Letter #330: Ken Griffin, Robyn Grew, Michael O'Leary, and David Rubenstein (2026)

Citadel Founder, Man Group CEO, Ryanair CEO, and Carlyle Founder | Leading with Vision and Resilience

*KG Note

I am in San Francisco for the next month. If you are around and would like to try and grab a coffee/meal, go for a walk, or play tennis, please reach out (email; twitter) — especially if you’re a founder or at a foundation, endowment, or family office.

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Intro

More on this newsletter here.

Today’s letter is the transcript of a panel with Ken Griffin, Robyn Grew, and Michael O’Leary, moderated by David Rubenstein.

Short Bios

Ken Griffin is the Founder and CEO of Citadel.

Robyn Grew is the CEO of Man Group.

Michael O’Leary is the CEO of RyanAir.

David Rubenstein is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Carlyle Group.

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Transcript

David Rubenstein: Robyn, you are the CEO of Man Group, right?

Robyn Grew: Correct.

David Rubenstein: And you’re not a man, right?

Robyn Grew: I—so, I, well, since I last looked, yeah.

David Rubenstein: And you’re the first woman to be the CEO of Man Group in 250 years or something like that.

Robyn Grew: Something like that, yeah.

David Rubenstein: So, how did you get to that job?

Robyn Grew: Yeah, determination. How did I get to that job? One, I worked there for a decent amount of time. Two, I’ve held lots of different roles. And I’ve got lots of war wounds to show for it. I was the best person for the job when it came open.

David Rubenstein: Okay. And the best person for the job always gets the job.

Robyn Grew: I like to think so.

David Rubenstein: Okay. Ken, your firm has been extraordinarily successful in everything it’s touched. But in the Great Recession of ‘07-’08, you came very close to not being that successful. Were you ever worried that you weren’t going to survive in the ‘07-’08 period?

Kenneth Griffin: So, ‘07, no, ‘07 was actually a phenomenal year for us. But there was a day in ‘08, I remember getting in the elevator at home and saying, “Literally, I hope when I come back we’re still in business.” CNBC had a van parked outside of our four walls trying to get that bankruptcy footage. So, it was a tough 16 weeks in 2008. The good news is history’s written by the winners. We’ve had a great run since 2008, and that moment has largely become a footnote in our history, but one that I’ll never forget.

David Rubenstein: Michael, you’re identified as the CEO for a long time of Ryanair, but you didn’t start Ryanair. Mr. Ryan started it. Had you not been working for him, do you think you would ever have wound up in some capacity like your job you have now? Did you have the personality you have now before, or did you grow it as you were running this airline?

Michael O’Leary: Was I always deformed personality? Probably. I was educated by Christian Brothers and then Jesuits, so it was a miracle I survived that. Would I be in the airline industry? No. I would hopefully have gotten a job in a proper functioning industry where you could make money like Kenny. But unlike Robyn, in my case, I got the job in Ryanair because nobody else wanted it. The Ryans had set up Ryanair at the start of EU deregulation back in 1987. They wanted to compete with Aer Lingus on the Irish-UK routes, and they lost 20 million in three years, and the thing was going bust.

I was this bright young guy coming out of college, had my accountancy degree. I was actually very quiet, reticent; I never wanted the publicity. Eventually, they ran out of chief executives. There was nobody left to run the bloody place. So I was sent in to just staunch the losses. “Do whatever you want and do whatever you want to do.” My first recommendation was, “Close this turkey. It’s never going to make money. It’s doomed to fail. This industry is for the birds.” Tony, thankfully, sent me off to see Southwest in the States at the time when Herb Kelleher was doing what he did so well in Austin, Texas. He was a legend, and he was the guy who created the low-fare industry.

I was sent off to see him, and I have this legendary dinner with Herb Kelleher. What do I remember at the dinner with Herb Kelleher? Absolutely nothing. He was at the time about 65; I was about 26. He drank me under the table before the starters had even got there. But I saw Southwest. I came from Europe, where everything was slow. A plane would drive in, and an hour and 15 minutes later, turn around, because the pilots had to have a smoke, and the cabin crew had to have a whinge, and everybody had to call their union to see whether they were feeling like going out on the next flight of the day. This thing arrived, it was like a Formula 1 pit stop. Aircraft in, everybody on it. Aircraft out, gone.

