Letter #200: Ken Griffin, Jon Gray, and David Rubenstein (2023)
Founder of Citadel, President & COO of Blackstone, Founder of Carlyle | Perspectives from Both Sides of the Capital Markets
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Today’s letter is the transcript of a joint interview with Ken Griffin and Jon Gray conducted by David Rubenstein. In this interview, David asks Ken and John to discuss a variety of topics, including why Hong Kong is important, how the real estate situation looks, how someone starts a market maker, whether the buyout market has peaked, how to deal with geopolitical risk, whether running a global investment firm is challenging, what to look for in candidates, in-office vs remote, using AI for investment/trading decisions, corporate structure and responsibility, regulatory concerns, whether there will be a recession soon, whether the Fed will raise rates, investing in China, conversations with regulators, the evolution of large, publicly traded PE firms, moving to Florida, how to decide where to give money away, running for President, how to get a job at Blackstone or Citadel, and the greatest thrill of their investment careers.
Ken Griffin is the Founder, CEO, and CIO of Citadel. He also owns Citadel Securities, one of the largest market makers in the US. Ken started trading in his dorm room while he was a student at Harvard, and launched his first fund in 1987 with $265k, days after his 19th birthday. After graduating in 1989, Ken moved to Chicago to work with Frank Meyer, the Founder of Glenwood Capital, who allotted him $1mn of Glenwood’s capital. A year later, in 1990, Ken founded Wellington Financial Group with $4.6mn AUM. Four years later, in 1994, he changed the name to Citadel. By 2001, Citadel managed $6bn. A year later, he launched Citadel Securities. At the end of 2022, Citadel had $62bn in AUM and Citadel Securities generated $7.5bn in revenue.
Jon Gray is the President & COO of Blackstone and a member of the board of directors, where he sits on the firm’s Management Committee and most of its investment committees. Before becoming President & COO in 2018, Jon was Blackstone’s Global Head of Real Estate. He joined Blackstone out of college in 1992 in their M&A and PE group. A year later, he joined the newly-created real estate private equity group which had just closed a $338mn fund. He helped grow it to $136bn in AUM (total firm AUM was $472bn) when he took over the President & COO role. Notably, Jon led Blackstone’s LBO of Hilton Hotels, which became the most profitable private equity real estate ever, earning $14bn for the firm’s investors. Today, the REPE has $337bn in AUM (total firm AUM is >$1tn).
David Rubenstein is the Cofounder and Co-chairman of Carlyle, which he founded in 1987. At the end of 2023, Carlyle had $426bn AUM and generated $3bn of revenue. Prior to founding Carlyle, David practiced law at Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman). From 1977-1981, David served in the Carter Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. From 1775-1976, he served as Chief Counsel to the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. He started his career in 1973 as a lawyer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
David Rubenstein: Okay, so we have a great panel here. And we're going to talk about every issue under the sun. Okay? Why don't we start. You flew all the way from New York here. Why is Hong Kong important to you?
Jon Gray: I love that, in a Hong Kong audience here. Hong Kong is a terrifically important place for our business, as a firm. We've got a great team on the ground. Obviously it's a place where you can invest capital. It's the gateway to China as well. And so it's an important part of our firm, and we really enjoy being here.
David Rubenstein: Okay. Ken, when did you first come to Hong Kong?
Ken Griffin: So I first came here about 30-some years ago. And Citadel has actually invested in Hong Kong for over three decades. And like Jonathan, I would say we have a great team here on the ground. It's our most important team in Asia. And Hong Kong is both, for us, a nexus to the entire continent and a gateway into Mainland China.
David Rubenstein: I would just add, I came here about 50 years ago, and there were no underground passages between Kowloon and here. And so, you had to take the ferry across--was 25 cents Hong Kong. Pretty cheap. Okay, so, Jon, let me ask you this: you built your career, initially, in real estate. And you built the biggest real estate business in the world. And now you're the President and Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone and doing other things other than real estate. But, just back to your real estate days, is the real estate market in trouble because people aren't coming to offices anymore, and therefore, tenants aren't going to need as much space? What's the situation and are we going to see a lot of distressed debt in real estate soon?
