Howard Lutnick

Howard William Lutnick (born July 14, 1961 ) is an American billionaire businessman, who succeeded Bernard Gerald Cantor as the head of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Lutnick is the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Partners.

After losing 658 employees, including his brother, in the September 11 attacks, Lutnick survived the collapse of towers on the ground, and has become known for his charity efforts through the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which helps to aid families of the attacks and natural disasters.

Howard Lutnick was born to a Jewish family in Jericho, Long Island on July 14, 1961, the son of Solomon Lutnick, a history professor at Queens College and Jane Lutnick, an artist.

Lutnick was the middle child of the family, whose siblings were an elder sister Edie and a younger brother Gary.

In 1978, Lutnick was a senior in high school when his mother died of lymphoma.

The following year, Lutnick entered Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

During his first week at school, Lutnick's father died while in a hospital being treated for colon and lung cancers.

A nurse treating Lutnick's father accidentally gave him 100 times the dose of chemotherapy drugs that he was supposed to receive.

Now orphans, Lutnick and his two siblings were largely abandoned by extended family members and instead relied on themselves for support.

Lutnick, then 18, was forced to hire a lawyer to settle the debt his father left behind.

The president and dean of Haverford, an institution priding itself on a Quaker heritage, called Lutnick a week after his father's death and offered him a full scholarship for his education there.

Lutnick went on to graduate from Haverford in 1983 with a degree in economics.

Lutnick joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1983, the same year he graduated from college.

Early on, Lutnick developed a warm relationship with the firm's founder Bernard Cantor as his personal mentor.

In 1991, Lutnick was named president and CEO of the company, and he became chairman in 1996.

On December 10, 1994, Lutnick married Allison Lambert, a law associate at Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker.

Lutnick placed a high value on technology early on, and in 1999 made the decision to take eSpeed, an electronic trading subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald, public.

This electronic trading system required no brokers, and was a large part of the reason Cantor Fitzgerald was able to remain afloat when 70% of the brokers in their New York office, everyone who was in the office that morning, were killed in the September 11 attacks.

They have four children together, including sons Brandon and Kyle, whose first days of pre-school and kindergarten respectively fell on September 11, 2001.

Lutnick was dropping his son off at his kindergarten, which caused him to be late for work, thereby saving his life.

In 2004, Lutnick and then head of the London office Lee M. Amaitis decided to split Cantor Fitzgerald into two separate operations.

Cantor would continue handling big trades through stock and bond trading desks, while a newly formed BGC Partners would offer broker-driven trading.

This move enabled the two entities to grow independently of each other, but required Cantor to borrow $400 million in loans and go into debt for the first time as a company in order to properly fund BGC's initial growth.

In 2006, the firm donated $180 million to the relatives of their employees affected by the 9/11 attack.

In recent years, Lutnick has been featured in events and specials relating to September 11, including the documentary “Out of the Clear Blue Sky” by director Danielle Gardner.

In 2008, Lutnick oversaw the merger of BGC Partners and eSpeed, a deal valued at $1.3 billion.

Lutnick took the video platform Rumble public through a SPAC deal.

At the time of the September 11 attacks, Cantor Fitzgerald's offices occupied the 101–105th floors in the World Trade Center's North Tower, just above where a hijacked plane hit the building.

None of the employees who were in the Cantor offices that morning survived the attacks.

In total, 658 of Cantor's 960 employees died that day, including Lutnick's brother, Gary Lutnick.

Lutnick himself would have been in the office as well that morning, but on September 11 he was taking his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten.

He tried to reach the outskirt of the towers in hope of finding any Cantor staff making it out alive but failed.

He survived the collapse of South Tower by taking cover under a car nearby.

In a short time after the attacks, Lutnick made several public appearances, and quickly became one of the most iconic figures from September 11.

Because Cantor Fitzgerald lost two-thirds of its workforce, the company was in a vulnerable state, and many observers expected them to close.

Four days after the attacks, on September 15, Lutnick announced amid much controversy, that he would have to stop the paychecks of nearly 700 employees who were missing or had died.

In a televised interview with CNN's Larry King on September 19, Lutnick addressed the issue, saying “I lost everybody in the company… I don't have any money to pay their salaries.” In that same interview, Lutnick went on to say that while paychecks had been stopped, families of Cantor employees who had died in the attack would receive a 25% share of future Cantor profits for five years as well as health insurance for the next ten years.

Combined, this package totaled more than $100,000 for each family.

As of September 2018, Lutnick owns 60% of Cantor Fitzgerald, with a net worth of "at least $1.5 billion".