It was pretty clear if you could turn planes around in 15 or 20 minutes instead of an hour and 15 minutes, you’d get two more, three more free flights per day per aircraft. So, that’s where it all came from. It was the combination of Tony Ryan’s stupidity in setting up an airline, but Herb Kelleher’s vision in saying you can actually run a very efficient airline, which is the key to Ryanair’s success.

David Rubenstein: Now, earlier you mentioned a couple of times safety as being an exception to some things, but sometimes people would say, “Well, if it’s a low-cost airline, maybe they’re going to scrimp on safety.” How can you assure people you’re not scrimping on safety?

Michael O’Leary: You can’t. But ultimately, we’ve now been doing this for about 35 years. We have the youngest, newest fleet of aircraft in Europe. We have a fleet of 650 Boeing 737s. We bought them all new. We own them all. They’re not owned by some bloody leasing company. So, we own them all. Depreciation only charge. We have no debt on the balance sheet. We train all our own pilots. We have 16 simulator centers. We do all our own aircraft maintenance in-house, and we’re about to take the engine maintenance in-house as well.

The best you can do is you point to your record over 35 years. Certainly, in our first 15 or 20 years, it was a bit cheap, and they’d say, “They don’t do the maintenance.” I think that’s disappeared. But you’re only as good as today. We do 3,500 flights a day. We’ll carry 700,000 people today. Today we have to do everything safely. Tomorrow we have to do everything safely. It always makes me worry statistically, the bigger and bigger and bigger we get. I always worry statistically, you’re likely to have a screw-up somewhere along the way. But so far, for 35 years, we’ve managed to avoid it.

David Rubenstein: Okay, Ken, many people don’t realize you operate two big businesses. One is the most profitable hedge fund ever, Citadel, but you have a separate business, Citadel Securities. What is Citadel Securities, and why did you start that business when you already had a very profitable hedge fund?

Kenneth Griffin: Citadel Securities is one of the largest market makers in the world. In fact, we trade about 25% of the US equity turnover every day. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we’ve averaged about a trillion dollars a day in turnover. So, it is a firm that is at the center point of liquidity around the world. It is powered by world-class technology, great predictive analytics, and a really brilliant management team. So, it shares much of the same DNA as the hedge fund side of the house: great people, great technology, great analytics. It’s very much similar to what we do in the hedge fund in terms of the culture and ethos, but we do it with a very different commercial intent.

David Rubenstein: There’s a story that might be apocryphal. Many stories about people who are famous have apocryphal background stories. One of the apocryphal background stories about you is that when you were in college, you got Harvard University to allow you to set up an antenna that would receive stock quotes so as a student, you could trade stock. Is that true?

Kenneth Griffin: It was a satellite dish, actually. I was updating my Xbox with my son next to me, and he was about 13—he’s 18 now—he looked at me and said, “Dad, you were alive before the internet!” Back in the 80s, there was no internet. Stock quotes were actually hard to get. So, I had a satellite dish on top of the dorm room. The cable actually came through a fourth-floor window, down an unused elevator shaft, and into my room. That gave me access to real-time prices from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

David Rubenstein: And it worked.

Kenneth Griffin: It worked.

David Rubenstein: And if you hadn’t done that, or if your early trades had not worked, would you be doing something more important, like being a lawyer or something?

Kenneth Griffin: I’d be doing private equity, David.

David Rubenstein: Right. Okay. Well, there’s no higher calling than private equity, of course.

Michael O’Leary: You’re chasing girls around the college dorm, David.

David Rubenstein: Robyn, you’re a publicly traded hedge fund.

Robyn Grew: Yeah.

David Rubenstein: Most hedge funds are privately owned. Why are you publicly owned, and what’s the advantage of being publicly owned in the hedge fund world?

Robyn Grew: Well, not my choice, by the way. I haven’t sat in that seat. It’s been roughly 35 years of listing. So, the advantages are: everybody knows what’s going on at Man Group. There is nothing to hide. In those quarterly updates that we do that Michael looks so forward to, we are completely transparent. Clients like that institutionally. If you’re going to be in a space where people are looking at you and saying, “Hang on a second, are these people who we want to do business with?” Sometimes there’s an advantage to having to tell everybody what’s going on in your firm every quarter. So, that’s an advantage.

