Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, is a Wall Street titan who lost his brother – and nearly 70% of his employees – in the September 11 attacks
President-elect Donald Trump has named Howard Lutnick – the CEO known for his rise to the upper echelons of Wall Street and his resilience after the September 11 attacks devastated his business – as his pick for Secretary of Commerce.
In the new role, Lutnick, who co-chairs Trump’s transition team, will lead the new administration’s tariffs and trade strategy and retain direct responsibility for the office of the United States Trade Representative, Trump announced Tuesday announced in a post on Truth Social.
Lutnick, a longtime power player in New York, became president and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment banking and financial services firm, in the early 1990s at just 29 years old.
Throughout Trump’s 2024 campaign, Lutnick — who has donated more than $1 million to Trump’s super PAC and hosted a $15 million fundraiser at his Hamptons home this summer — has served as a top economic adviser.
Lutnick was one of the leading voices in Trump’s camp calling for higher tariffs in an effort to lower corporate taxes in the United States and insulate American companies from foreign competition.
For months, many suspected that Trump would tap Lutnick as Treasury secretary, a role that remains unfilled.
A representative for Lutnick did not immediately respond Fortune’s request for comment.
Lutnick, 63, quickly climbed the corporate ladder, but he didn’t have an easy start: Both his parents had died by the time he was 18, leaving him and his two siblings to fend for themselves.
The native New Yorker joined Cantor Fitzgerald as a bond trader shortly after graduating and quickly formed a close mentor-mentee relationship with the firm’s founder, Bernard Cantor.
Eight years after taking office, Lutnick was named president and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald — after reportedly “working his way to the top” as Cantor was on his deathbed — and became chairman five years later.
“There is no sugar-coating the fact that before and even after September 11, Mr. Lutnick was deeply disliked by the industry,” Susanne Craig wrote in the paper. New York Times in 2011. “He’s a ruthless competitor even by Wall Street standards and has made more than a few enemies over the years. In 1996, as Mr. Cantor, his mentor, was dying, Mr. Lutnick fought with Mr. Cantor’s wife, Iris, for control of Cantor Fitzgerald. She later excluded him from the funeral.”
Cantor Fitzgerald was brutally affected by the September 11 attacks. Its headquarters were located on the 101st through 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center; The hijacked flight hit floors 93 through 99, leaving those on the Cantor floors with no means of escape.
Every employee who had been in the office – 658 employees – died that morning, representing almost 70% of the company’s workforce. Lutnick dropped his son off at preschool that morning and was out of the office, but his younger brother, Gary, also a Cantor employee, was murdered. Cantor associates represented nearly one in four of the victims killed in New York that day.
Within a week, Lutnick returned to the trading desk and announced, amid widespread criticism, that the company would suspend salary payments to its deceased employees. He later promised 25% of the company’s profits over the next ten years to their dependents, along with ongoing health insurance. He also gave them $90 million from his own personal savings.
Today, Lutnick is one of Wall Street’s longest-serving CEOs, with 41 years at the helm of Cantor Fitzgerald. During his tenure, Lutnick oversaw the $1.3 billion merger of BGC Partners, a financial services firm, with eSpeed, an electronic bond trading platform, and took Rumble, a video platform, public through a special purpose acquisition company ( SPAC). Earlier this year, through BGC Group – of which Lutnick is also CEO – he unveiled a futures exchange called FMX, which counts Morgan Stanley, Citi and Goldman Sachs among its equity partners. Meanwhile, its economic interest in the company is about 60%, compared to 25% twenty years ago.
In recent months, Lutnick has balanced his CEO duties with his Trump campaign leadership by working for Cantor between 6:30 a.m. and 9 a.m., and then from 4 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., with Trump time in between. Wall Street Journal reported.
One of Trump’s main talking points during his campaign was his commitment to raising tariffs. As Commerce Secretary, Lutnick will be closer to that promise than any other appointee.
“Tariffs are a great tool [for] the president will use,” Lutnick told CNBC in October, arguing that the Trump administration will use tariffs to “build.”
“If we want to make it in America, we have to charge tariffs for it, or if we compete with it, we have to charge tariffs for it,” he added.
Lutnick has grown increasingly close to Elon Musk, another key Trump adviser New York Times emphasized: “and, given the Department of Commerce’s role in expanding broadband Internet access, [Lutnick] could give the tech mogul’s Starlink a significant boost.”
As part of the transition team, Lutnick played an important role in recruitment and selection. He has pledged to do the same as a member of the government, NPR reported — “stacking” the team exclusively with “loyalists.”
However, many have raised concerns about Lutnick’s potential conflicts of interest, including regarding cryptocurrency; Cantor Fitzgerald manages a handful of reserve funds for Tether, a stablecoin.
