Morning Coffee: When a 27 year-old broker makes $300m in profit. 2025 could be a good year for traders, too
$300m is a lot of money. It was even more money in the late 1980s, when Howard Lutnick, the man who might now be Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary, made $300m in profit for Cantor Fitzgerald. Lutnick joined Cantor aged 22 in 1983; he became CEO there seven years later, aged 29.
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That $300m helped him on his way. Cantor was one of the biggest treasury brokers at the time, and theEconomist reports that Lutnick made his $300m in three chunks. Each time, he says the boss liked him more. “The first time I made him $100m, he liked me; the second time I made him $100m, he loved me; and the third time I did it—family.”
Lutnick was already anepo hire. He got the job at Cantor through a family friend after his academic parents died of cancer one after the other. Bernie Cantor, the founder and his boss, took him under his wing and when Bernie too died, Lutnick gained control of the firm. Lutnick then continued to hire more family and friends, following an ethos that it made sense to recruit them — so long as they were also conscientious and capable.
Filling Cantor with friends and family made September 11th 2001 particularly difficult to bear. 685 people at Cantor died during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, including Lutnick's brother.
Now, Lutnick — who owns 60% of Cantor and has a net worth in excess of $1bn, might be moving on from the firm where he's spent all his adult life. He's in the running to be Treasury Secretary in the second Trump administration, and is Elon Musk's top pick. — Lutnick would «actually enact change,» tweeted Musk last week, before claiming that rival treasury candidate, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, would be «business as usual.»
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