David Rubenstein: You came to this firm largely as a lawyer and as a compliance officer.

Robyn Grew: Yeah.

David Rubenstein: Usually compliance officers are people who tell you, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” How did you go from—

Robyn Grew: Didn’t say I was a good compliance officer.

David Rubenstein: People telling you you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you usually don’t rise up to be the CEO. So, were you not that good a compliance officer?

Robyn Grew: I believe that sometimes the best people to understand risk are the people who want to take the risk as well. If you sit my executive team down, they’ll probably tell you that perhaps the person with the highest risk tolerance in the organization is me. That’s something that either I’ve grown up on because I was a litigator, I guess in American terms, or a barrister if you go back to the UK. So, I’m an advocate. I understand risk. I’ve grown up in risk. I’ve run towards risks when sensible people have run away from them. And that makes my understanding of risk management, which is what we do all day, what we deliver all day, quite acute. So, no, it’s not usual. Was I a terrible compliance officer? I’m not going to—I don’t think I was terrible, but I understand risk.

David Rubenstein: Okay, Michael. Not long ago, you said that you wanted to charge people to go to the bathroom on your planes. Did that plan ever work, and why were people so upset about that? Couldn’t they go for 45 minutes without going to the bathroom if they didn’t want to pay?

Michael O’Leary: This is one of the great free stories that keeps on giving. I did an interview with some BBC news journalists about 25 years ago. I think we were talking about something else, taking seats out and putting sand in cabins, like the tube in London where they’d be hanging on to the rails. And she said, “What’s next? Are you going to charge for toilets?” I said, “Yeah, we have a team working on that at the moment.” And you know, if we could take out the two toilets at the back, we could put in six seats, and six seats would mean 4% lower fares. It still comes back every 25 years: “You’re the guy who wants to charge for toilets on board planes.” There is actually a theory in it, we won’t do it, but if you could take out two of the loos, only have one toilet left, and charge for it, you look at the extent to which people obsess about not paying for our baggage fees on board.

People pack up and weigh their scales in their bathrooms, saying, “I’m not going to pay bloody Ryanair for the bag.” They’d do the same thing with the toilet as well on board, and we could put extra seats on the plane, and with extra seats, we’d be able to charge lower airfares. But we’re not going to do it.

David Rubenstein: You talked about once about charging extra for people overweight.

Michael O’Leary: No, no, we were very good. We actually never did that one because it wouldn’t make—

David Rubenstein: Don’t give him ideas. Never mind.

Michael O’Leary: That actually came out of the States. I think, with respect, quite a lot of physically challenged people. The Europeans are a bit slimmer, although because we’re paying so much stupid environmental taxation over here. No, we’ve never planned to. Aircraft weights are done on average weights for adults and children, so it would make no difference anyway.

David Rubenstein: You have a good business in Europe. Why don’t you just take that business to the United States? Why don’t you go to the United States?

Michael O’Leary: Because that is where the culture starts to go wrong. You believe in your own success. This we work very well in Europe because we have pretty much incompetent competition in Europe: Lufthansa, Air France, KLM, and these guys run by incompetent European government-owned airlines. The US airlines are a bit more aggressive. They are much stronger and much more well embedded. The minute we and our management team says, “This has worked great in Europe, let’s go all off to America, California or Florida, and we can run an airline over there,” they’ll all be out the door to go to the sunshine. I mean, if you’ve spent any winter in Ireland, everybody wants to get the hell out of the place.

So, that would be a distraction. The other—I mean, I think Kenny’s demonstrated over many years in Citadel: zealous focus on your business. Do not get distracted. I don’t want to go to—Europe is a deregulated market. The only good thing about Europe is it is a deregulated market for air travel. So, thankfully, I get very little government interference. The minute I go outside of Europe—to the Middle East, to Asia, to the US—it is hugely government regulated, and the States is already a reasonably well-run market, although it’s quite expensive. It wouldn’t work because it would undermine Ryanair, because we’d all get distracted.

