Ken Griffin - Founder and CEO of Citadel | Investment Conference 2026

So, first, it's just wonderful to be here today. Thank you so much for having me participate in this wonderful conference. And one of the things that is very true is that this team which has done such an extraordinary job of managing the sovereign wealth of the nation has been focused on delivering for the people of Norway. You have had a winning team which has really delivered in a profound way for the people of your country. Let me be clear. Why do we actually enumerate winning as one of our core values? Because regretfully in the United States, we went through a period of time in which winning seemed to be out of vogue. We lost our way in the wilderness. And great firms are focused on winning. As David Rubenstein put it, can you create a product that the consumer will value, the consumer will pay for, and what the consumer will reward you for creating and for building? Firms that are winning firms do just that. And firms that create inferior products are firms that fail. And what worried us is in a culture where participation trophies were becoming ubiquitous, we lost our way as a country and what it took to win. And we at Citadel really do believe in the importance of winning for our clients. That's core to our business. And I was thinking about what David had to say in terms of companies and products. One thing to keep in mind is at Citadel there's no shame in making money. We manufacture money. Our clients give us capital with one goal in mind. Can we manufacture more money with that capital?

So I wish we could. I wish we could. But as you grow, as a business grows in complexity and grows in stakeholders, grows in regulatory footprint for example, it actually becomes necessary to have more process, more bureaucracy to make sure that what you do is on the right side of the road. So startups have greater flexibility than your established firms but your established firms have far greater depth and resources. What you have to be very focused on is that you are controlling the size of the bureaucratic state that you keep a constant focus on the ability to rapidly make decisions and when a decision is made to rapidly execute upon that decision. But because you have a bigger footprint, you're still going to have to go through a few more steps than that smaller startup might have to go through. But with more resources, with the ability to interact with other global players on a far stronger playing field, we're able to move quite quickly on decision-making. This is one where large firms do tend to find themselves lost in the wilderness. I'll tell my colleagues all the time, they put something to my desk for input from me. I'll give them a date. I'll be back to you in 72 hours, 48 hours, 96 hours. If you don't hear from me, I gave you a yes. It's your call. Don't let yourself in management be an impediment to decision-making by those who are junior to you. And in some sense, negative consent to move forward is really powerful because it tells people that they have agency that they can make a decision. One of our key internal principles is the most junior person who is closest to the information. That's the person who optimally should make the decision as often or as frequently as possible. Now, will they make mistakes? Of course they will. But they will grow much faster in a culture where they're empowered with agency to make decisions. They will learn from their successes and they will learn from their failures. But most importantly, they are rapidly learning and that's how we create leaders.

Well, first of all, I think it says that I deeply care about how my colleagues are advancing in their careers. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking for patterns of where we are not developing talent strongly enough and aggressively enough. So where in the business are our newest hires, whether they're out of college, out of a PhD program, a lateral hire from another global investment bank or global investment management firm, where are people not flourishing? And I'm trying to understand what do we need to do as a firm? What do we need to do differently? Whether it's professional development, whether it's the experience that people have, whether it's the trust that are placed in our newer hires, what do we need to do differently to get more out of people? One of the things I'm most proud of at Citadel is the extraordinary amount of human capital that we've developed over 35 years. People who run today one of the world's most successful hedge funds who run one of the most successful securities dealers in the world and bluntly countless people who run many of the financial institutions around the world whose roots trace back to Citadel. I think these are all a testament to our consistent focus on developing people to be the best that they can be.