Jon Gray: So I guess you probably focused on the US here, in this question, and maybe around the world and Europe. I would say there are two negative headwinds near term: one is the office market, which he talked about. Remote work hurts demand for office space. There's obsolescence. And I think we'll continue to see pressure in that space, particularly in the United States. It's an area we do not have a lot of capital deployed. I think the second headwind, which people have talked about more broadly on the panels today, is the rising cost of capital. Obviously if short rates have gone up, more recently long rates, that creates pressure on valuations. I think the good news is that underlying fundamentals in some of the better sectors, like logistics and student housing, data centers, are helping offset some of that. And the second thing I'd say is, you're gonna see a sharp decline in new construction, which will help real estate over time. But the short answer is, yeah, there's some near term pressure.
David Rubenstein: Okay. Ken, you obviously started Citadel, great hedge fund, one of the most successful out there. You also have started Citadel Securities, which is a global market maker. I always thought that market makers were people like NASDAQ or exchanges. How does somebody start a market maker? And you operate all over the world, including here?
Ken Griffin: We do. We operate in every major country around the world. The exchanges are where buyers and sellers come together. But market makers are responsible for the intermediation of demand in real time. So at any moment in time when a seller arrives the market, there's a good chance there's no natural buyer. And the role of the market maker is to provide liquidity at that moment in time. And we do that in equities, in options, in fixed income, for over thousands of clients around the world.
David Rubenstein: Okay. John, Blackstone started as, initially, as I guess, an advisory firm, but did buyouts for quite a while, and still does them of course. Has the buyout market peaked in essentially it's hard to get deals financed, hard to find big deals. And are you shifting your firm away from buyouts to other areas now?
Jon Gray: No, I don't think the buyout business has peaked. There's a cyclicality to the business, as you're aware. And that happens when you're in an environment like this where transaction activity goes down, where it's harder to get financing. That's an environment where you see less deals getting done. But what private equity does is, essentially, help transform and grow businesses. And incentivizes management teams, provides valuable capital for companies to grow, really creates great alignment. And that function and that ability to generate excess returns for our customers, that continues. Now, we've grown what we do in private assets, obviously, we have an enormous private credit business, real estate business, infrastructure, we serve a large variety of clients. That's all change. But the basic business, although a little bit slower today, we still think we'll grow a lot over time.
David Rubenstein: Ken, you run a gigantic hedge fund, as I mentioned. How do you deal with geopolitical risk? Do you have a geopolitical risk assessment team that tells you what crises are likely to occur? And when a crises does occur, do you have people giving you reports hourly or daily on what's going on in the Middle East or in Russia, Ukraine, how that's gonna affect the markets?
Ken Griffin: So, we use a broad array of outside advisers and consultants. To have a idea about geopolitical risk, you need to have people on the ground in all the major countries around the world. That relies on having a really informed network of experts. For most of our business, the geopolitical risk that makes the headline stories does not impact our portfolio. But then, when you see a war in the Ukraine, which puts all energy supplies into Europe, in risk, at jeopardy, all of a sudden geopolitical risk becomes front and center in all of your risk taking decisions. So one must separate the headlines that drive the news cycle from the headlines like the Ukraine that actually drive the real economy in a very profound and important way.
David Rubenstein: So, Jon, I noticed that you have no gray hair. So, obviously, I guess the pressure of doing this is not so great. So is the fun of running a global private equity, private investment firm, as challenging as I thought it was, or not so tough?
Jon Gray: I would say, and you know this well, it's a very challenging job. What's exciting about it is you get to think about some of these powerful trends that are out there. And so it's interesting when Ken talks about the geopolitics, one of the challenges with our business, managing $1tn+ of assets is, every day when something happens, it impacts a business and asset you own around the world. But, I think as investors, what you want to think about are these longer term trends. What's happening in digitalization and AI, what's happening in green energy, what's happening in life sciences, which countries are growing faster? Some of these big long term trends are very powerful, and back to the job, that's what I love about the job: trying to think about where is the world heading and how can we deploy capital against that?
David Rubenstein: So, Ken, I assume people want to go work at your firm. How many people apply a year to work at Citadel and how many do you take? And what kind of--for those who have children who might be watching here--or maybe people who want to work in Citadel themselves--what are you looking for in the people you hire? High IQ, high work quotient, they wear a tie, what do they have to do?