David Rubenstein: Now, you were trained as an accountant, but usually the accountants I know are low-key, very boring people. How did you get this personality as an accountant?

Michael O’Leary: Firstly, a lot of people question whether I was trained or even trainable. I did pass the exams, but only barely. I grew up on a farm. So, I’m a farm boy. We learned how to work hard. I always—if I came through accountancy, I didn’t—I wanted to be very quiet and retired. I don’t like the publicity. But I recognized when I got into Ryanair, we had no money for advertising. So, it had to do something. Branson at the time was running around getting all the cheap publicity. Herb was very good in the States as well. So, the obvious thing to do was, “Okay, you can’t be successful here if you’re going to be a quiet as a mouse accountant. So, let’s reinvent now.” Remember, the Irish are generally good at being brash bullshitters. So, there is a gene in all of us where we just talk a lot of rubbish, and we’re very good at talking lots of rubbish. In fact, we’ve built generations on it.

David Rubenstein: Would you hire an accountant with your personality?

Michael O’Leary: Would I hire an accountant? Well, thankfully, I have much more sensible people hiring accountants than the likes of me. You’re not doing that. I would hire people—I mean, I look at CVs. Kenny looks at CVs. He gets these smart students out of Harvard. I want people if they grew up on a farm, they’re in the door straight away. The thing I look for is not what your degree was, but what summer jobs did you do during your holidays from school and from college? If you worked hard and you went out, you got part-time jobs, those are the people I want working in Ryanair. I want people who work hard. Brains? It’s the airline industry. We don’t need a lot of brains, and we don’t need very bright intellects because it’s a stupid industry anyway.

David Rubenstein: Ken, recently the mayor of New York pointed out that you had bought an apartment in New York, and he wanted you to pay a so-called “Pied-à-terre tax,” even though you have employed thousands of people in New York, you’re building a new building in New York, you’re contributing a lot of tax money to New York. Did that upset you?

Kenneth Griffin: What upset me was the personal attack. We were—you were at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday where they tried to assassinate the president, and not too far from where I live in New York is where they assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. So, I think the willingness of the Mayor of New York to make this a policy debate, a personal attack, just demonstrated a profound lack of judgment. Just a profound lack of judgment. I understand that New York has bills to pay.

David Rubenstein: Would you like to run New York for us for a couple of years?

Michael O’Leary: I’m unelectable, Kenny. Nobody would vote for me.

Kenneth Griffin: Yes, but you’d actually be a distraction from running—

David Rubenstein: Are you going to, Ken, are you going to go ahead with your building in New York?

Kenneth Griffin: Well, I’m meeting with the governor Thursday.

David Rubenstein: Okay, you’ll figure it out.

Kenneth Griffin: And we’ll talk about our future direction in New York. Here’s the real question: Is New York going to put its fiscal house in order and run itself from a position of a strong government that’s pro-business, or are they looking to play like—why do the Americans think we can do socialism? We have none of that in our DNA, and we’re just going to screw it up.

David Rubenstein: Ken, you are a very large, maybe the largest, donor in the United States of various political candidates, and you’ve met many of these political candidates. You’re probably smarter than all of them. Why don’t you just run for president yourself? Have you ever thought of that?

Kenneth Griffin: Didn’t you just say I was smarter than all of them? I mean, David, what a nightmarish job these people sign up for.

David Rubenstein: To be the president of the United States, you wouldn’t want to do that job?

Kenneth Griffin: If you could snap your fingers and be in the Oval Office, of course, I’d love to do that job. That would be such a—I love solving problems, but it’s not that simple. You’ve got to go through a campaign cycle, which is just the most humiliating and degrading process in American society.

David Rubenstein: You’re also a very large donor to lots of charitable causes. How do you deal with people coming to you every hour on the hour for charitable contributions?

Kenneth Griffin: I do. I’ve got two outstanding people that take care of it. My job is to manufacture money. We spoke about that early on. I’ve got my investment team. I focus on the business as much as I possibly can. I’ve got great people around me who are involved in our philanthropic efforts, who are involved in our political efforts. They know the values that are important to me. They know the key objectives that we’re trying to obtain, like how do we educate American children to be the future leaders of the free world? But my day in and day out, it’s about driving the returns for our shareholders.

