• Citadel CEO Ken Griffin's Stegosaurus fossil will be displayed at the American Museum of Natural History.
• Griffin purchased the fossil — dubbed Apex — for $44.6 million in July.
• The fossil is 150 million years old and nearly 80% complete.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin's Stegosaurus fossil has found a temporary home at the American Museum of Natural History.

The 150-million-year-old fossil known as "Apex" will be displayed at the Manhattan-based museum starting December 8. It will arrive at the American Museum of Natural History as part of a special loan from Griffin, who purchased it during a Sotheby's auction for $44.6 million in July.

Commercial paleontologist Jason Cooper discovered Apex in May 2022 at Morrison Formation near Dinosaur, Colorado. It is 11.5 feet tall, 27 feet long, and nearly 80% complete. Apex is thought to be the largest and one of the most complete Stegosaurus specimens discovered so far.

Sotheby's, which initially expected the fossil to go for about $6 million, said in a statement that Apex set off a "bidding battle" and was "the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction."

At the time, some paleontologists argued it shouldn't have been privately sold but rather used for educational purposes.

"We are thrilled to have Apex on view at the Museum and grateful to Ken Griffin for his commitment to sharing this magnificent specimen with the public and for partnering with our Museum to do so," Sean M. Decatur, President of the American Museum of Natural History, said in a press release.

The press release said Griffin's decision to loan the fossil will allow scientists in the museum's Division of Paleontology to study it as part of a new research initiative.

A representative for Griffin said he also provided sampling needed for scientific research and funding for educational programming. A postdoctoral fellow will also have the opportunity to research Apex alongside other Stegosaurus specimens.

"Apex offers a unique window into our planet's distant past, and I'm so pleased to partner with the American Museum of Natural History to showcase it at one of our country's preeminent scientific institutions," Griffin said in a statement to Business Insider. "I am grateful that millions of visitors and researchers will now be able to see and learn from this magnificent specimen of the Late Jurassic Period."

He added: "The joy and awe every child feels coloring a Stegosaurus with their crayons will now be brought to life for the millions of people who have the opportunity to see this epic dinosaur in person."

• Several of the world's power brokers gathered for a New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
• While Elon Musk was not in attendance, he was the most-talked-about person there.
• Here's what business leaders and politicians had to say about the richest person on Earth.

Several masters of the universe convened on Wednesday, and they had one name on their lips: Elon Musk.

At the annual New York Times DealBook Summit, the world's richest man was a topic of conversation among his fellow billionaires, CEOs, and political elite.

To be sure, Andrew Ross Sorkin, DealBook's founder and the day's MC, asked nearly all of his guests about Musk, who made headlines at the same summit last year for telling advertisers on X to "go fuck" themselves.

And while the Tesla CEO wasn't present this year, many conversations touched on his latest role. Over the past couple of months, Musk has become a political advisor and confidant to President-elect Donald Trump and one of his biggest donors, shelling out about $119 million to support his campaign.

The reaction to Musk's new role as co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency ranged from cautiously optimistic to not giving a damn.

Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager and GOP donor, praised Musk's entrepreneurial ability.

"He runs Tesla, he runs SpaceX at a level of excellence that very few companies can even start to relate to," Griffin said.

At the same time, he questioned just how much Musk could impact federal spending.

"He's going to have to hit the hard reality, the hard truth, that making cuts of any form whatsoever will be politically very unpopular," Griffin said. "It'll be very hard to squeeze numbers in the trillions of dollars out of the baseline budget."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been embroiled in a personal and legal feud with Musk, similarly praised the Tesla CEO's business acumen.

"At a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously," Altman said of his OpenAI cofounder.

While Altman acknowledged his feelings about Musk have changed, he said it would be unlike his former "mega hero" to use his political proximity for his own monetary gain.

"It would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses," Altman said. "It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself."

Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin is in direct competition with Musk's SpaceX, agreed that Musk's relationship with Trump was not that concerning.