Ken Griffin: Well, if wearing a tie was a job requirement, we'd have a really tough time finding candidates. We've got about 100,000 college applicants this year across North America, Europe, and Asia. These are from the best schools around the world. That's for about 300 spots, between our internship and full time program. So the bottom line is, it's really hard to get your kid a job at Citadel. Now, the good news is, there's 100,000 kids that want to work in a firm that's five days a week. So going back to your office portfolio, the younger members of our society want careers. They don't want just jobs, they want careers. And careers involve mentorship and apprenticeship, and you're not going to get that in a hybrid work world. And it makes me so happy to see so many young people around the world want to be back in an office five days a week. I think it's so important to have that collaborative culture, of mentorship, of apprenticeship, that drives innovation, increases productivity, and ultimately, for our team, allows us to deliver for our clients.
David Rubenstein: Do you require your people to come into work five days a week in the office or not?
Ken Griffin: We do. And we've been back for two years. And I think it's been a big part of our success story over the last two years, is that ability to work together as a team in a very complex, rapidly evolving world. We've seen more geopolitical crises in the last two years than, I mean, we've seen in our lifetime. And to have people together, collaborating together, responding together, has been a huge source of competitive advantage in these financial markets.
David Rubenstein: Okay. Jon, how do you deal with artificial intelligence? Will it be soon that you could just plug in an artificial intelligence algorithm and decide to do this deal or that deal?
Jon Gray: That might take a couple years. I would say, artificial intelligence has been something we--and I know Ken has--been working with for some time. It started with this predictive AI, which basically is put numbers in, numbers come out. So if you're looking at a company and you're thinking about do they have pricing power, you can look at historical data and then think about the future pricing, you can think about staffing levels, optimizing businesses. And that's probably been the place we've used them the most. And also in helping us on new deals, better understanding the companies. I think what's really powerful now, as we move to generative AI, that you can not only put in numbers, but pictures and videos and language. And you can start to transform businesses. So if you think about software companies, creative companies, media companies, really powerful. We own ancestry.com, the family history business. If you think about, over time, what that company could do, instead of just telling you your family arrived on this date and they moved here and this, they could do a video, they could have music, newspapers. So I think this is going to be very important for our businesses. I do think they're going to be important analytical tools for us in the alternative space. We've got 50+ people on our data science team, that's going to grow a lot. If you're going back to the job comment, I think being a data scientist is a very good way to get a job at an investment firm.
David Rubenstein: Ken, do you use artificial intelligence to make trading decisions?
Ken Griffin: Well, first of all, I think artificial intelligence is a huge overstatement. I have yet to find a computer that thinks. Now, having said that, we've been using machine learning for over a decade. And on any given day, we're about 25% of the turnover in the US equity market. And that's empowered by a very, very, very powerful set of predictive analytics, of which machine learning is a really important part. Now, one thing to keep in mind when it comes to generative AI or machine learning: it's all rooted in past patterns. That's how these models are trained, and the answers that they give reflect the history that has unfolded before the model was in fact trained. Why do I say this? Tell me about the retail strategy, the online, the mobile retail strategy, of your portfolio companies in 2003, before the advent of the iPhone. Nonexistent. And yet, if you go forward 10 years past the introduction of the iPhone, if you don't have a mobile strategy, you are probably becoming irrelevant as a retailer. And generative AI has no knowledge of this great transformation that was going to unfold. When the world changes, it's going to come down to the judgment calls of people to allocate capital wisely and astutely. Generative AI has a number of really important and powerful uses--we use it every single day to help make our software engineers more productive--but in investing capital, going back to your early commentary, we're thinking about longer term trends that have yet to emerge, or have yet to have played out. And we want to capitalize on that. That's outside the scope and capabilities of generative AI.
David Rubenstein: So, Ken, you make an enormous amount of trades, I assume, for Citadel every day. But do you have to approve, personally, all the trades? Or do you have to approve them above a certain level? And like today, who's doing the trading when you're here?
Ken Griffin: So, we'll do, on any given day, about 25-30mn transactions. That's a pretty typical day at Citadel. And fortunately, I'm not involved in all but a fraction, a fraction of a basis point, per day. And the reason I'm involved in so little is that we have a very strong belief that the person closest to the information should make the decision. We hold people accountable and responsible for their decision making. That's how we grow leaders. That's how we grow what is one of the strongest investment teams in the world, is all the power is not held at the top, it's held at the frontline where people are best informed. Now, of course, I'm looking at the aggregate risks that we accumulate across our portfolio. We're late in the economic cycle. I want to make sure we're thoughtful about how much exposure we have to cyclicals, or how much exposure we have to illiquid assets. So I'm thinking about these big picture issues. But day in and day out, my colleagues closest to the information are making the right decisions in real time.