David Rubenstein: The US hasn’t had a recession for more than 10 years, a technical, more than a technical recession. Usually, we have them every seven years or so. Are you worried about a recession, in part because of the war in Iran or anything else coming to the United States?

Kenneth Griffin: The business cycle has not been banned. We both know this. Everybody in this room knows this. The business cycle has not been banned. We’re going to have a recession around the world at some point in the foreseeable future. What worries me is not the fact that we’re going to have a recession. It’s that we’re losing the fiscal space to engage in countercyclical spending to keep the economy on the strongest possible footing. Frankly, if there were a panic in the credit quality of the leading sovereign debts around the world—the US, it happened in the UK just about 18 months ago, wasn’t it Liz Truss’s moment?

Robyn Grew: 10 days.

Kenneth Griffin: 10 days of excitement. Yep.

David Rubenstein: I mean, terrifying, is it not, as a risk manager?

Robyn Grew: Yeah.

Kenneth Griffin: Right. So, the key is the Western world has to put its fiscal house in order so that we have more flexibility and more capacity in the next downturn to keep people employed, to keep our businesses going, to keep our economies as strong as possible when they’re under duress.

David Rubenstein: Okay, Robyn, this week in the United States, the King of England is visiting the President. You’re a British citizen.

Robyn Grew: I am.

David Rubenstein: What do you want to have the King get out of those meetings? Many people in England focused on that, and why send the King, why not send the Prime Minister to meet with the President of the United States?

Robyn Grew: It’s great when you’re asked to speak about why the King is doing something anyway. I saw on social media—I do that thing—interviews with the American general population about, “Did you know the King and the Queen are coming?” A lot of them said, “Not really, and I’m not sure why.” When asked what they should do, the American population, these folks on social media, said they recommended certain burger joints that they could go and visit, which I thought was very useful.

In the UK, when asked, there were at least five interviews where people felt sorry for the King having to do this visit because what were they going to do? And how predictable or unpredictable is that conversation? How meaningful is it going to be? I have to say I haven’t spent much time thinking about what I think the King should be doing. I strangely am a little like you; I’m focused on what we’re supposed to be doing every day, which is returning value to clients. Nevertheless, these are difficult times, and what we need is sense and stability, and some version of how we find solutions and things. If the King can add to that debate, terrific. But I don’t think I’d be holding my breath.

David Rubenstein: Let’s suppose I have some money and I want to invest in Man Group, and I say, “I don’t really know much about investing, but I’m going to give you, I don’t know, $100,000.” What kind of rate of return could I expect to get if I went into a reasonably safe but hopefully profitable investment that you would get to buy from me?

Robyn Grew: Number one, let me just explain, Man Group deals with institutions, and we don’t deal directly with wealth and retail. So, I’m just being mindful that somebody doesn’t ring up the phone at the end of this. Number two, it depends on what you’re after at the moment. I think if we really think about wealth portfolios right now, what worries me, or what I think about a lot, is whether wealth and retail are having the access to diversified portfolios that they should have to try and weather the storms of this volatility that we’re seeing in markets.

So, with $100,000, it depends on where your risk profile is. It depends on how old you are, it depends on how much risk you want to take. It depends on whether you want to be in Europe or whether you want to be diversified. It depends on whether you want to lock your money up or not for a period of time. So, I think it depends on a bunch of questions in the middle of that. But the thing that worries me, or the things that I think we talk about a lot with the people in this room, is how do you navigate markets at the moment when you have such volatility and such dispersion if you want to go into something relatively flat and relatively safe.

David Rubenstein: In the hedge fund world, there seem to be many more men running hedge funds than women. Why do you think that is, and is that going to change anytime in our lifetime?

Robyn Grew: It’s an interesting question about whether the historical bunch of people who have gone into these careers are right. There’s a certain gendered nature to this. When we started looking at this years ago, we started to look at, “Hang on a second, what are we recruiting from?” And “Is there some bias in the pool?” Then we looked at the pool, and then we looked at universities, and we looked at who was taking the courses from whom we were hiring, and they were predominantly being populated by men. That is changing, but it’s changing slowly. And what you’re not going to do is find us clicking our fingers and finding different populations of gender makeup. We want the very best people to run money, and ultimately there is a little bit of bias in that, or a little bit of gendered nature in the pool of people. Would I like to see it change? For sure.

