positive returns in more than 80% of the months it has been going, and has grown at a rate of 19.2% a year, again after fees. With $68 billion under management, Citadel isn’t the largest hedge fund manager out there but it is adept at managing cycles and the changes they bring.Recently, Griffin has been speaking about AI. The finance industry has a long tradition of deploying technology to achieve edge, and Citadel has been at the forefront. It launched a quantitative strategies group in 2012 and employs around 270 PhDs from fields including computer engineering and statistics. Currently, around one in three employees at the firm is a software engineer.1Yet while the firm was quick to embrace earlier machine learning advances to support its portfolio managers, its approach to generative AI was more tempered. Griffin instructed his team to abandon 195 of the 200 projects they had been working on and a year ago remarked that AI ha…