I’m just back from hearing Citadel CEO Ken Griffin speak to a room full of financial journalists in support of the Knight-Bagehot journalism fellowship. (It’s a fabulous program that some Columbia J-school classmates used to wrongly assume I was in because I chased every financial writer prize posted on the bulletin board and my year in Kenya must have made me look mid-career at the age of 23.)

Griffin is the most successful hedge fund manager in history, according to the Institutional Investor scoreboard and interviewer Alan Murray, a name familiar to many readers as he created and wrote this newsletter. Griffin says reading about KKR cofounder Henry Kravis was “incredibly inspirational” in sparking his interest in business. Kravis intrigued me, too, ever since I discovered him as the steely architect of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in the book Barbarians at the Gate. The challenge for media today, Griffin said, is “this very awkward competition with social media” and a lack of trust as consumers find it hard to tell the difference between clickbait headlines and reporting-based analysis. 

Nuance does matter.  One media headline from the talk was that Griffin said he has not supported Donald Trump for president. While that’s technically true in terms of financial support, the longtime GOP donor did not say how he plans to vote, other than to acknowledge that he will not “have a smile on my face” when voting this time around. He is looking forward to 2028. 

Meanwhile, Griffin insists he moved his family and Citadel’s headquarters to Miami because of crime in Chicago—not taxes, which he said are “the cost of a civilized society.” Griffin also said that he refused to fund Ron DeSantis in his presidential bid because of the Florida governor’s battle with Disney. And he thinks generative AI is overhyped. “Large language models are very good at solving a relatively small number of problems.”  

I would have loved to follow up. But as I lingered by the empty chair at the table where he was slated to come back and sit, it appears Griffin had left the building.

More news below.

Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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