David Rubenstein: Michael, let’s suppose you want to go on a vacation outside of Europe. Would you fly another airline, and do you fly other airlines to find out what mistakes they’re making? And what airline do you think is the best next to Ryanair?

Michael O’Leary: I occasionally have to go to the States on investor road shows, David, to explain to investors like you, “Don’t put the hundred grand into Man; put it into Ryanair shares at a 22% discount year to date.” I mean, I fly whoever’s cheapest going across the Atlantic. That’s my only other kind of—

David Rubenstein: You don’t—when you fly for vacation with your family, you don’t fly first class on some other airline? You always want to be in coach?

Michael O’Leary: You know, I want to be on Ryanair. I want to be seen on Ryanair. The great thing about flying on Ryanair is I have to fly in rows three, four, or five, because if I’m up in the front row of seats, everything is some VIP nonsense. The great advantage of it, too, is when I’m flying with Ryanair, I’ll go up and pull the boarding cards at the boarding gate. Inevitably, I get about 25 Facebook pictures, and I appear on all these people’s feeds, so, “God, your man is up there doing cutting-edge, front-line, back-to-the-shop-floor kind of stuff.” No, actually, I’m going on the same flight as you, but it’s good for cheap PR.

David Rubenstein: Do you ever have complaints? Do you tell them right then and there, or do you—?

Michael O’Leary: I have lots of complaints, usually that I’m pulling the boarding passes too slowly, or I’m the reason the flight is going to get delayed. But I also run our complaints department, where we have a very prompt policy of responding to all complaints within 24 hours, usually with a polite “no.”

David Rubenstein: For most passengers, what’s the most important thing: price, safety, or getting there on time?

Michael O’Leary: Safety is, but I mean, assume that safety is a given, because without safety, you have nothing. 99.999% of passengers, when making a booking, want to know what’s the cheapest fare to XYZ. It is not availability, it is not destination, obviously route frequency. But 99.99%, which is why the internet has transformed air travel, and machine learning, which we had—they probably didn’t spend enough time—machine learning is going to transform it again for the next 10 or 20 years.

David Rubenstein: Okay. Ken, when you’re hiring people, do you want people who are high IQ, hard workers, good athletes? Somebody comes in front of you, they’re first in their class at Harvard, but they’re kind of nerdy and they don’t really talk very well. Do you hire them, or do you rather have an all-American athlete who looks great? What kind of people do you want to hire?

Kenneth Griffin: I need both. I need people who are that all-American athlete with a lot of charisma, a lot of leadership, and a lot of intellect because I need people who have the innate leadership skills that go with that. But I also need some of the people who are just wickedly smart, often a bit introverted, but we’ve got tough problems that need to be solved, and they know how to solve them.

David Rubenstein: Final question. What is the best sovereign wealth fund in the world in your view?

Michael O’Leary: I would have to say Norway, except they don’t have enough exposure to Ryanair. But we’re getting there. That’s why I’m back up in Oslo again and again and again, trying to persuade them to up-weight their investments.

David Rubenstein: All right, Ken, you have the same view on the best sovereign wealth fund?

Kenneth Griffin: This is an absolute no-win question for me. But I will say this: I will say that the fact that the leadership team of this Commonwealth fund is so committed to the betterment of the people of Norway is actually really touching. I think everyone should give a huge round of applause to Nicolai and his team for their commitment to bringing the best and brightest to this organization and their consistent focus on how to deliver for the people of Norway. It’s really quite remarkable.

David Rubenstein: Robyn, I assume you would have the same view. The best sovereign wealth fund that you invest with or that you’re with today.

Robyn Grew: What he said, plus because why say something when something’s been said so eloquently? Plus this: We all get better, all of us on the financial provision side, when we work with the smartest people in the world. So, there is nothing better than working with a team, an investor, a sovereign wealth, who make us better at what we do, and that’s what this team does.

David Rubenstein: Thank you all very much.