CEO of Citadel Ken Griffin is interviewed Chairman of the Milken Institute Michael Milken (not pictured) during the Milken Institute Global Conference 2025 in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 7, 2025.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin on Thursday knocked the Trump administration for making deals with large corporations to avoid the full extent of its tariff policies, describing such agreements as anti-American.
“Is that our country, that we’re going to favor the big and the connected?,” Griffin told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in an exclusive interview from Miami. “That’s not the American story.”
“When the state becomes involved in picking winners and losers, there’s only one way this game ends: All of us lose,” added Griffin, a billionaire and top Wall Street figure.
Griffin’s comments come as U.S. companies have raced to make agreements with the White House that allow them to avoid the steepest levies placed on imports from many foreign countries. Multiple well-known businesses including Apple and Nvidia have announced significant domestic investments in recent months, which have been viewed by some as ways to gain favor from the Trump administration.
“I spoke about my concerns with the crony capitalism if we went down the path of tariffs,” Griffin said. “The line outside the White House of every business arguing why they should be exempt from paying tariffs on what they import into their products is nauseating.”
The Wall Street bigwig said tariffs can be considered similar to a “national sales tax.” Because the levies would make up a higher proportion of household income for lower earners, Griffin said there are “issues of equity and fairness” involved with Trump’s tariff policy.
Griffin warned that companies should act carefully when it comes to trying to win favor of a current White House team. He said those companies could find themselves disliked or having to make new deals when a new person takes the nation’s highest office.
“It’s the government’s engagement in picking winners and losers. And we should tread carefully on that water,” Griffin said. “In fact, we should just stay out of it. That’s where the crocodiles live.”
“The core competency won’t be that you can drive innovation,” he added. “It’s that you can drive the right favors from D.C.”