With Situational Awareness AI deal, Citadel's Griffin rides to the rescue again

For Griffin, who began trading from his Harvard University dormitory some four decades ago and now oversees $71 billion in assets, it is a playbook that stretches back decades.

"During market stress, the collective judgment of our business leaders, risk managers and portfolio managers enables us to capitalize on market opportunities when others, who depend on simplistic stop-loss approaches, cannot," Griffin wrote in a 2023 letter to investors seen by Reuters.

When energy company Enron filed for what was then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2001, Griffin chartered a jet that same day, dispatching top Citadel executives to interview nearly all of the energy traders and analysts who had worked there, the Financial Times reported last month and one of the sources confirmed.

The recruits would go on to shape Citadel's commodities franchise for years. It was an approach Griffin would return to time and again as markets lurched from one crisis to the next.