David Rubenstein: So if you make a trade and it doesn't seem to work out right away, do you get rid of it right away? Or you blame somebody else? Or you take the blame yourself? How does that work?
Ken Griffin: Well, so actually... actually, people who blame exogenous events or others are people who don't learn and grow. And those are people who are not part of our team. If the buck doesn't stop on your desk, whether that's the junior person or my desk, then you're just not of the culture that we look for in people on Team Citadel. We look for people who, when they get it right, celebrate their successes, learn what they got right. When they get it wrong, internalize the mistakes, wonder about what we could have done better. And then from that vantage point, they become better investors of capital.
David Rubenstein: Okay. Jon, there has been some criticism that the large private equity firms, as they used to be called, now are in private credit in a major way. And the private credit--money that they're lending out--is not regulated in some ways. What is your response to the fact the federal government should come in and regulate what the private credit business is all about?
Jon Gray: Well, there's been a lot of discussion of that in the room today. I think the thing people don't necessarily see clearly is the idea that if you lend money as a financial institution, and I lend money at Blackstone, you might say those are the same thing. But the question is, how are they funded? So a bank, of course, involves pretty significant leverage. They're critical part of the financial system, but they're generally 10-12x leveraged with that. They have their deposits guaranteed as well. And the duration of a lot of that leverage are deposits that are pretty short term. If we're managing money for a state pension fund, and we go lend that money on an unleveraged basis, it's pretty hard to identify the risk embedded in that. Same thing if we're running a BDC that's 1x leverage. So I think it's important in the financial system to understand what's going on, but I think it's critically important to understand the funding source for credit, which is why I think this is actually healthy. It's one of the reasons why the US has been very competitive. Broad, deep capital market.
David Rubenstein: Ken, Ronald Reagan once famously said the most dangerous words in the English language are: "I'm from the federal government, I'm here to help you." So, do you agree with that general view that the federal government may not be as helpful sometimes in regulating financial service companies?
Ken Griffin: I mean, Reagan is, I think, almost everyone's hero for a reason. And I think he's got that statement just completely right in the context of the US financial system. Now, this doesn't mean that we haven't had regulatory missteps, we haven't had large financial institutions that have been undermanaged episodically. But one of the great virtues of the US capital markets is the diversity of capital sources, the diversity of investors, and the flexibility of our economy to allocate capital on a very rapid and reflexive basis. That's been a big part of the reason the United States has been the epicenter of so much innovation and new business formation over the course of the last 100 years. It's underpinned by the robustness of our capital markets. Regulation plays a really important role. Regulation should be in place to reduce systemic risk. And as James Gorman said, the regulators need to be focused on the right, big picture systemic risk issues--I'm paraphrasing your words. The 80,000 pages of the CCAR report tell you nothing. You want to stay focused on, Will this bank be able to get through a period of economic contraction and continue to provide credit to American consumers and businesses? Right now, I'm very perplexed by the regulatory agenda of the SEC. There's 50 meaningful rules in various forms of approval processes that will really diminish the flexibility of America's asset managers and capital markets. And I just don't understand it. The US capital markets have been such an incredible source of prosperity, job creation, and frankly, just success in America for the average American family. We should try to encourage capital formation, not discourage it.
David Rubenstein: Jon, the most predicted recession in all time is the one that we're predicting is going to happen but it hasn't happened yet. Are we going to have a recession soon? So people who predicted it can be seen as right?
Jon Gray: Well, I would say, the good news, I'd say, on the economy is, we definitely are seeing the inflation coming down, which is helpful. We see it in our portfolio in labor costs, the increases that are coming down, shelter costs not increasing in nearly the same rate. And also, to your point, there's been incredible resilience. Those are the two positive things out there. I think the challenge is, when you raise the cost of capital as dramatically as we have, up to 5.5% in the US, 4-ish percent in many other places around the world. Now the long end of the curve has also gone up. That's a real weight, for consumers, and for businesses, to borrow at 8%. It works its way through the system. I think we will see a slowdown. We've begun to see hiring at our companies be much more subdued. I don't see this as a sort of cliff, but as sequential decline. But to your point, do I think we'll see an increase in unemployment, slower rates of GDP growth, yes. But we do not have anything like the imbalances of '08, '09.
