It has been seventeen 9/11s since Howard Lutnick watched the Twin Towers fall. Grief has mellowed. Old recriminations have quieted.
And, with time, the tragic story of his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald LP, has begun to recede in the national memory. Lutnick can never forget: 2 of every 3 people who worked for him in New York, 658 in all, died when American Airlines Flight 11 struck One World Trade Center. His brother Gary was among the dead. Cantor, it seemed, was finished.
Yet today, at 57, Lutnick is the improbable face of one of the greatest comebacks in Wall Street history. He hasn’t simply rebuilt Cantor. He’s become a billionaire in the process and is spending hundreds of millions of his own dollars to push into new businesses and set the firm on an ambitious course: to become, in his words, “the biggest little guy” in the business.
The famously sharp-elbowed Lutnick -- his firm has been sued for, among other things, unfair dismissal and broker-poaching -- found an unlikely partner in Anshu Jain, the former Deutsche Bank AG co-chief executive officer. The two have been courting sovereign wealth funds around the world to help finance Cantor’s push into investment banking and the highly levered world of prime brokerage, financing smaller hedge funds that the biggest banks are reluctant to take on.
‘Lonely’ Lutnick
Jain, 55, whose career has taken him from Kidder Peabody & Co. to Merrill Lynch to Deutsche Bank, and who now holds the second-largest stake in Cantor, has revitalized Lutnick. “I wanted a partner,” Lutnick says in an interview from his second-floor Midtown office. “I’ve been lonely.”
When Jain is in London, Lutnick spends the first working hour of each morning speaking with him. The two are so close that they and their wives vacationed together in Europe this summer. They make for an intriguing pair: the soft-spoken Jain and the more expressive Lutnick, a Long Island native who’s spent his entire career at Cantor. Together, they’re growing the firm in sectors like healthcare, power and alternative energy, real estate, and eventually technology.
Even as he builds a new Cantor, Lutnick surrounds himself with the past. His office is filled with mementos salvaged from the World Trade Center. Walking around it, he points out pictures of friends lost in the Twin Towers and steel plates and fire-scarred pieces of art retrieved from Ground Zero.
Lutnick’s journey to the top was a speedy one. He became president of Cantor at 29 after making a series of profitable trades for founder Bernie Cantor. He’s had a reputation as a Wall Street bruiser for almost as long, having waged a bitter and public fight for control of the firm with Cantor’s widow in 1996.
‘Howie Dollars’
Two decades later, he’s only tightened his grip. He’s the sole stockholder of Cantor Fitzgerald Group Management, which is the managing general partner of Cantor Fitzgerald LP and gives him sole voting control. His economic stake in the company is about 60 percent, up from 25 percent two decades ago.
That means Lutnick’s net worth is now at least $1.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He declined to comment on his fortune.