(Bloomberg) -- The text to Elon Musk: a picture of giant scissors. Musk’s text back: a picture of a sword.
The person on the other end: Howard Lutnick — Wall Street billionaire, MAGA believer and head-hunter-in-chief to Donald Trump, the next American president.
“Me, Elon Musk and Trump are going to figure it out,” Lutnick, head of brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP, told a podcaster shortly before Trump staged his comeback for the ages on Election Day.
By “it” Lutnick was referring to nothing less than the $2 trillion US deficit and the role of the federal government in American life. He and Musk say they’re ready to gut federal agencies, disband entire departments and stock the vast bureaucracy with loyalists like themselves to unbridle American capitalism.
It’s a remarkable turn for Lutnick, a pugnacious billionaire whose name even now barely registers outside Wall Street circles. Along with other financial players jockeying for influence, he’s busily lining up candidates for positions of power.
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One of the names many suspect is on Lutnick’s list: his own. Inside the Park Avenue headquarters of Cantor Fitzgerald, employees are exuberant, but even senior bankers and traders are in the dark about what might be in store for their CEO — and what his rise inside Trump World could mean for them.
Where, if anywhere, Lutnick might land in Washington is anyone’s guess. But if Trump asks, Lutnick is ready to serve, he’s said publicly. Treasury secretary is a possibility, but others are vying for that job too. Among them are Scott Bessent, a prominent hedge fund manager; Jay Clayton, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Robert Lighthizer, an economic adviser and China hawk during the first Trump administration. Some of Trump’s key advisers are backing Bessent, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. At this point, it’s difficult to rule anyone in or out.
But few on Wall Street have embraced Trump more enthusiastically than Lutnick. He crisscrossed the country on “Trump Force One”; strategized at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence and private club in South Florida; grabbed the mike and pumped his fist at raucous rallies; and gloried in Trump’s spectacle of grievance at Madison Square Garden.
Now, few are in a better position to reap the spoils.
“He was a political novice and through sheer force of personality has become a major player,” said Charles Myers, a former Wall Street executive and Democratic donor who runs advisory firm Signum Global Advisors.
For months now, Lutnick, a major Trump donor, has been fast at work assembling a future administration. As co-chair of the transition team, he’s set up a war room at Mar-a-Lago with eight TV screens and two iPads. He’s personally walking Trump through names, photos and biographies of potential candidates, laying out the pros and cons of each, according to a person familiar with the matter. Trump is expected to interview candidates for Treasury in the next week.
A spokesperson for Lutnick declined to comment.
“President-elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”
Lutnick has embraced Trump’s plan to restart oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and make extracting valuable minerals and metals easier in the Lower 48. With Musk, he has also endorsed the creation of an entire new federal department, the Department of Government Efficiency, to reduce what the new administration views as waste and inefficiency.
‘Two Sides’
“There’s two sides,” Lutnick explained on the Oct. 28 podcast with cryptocurrency investor Anthony Pompliano. “Cost-cutting, which is DOGE,” he went on, referring to the proposed efficiency office. “And there’s revenue production, which is Howard and the economic team.” He mentioned on the podcast his text exchange with Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Inc.
Like Trump, Lutnick has bemoaned the move of US manufacturing overseas, slammed “coastal elite nonsense” over electric cars, and focused on the importance of taming inflation. He’s also criticized the cancellation of the extension of the Keystone XL pipeline — a move by President Joe Biden on his first day in office — and said China was attacking American workers by sending fentanyl to the country.
“China is attacking America from its guts,” Lutnick told Pompliano. “It’s going to get it directly into your stomach to try to kill you.”
That Lutnick has frequently placed himself at the center of such discussions has only added to the speculation inside Cantor. Barely 36 hours after Trump cruised to victory, employees sporting Cantor vests were buzzing at the deli downstairs from the firm’s Manhattan headquarters. Upstairs, on the trading floor, chatter was spinning too.
Lutnick is unusual among top names being reported as potential cabinet picks in that he’s a billionaire who still runs large private and public companies — which also stand to benefit from his involvement in government policy. Among Cantor’s ventures is an operation that will lend dollars to clients using Bitcoin as collateral — a business that could receive a boost from Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrencies.
His group also includes a private investment bank and a fixed income and equities business, along with publicly traded brokerage BGC Group Inc. and real estate firm Newmark Group Inc. Shares in both firms have risen since the close of trading on Election Day — BGC by almost 11% and Newmark by 5.5%.
Futures Controversy
Most politically pertinent is Lutnick’s latest venture, futures exchange FMX, which launched in September and has been embroiled in finger-pointing over its plans to clear US Treasury futures abroad — controversy that is likely to evaporate under a Trump administration.
Protests to Lutnick’s plans, chiefly by dominant rival CME Group Inc., based in Chicago, have involved Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois writing to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the top derivatives regulator — and CME’s CEO, Terry Duffy, appealing to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Now there’s a chance Lutnick himself could hold Yellen’s role. At the very least, Lutnick’s current job means he’s helping oversee the appointment of regulators with oversight of FMX’s plans — and much of the rest of his business empire. (Duffy himself has said he’s not concerned about Lutnick’s relationship with Trump, adding such obvious conflicts would be “a biblical disaster.”)
Any top government job should make questions over entanglements unavoidable and compel Lutnick — like anyone with such expansive business interests taking a job in a presidential administration — to divest assets or put them in a blind trust to avoid legal troubles. Guidance allows new officials to minimize capital-gains taxes, provided they invest the proceeds of any sale in an accepted investment fund like a broad-based mutual fund.
But the rules laid out by the Office of Government Ethics may be less enforced under Trump, according to Kate Belinski, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr LLP. “There’s not really any way to get people to comply with this guidance,” she said by phone — except, she added, threats from the Department of Justice, which would be unlikely to turn on its own government’s officials under Trump.
While still uncertain, the prospect of Lutnick’s departure leaves his 13,000 employees wondering who, if he moves on, would lead them after his 33 years at the helm.
Even for those who’ve worked at Cantor for a while, there’s no easy answer. While he can be bombastic in public and on television, in business he’s known for his discretion and keeping a very tight circle of loyal, trusted advisers, according to people familiar with his working style.
Top Deputies
Lutnick has repeatedly said he loves his current job, but would take a job if Trump calls him up, leaving the precise fate of his companies — spanning from Singapore to Tel Aviv and even the Philadelphia suburbs — unclear. But while the firms have grown aggressively over his tenure, they’ve largely remained self-contained entities, likely able to run themselves.
His property firm Newmark is run largely by CEO Barry Gosin, who is popular among employees. Cantor and BGC — the firm that recently launched FMX — have clear heads of its divisions, but it’s unclear how they’d be steered without Lutnick’s day-to-day involvement.
At Cantor, Lutnick’s top deputies have all been in their jobs at least six years and pushing their own business agendas. They include Sage Kelly, a former Jefferies Financial Group Inc. health-care banker who has rapidly expanded the firm’s investment-banking division; Christian Wall, who joined from Credit Suisse and oversees fixed income; and Pascal Bandelier, a former Barclays Plc trading executive who runs the equities business.
A key adviser likely to have a close role in any transition is longtime ally Stephen Merkel, who joined Cantor in 1993 after a stint as a lawyer in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s J. Aron & Co. division, and was in an elevator in the World Trade Center when the first plane hit during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Merkel missed being consumed by flamed by only seconds, according to On Top of the World, a book by Lutnick’s college friend Tom Barbash that chronicled Cantor in the wake of 9/11, when it lost 658 employees.
--With assistance from Stephanie Lai.
(Updates with Treasury secretary discussions in seventh paragraph.)
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