David Rubenstein: So the conventional wisdom in Washington--which many people say is almost always wrong--but the conventional wisdom in Washington, Ken, is that the Fed is done raising rates for the time being. Do you agree with that, or do you think the Fed might still raise rates?
Ken Griffin: So the wild card we don't know is the inflationary consequences of deglobalization. One of the huge benefits that both Jonathan and I have had in our careers, in our lifetimes--the peace dividend. I remember, when I started my business, was the end of the Cold War. And the second dynamic has been globalization, which has been an incredibly deflationary force for the entire 30 years that I've been in business. We don't know what a world looks like that involves deglobalization. How much does that increase inflation, just systemically, around the world? What does that mean in terms of monetary policy around the world? That's a giant wildcard. So for choice, I definitely agree with Jon that we're seeing inflation come down right now. What we don't know is where does it land in this world of supply chains that are being radically changed around the world. And then, with respect to the recession, our best view is sometime mid next year, we're likely to see a slowdown in the back of these higher real rates. It's taking a bite out of the economy, in particular, the private sector. The counterfactual to this is the US government is on a profligate spending spree. We're gonna run a deficit this year of about $2tn, the United States. That's pulling forward consumption into the here and now at the expense of future generations.
David Rubenstein: So, Ken, your firm has invested a fair bit in China, and I think yours has as well. Ken, are you investing more in China? Are you worried about China's growth? How do you assess China right now as a place in which to invest?
Ken Griffin: Well, I think big picture, you could have been an investor in the United States at almost any point over the last 100 years, had solely a domestic investment portfolio, and have done extraordinarily well. The world's changed. There's much more innovation outside of the United States relative to 50 years ago. I was--this morning I was with one of the prominent Chinese business leaders. The management teams in China are extraordinarily capable. They produce extremely competitive products on the global stage. They lead in many areas that are important to the world: solar, EVs. These are really important competitive advantages that exist in China. Companies, great management teams, great products. If you're a global investor, you've got to be watching and investing here in China.
David Rubenstein: Jon, in your current position, I assume you deal with regulators and administrators all the time. Do you find that an uplifting experience to go talk to them about convincing them about your point of view of things, or not so uplifting?
Jon Gray: I'm only going to say positive things about those experiences.
David Rubenstein: Okay, so you like that part of your job.
Ken Griffin: And I'm going to make sure all my future meetings are with him, then. We can go together to Washington if these are your experiences.
David Rubenstein: So, Jon, how has the large global private equity firm that's publicly traded evolved in the last 10, 20 years or so?
Jon Gray: Well, the business is, as you know extremely well, having created one of these firms, was pretty narrow. I mean, we were basically in high octane strategies in private equity, real estate private equity, and distressed credit. We were trying to produce 20 gross, 15 net. And we had a small number of customers. And when you look today, you've seen a real evolution of the business model. We've expanded who we serve--insurance clients, individual investors have grown to be almost a quarter of what we do. Many more institutional investors. And we've moved down the sort of risk return spectrum into things like direct lending to companies, asset backed finance, infrastructure, lower returning core plus real estate. And so the total available market is much larger for what we do today. And we continue to see this migration from all sorts of pools of capital towards alternative assets, because of the return premiums that have been generated.
David Rubenstein: Ken, you were trading securities when you were an Harvard undergraduate--despite the fact Harvard probably didn't like that. And then you ultimately went to Chicago, built Citadel there. And then, last year, I guess it was, you move Citadel from Chicago, after many, many years, to Florida. So, why did you move your entire firm headquarters to Florida?
Ken Griffin: That's a great story. Because in the pandemic, what you saw was that people moved all over the world. And we put a number of people in Palm Beach in the Four Seasons during the pandemic so we could run our trading floor during the height of the pandemic. We could trade the entire US equity market, if need be, from the Four Seasons Palm Beach. Now, why did I talk about people moving around the world? My colleagues who went to Florida during the pandemic said, Why don't we just stay here? And today, Miami is the headquarters for Citadel. And virtually the entire senior management team from Chicago moved to Miami. Now, note, here out of Hong Kong, we had people scatter across Asia back to countries that they were from originally, so on so forth. They've come back to Hong Kong. It's a real statement about the quality of life that Hong Kong offers, and about the attractiveness of Hong Kong's as an international finance center.
David Rubenstein: So, Ken, in the United States, you are one of the largest philanthropists, I think it's fair to say. For people are listening here or listening elsewhere, how do you decide where to give your money away?
