This post was originally published on this site
A previous version of this report mischaracterized Griffin’s $300 million gift to Harvard as a financial-aid donation and as the largest individual gift in the university’s history. Griffin’s latest gift, which is unrestricted and not earmarked for student aid, is not the university’s biggest individual donation. The story has been corrected.
Hedge-fund multibillionaire Ken Griffin, an alumnus of the undergraduate Harvard College, is hanging his name on the Ivy League institution’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences following a $300 million donation to the university.
Harvard says Griffin, 54, who received his bachelor’s degree in 1989, has now given more than a half-billion dollars to his alma mater. His $150 million donation in 2014, earmarked for financial aid, was reportedly the largest gift in the undergraduate college’s history.
It’s not the first Griffin gift to an elite educational institution to result in his name’s being emblazoned on a high-profile academic entity. He donated $125 million to the University of Chicago’s fabled economics department in 2017, which has since formally been called the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics.
Of his new Harvard donation, Griffin said this: “Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences is committed to advancing ideas that will shape humanity’s future, while providing important insight into our past.”
He added that he was “excited to support the impactful work of this great institution.”
Harvard’s endowment was valued at $50.9 billion at the end of the 2022 fiscal year last June.
As Citadel’s founder and chief executive officer, Griffin, has become one of the richest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of $34.9 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
Last year he made news by sinking tens of millions of dollars into a failed effort to elect a Republican governor in Illinois while also pulling Citadel’s headquarters out of Chicago. (He also made an appearance in 2022 in the inaugural MarketWatch 50 list.) Of late, he’s had plenty to say about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, telling the Financial Times that uninsured depositors at the bank should not have been rescued.
Following are five more things to know about Griffin.
Citadel made $16 billion last year
According to a report published earlier this year by the fund-of-funds outfit LCH Investments, Citadel made $16 billion in profit, after fees, last year.
That would be the largest annual profit for a hedge fund in recorded history, outpacing the $15 billion profit racked up by John Paulson’s fund in 2007, driven by what has often labeled “the greatest trade ever,” against subprime mortgages, said Rick Sopher, chairman of LCH.
Citadel’s year was particularly impressive considering the overall drop in the market. Hedge-fund managers as a whole lost $208 billion in 2022, the LCH report indicates.
In addition, Citadel Securities, a market maker, raked in an additional $7.5 billion in revenue in 2022, according to Bloomberg.
Griffin is a megadonor to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
Griffin, who is originally from Daytona Beach, Fla., is a fan of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Griffin donated $5 million to DeSantis’s re-election campaign — in a race DeSantis ultimately won by a large margin over Charlie Crist, former governor (and former Republican) — and said he would back DeSantis in a potential 2024 White House bid.
“I don’t know what he’s going to do. It’s a huge personal decision,” Griffin told Politico about the possibility of DeSantis’s running for president in 2024. “He has a tremendous record as governor of Florida, and our country would be well-served by him as president.”
In One Chart: As Biden says he’s ‘planning on running,’ here are the potential 2024 Republican candidates
Griffin has contributed to dozens of Republican candidates over the years. He has donated sums of between $250,000 and $5 million to political campaigns including Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign; Donald Trump’s and Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaigns; and the Senate campaigns of Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, according to tracking site Open Secrets.
Griffin donated a total of $66 million to GOP candidates in the 2020 election cycle, according to Bloomberg.
Griffin also gave $1 million to the Obama Foundation in 2017, a year after Barack Obama left the White House, and $500,000 to Joe Biden’s inaugural committee, per Forbes.
Griffin has spent millions seeking to cut taxes on the wealthy — and won
In 2020, Griffin spent $54 million for ads and other efforts to thwart a ballot measure in Illinois that would have put him and other ultrawealthy residents of the state on the hook for more taxes. The big spending paid off: The measure failed. Its approval would have added Illinois to the list of 32 U.S. states that set a higher tax rate on the wealthy than on other citizens.
Nonprofit ProPublica used IRS data to determine whether Griffin’s ballot effort was — for him, personally — worth the $54 million he spent. According to tax filings, Griffin’s annual income averaged $1.7 billion from 2013 to 2018 — the fourth-highest income in the country over that span. Using that average income as the marker, the proposed state tax increase, which would have raised the state income-tax rate to 8% from 5% on the highest incomes, would have cost Griffin around $51 million every year in extra tax over what he currently pays, ProPublica says.
Griffin wasn’t done trying to influence Illinois politics. In 2022, he spent roughly $50 million to back a Republican candidate for Illinois governor, a suburban mayor named Richard Irvin, who didn’t make it out of the primary.
Griffin had vowed he was “all in” to unseat Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker when the hedge-fund giant placed his bet on Irvin, mayor of a western suburb of Chicago called Aurora. State Sen. Darren Bailey, a Trump-backed candidate who beat Irvin, later lost in the general election to Pritzker by some 12½ percentage points.
See also: Who is Harlan Crow? 4 things to know about the man who paid for Clarence Thomas’s luxury trips.
Griffin, an avid cyclist and runner who gave $12 million to help fund a popular plan to separate Chicago’s lakefront bike and foot paths, may no longer spend quite so much on Illinois politics. He announced in June that he had decided to move Citadel to Miami after 30 years in Chicago.
Griffin shorted the market on Black Monday as a teenager
1987’s Black Monday, a day that lives in infamy for many stock-market investors, was a big win for Griffin.
According to story by Institutional Investor, Griffin, then 19, had an investment fund worth $265,000 and had various short positions when the market crashed. Griffin’s fund also included some money from his grandmother, he said in an interview for the 2001 story.
On Oct. 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
dropped 508 points, a decline of almost 23%, while the S&P 500
SPX,
plunged more than 20%, one of the biggest selling frenzies ever for the stock market. An equivalent percentage drop at today’s levels would shave more than 7,000 points off the Dow.
Griffin did not disclose how much his fund made from short positions on Black Monday.
Citadel was involved in the 2021’s ‘meme-stock’ phenomenon
In 2021, retail traders began an unprecedented move toward stocks like GameStop Corp.
GME,
and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.
AMC,
in what some have called the Mother of All Short Squeezes.
Griffin announced that Citadel would invest $2 billion into the investment firm Melvin Capital, which at the time had suffered huge losses related to its short positions, including on GameStop.
Citadel made the investment in exchange for a share of Melvin Capital’s fees over the next three years, according to the Wall Street Journal. The investment enabled Melvin Capital to lower its leverage and avoid becoming a forced seller.
Despite the investment, Melvin Capital eventually announced its fund would be closing in May 2022.
An investigation by the Securities and Exchanges Commission into the GameStop controversy found no evidence of collusion between Citadel and executives at the popular trading platform Robinhood Markets Inc.
HOOD,
“The whole GameStop conspiracy theory, I mean that’s come and gone,” Griffin said at the New York Times DealBook summit in November 2021. “It was fascinating to be in the center of that conspiracy.”
Read more about Citadel’s role in the meme-stock frenzy.
Read on: This investing tactic was left for dead but is about to make a comeback, says strategist