Ken Griffin: So, we look at a number of considerations and how we allocate our charitable giving. But first and foremost is the impact on humanity. Like first and foremost, education is top of my list. I really believe that the American Dream is paved by the on ramp of education. And education in the United States has been struggling over the last 50 years. In Illinois, the state that we left, there are 53 schools without a single child who performs at grade level. That's 53 schools full of children who will never experience the American Dream. And one of the areas that I think we need to focus on in the United States is being far more competitive in educating our children. We live in a globally integrated economy, and if our education is not at the very top of the charts, we're going to struggle to be competitive with the rest of the world over the decades to come.
David Rubenstein: Hey, John. In your case, you're also very involved in philanthropy, and particularly cancer research. Why are you so actively involved there?
Jon Gray: Unfortunately, my wife lost her sister to ovarian cancer related to a BRCA gene mutation, which leads to much higher levels of breast and ovarian cancer and some other types of cancer. And so our thought was, if we dug really deep in that area, we can make a difference. We created a center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Basser Center, named after my sister-in-law, and it's been amazing in terms of talking about what's changing the world, what's happening in life sciences. The advances today, because of genomics and big data--the intersection of those two things--I think it's going to change the world in a profound way. We've become really encouraged about what's happening in this area.
David Rubenstein: Ken, you're a very large political donor in the United States. And you've been interested in public policy--have you ever thought of running for President of the United States yourself? Or you're too young?
Ken Griffin: Well, I mean, David, given who the frontrunners are today, I think this question is right in about 25 years.
David Rubenstein: Okay, all right. Okay, so not right--
Ken Griffin: I might not remember the question if you ask me in 25 years.
David Rubenstein: 25 years. Okay. All right. So Jon, you're not running for anything are you?
Jon Gray: No plans. I like my day job.
David Rubenstein: Okay, so, when you're hiring people at Blackstone, what's the best way to get a job there? Be very smart, good grades, know somebody--what's the best way to get a job there?
Jon Gray: Well, the numbers are similar to what Ken described. Incredibly competitive. Obviously, you've got to be smart, you've got to be hardworking, shown some resilience in what you've done. We love to find people who've been on athletic teams or organizations where they've worked together. As you know, this investing business, particularly in the private space, is a team sport. So you want somebody who cares a lot, works hard, but works well with other people.
David Rubenstein: Ken, you've built your--go ahead.
Ken Griffin: To add to that, for just one moment. We look for those same traits--and I know you do also--we look for people who are really good communicators. The power of ideas is what drives investment portfolios, and people who are really good communicators have an [on-do] ability, a much greater ability to influence outcomes in our capital allocation. So we look for resilience, because every single person who commits capital is going to make mistakes. You have to pick up, get back on your feet. A little statistic: our equity portfolio managers, adjusted for the market factors that they take exposure to, are right 52% of the time, give or take. That means you're wrong 48% of the time. Could you imagine, like, going to a brain surgeon who said, like, 52% my patients--
David Rubenstein: Hey, so, final question. What is the greatest thrill of what you've done in your career? What do you most enjoy about having built Citadel from nothing, from scratch? Other than this panel kind of opportunity that you're on now.
Ken Griffin: So, I mean, unequivocally, the greatest satisfaction in my career is working with the people that I work with. I work with an incredibly bright group of people. Every single day, I learned something at Citadel. That's number one. Number two: impact matters. And I know that in the start of the pandemic in the United States, we played a very critical role in helping to coordinate between the private sector and government on issues like accelerating trials with the FDA for experimental treatments. And ultimately, Operation Warp Speed, which probably saved half a million American lives, came from my team at Citadel. It's one of the greatest successes, I would say, in my career, is to be part of that group that took to the Washington the concept of what became Operation Warp Speed.
David Rubenstein: Final word?
Jon Gray: Well, I would just say as it relates to me and my experience, I agree with Ken's. The people you work with, the impact you have--when you're managing capital, you're working for the police officers, firefighters, the retirees--you're trying to make a difference. And then trying to help grow companies. I mean, what we did it at Hilton Hotels and some of the other businesses to help them expand globally, to create opportunity, to create some wealth for other people, and to do it in a team sport and feel a real sense of pride, that's a lot of fun. So I feel very blessed in what I get to do.
David Rubenstein: We're out of time. Thank you both for a very interesting conversation. Thank you.
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