"I take it face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors," Bezos said. "Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made are correct, that this is going to be done above board in the public interest."

And Sundar Pichai, the Alphabet CEO, said Musk's xAI artificial intelligence company is a formidable competitor "given Elon's track record."

Those interviewed with actual political experience — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and former President Bill Clinton — appeared the most unfazed by Musk's new position of power.

Powell seemed confident in the independence of the Fed, even though Musk has signaled support for moving the central bank under the president's command.

And Clinton seemed to almost entirely brush off Musk's burgeoning influence — including the fact that he was on a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"Trump's whole shtick is that all these rules and systems don't amount to anything," the former president said.

"Being the richest guy on Earth is far more important than anything else that you could be to him," Clinton added. "That's what he values. It's no big deal."

• Citadel's Ken Griffin is skeptical of Elon Musk's ability to cut trillions from the federal budget.
• Tesla CEO Musk has been tapped to run the proposed Department of Government Efficiency by Trump.
• Entitlement reform would be needed for the level of cuts Musk has called for, Griffin said Wednesday.

Billionaire Citadel founder Ken Griffin wants to get America's "fiscal house in order" but doesn't believe Elon Musk can do it alone.

Speaking at Wednesday's DealBook conference in New York, Griffin said it's unlikely that Musk, who has become a close advisor of President-elect Donald Trump and is set to co-run the proposed Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, will be able to cut the trillions he has called for without entitlement reform.

"Making cuts in any form or fashion will be very politically unpopular," said Griffin, who was one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party this election but declined to support Trump directly — though he said he voted for the real estate mogul.

Griffin — who paused for a couple of seconds when asked for his opinion about Musk's new task running Doge, prompting scattered laughs from a crowd that included fellow hedge-fund billionaire Dan Loeb and Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan — said the bond market could eventually become unsteady if there isn't a clean-up of the country's spending.

"To make Elon wear the entire burden of that responsibility is preposterous," he said.

Griffin, who lauded Musk's entrepreneurial abilities, also said he hopes the Federal Reserve will remain independent so it can make decisions too unpopular — but necessary — for politicians.

The wide-ranging interview between Griffin and New York Times editor and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that the billionaire hedge-fund manager does not think Trump's most explosive economic policies, such as his aggressive tariff proposals, will go into effect.

Last week, Trump posted about implementing tariffs on countries like Brazil and Russia that were considering creating a new currency to reduce the power of the US dollar. "It's not going to happen," he said, bluntly about Trump's recent warning.

Griffin said this is how negotiating is done in real estate, and he believes items like tariffs are a "second-order" issue.

"America is open for business," Griffin said repeatedly, and he pushed that throughout the interview. Gone, he said, is the "paralyzing regulation" of Joe Biden's administration, and executives are "smiling from ear-to-ear."

"For corporate America, it's a better world today than it was before the election," he said.

Griffin's $65 billion firm had a strong November, returning 1.8% in its flagship Wellington fund. Asked if there was still room in the investment industry for smaller funds and individual investors, Griffin said there's always going to be a dominant incumbent in any industry.

"When I started out, I had to go compete with Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs," he said.

Now, new launches compete with his firm and peers like Millennium and Point72.

"Your entrepreneurs find a way to make it happen," he said.

• The industry's biggest names were up despite choppy markets following Donald Trump's victory.
• Balyasny led the way among multistrategy firms, posting a 3.9% monthly gain.
• Firms like Citadel and Schonfeld continue to build on a strong year of returns.

The biggest names in hedge funds ended an up-and-down month in markets in the black.

Multistrategy managers overcame the volatility surrounding Donald Trump's electoral victory — when markets initially skyrocketed but then sold off briefly before rebounding — with firms like Balyasny, Schonfeld, and Citadel posting strong returns for the month.

Balyasny led the way among its peers with a 3.9% gain in November to bring the Chicago-based manager's 2024 returns to 11.6%, a person close to the manager confirmed.

Schonfeld meanwhile continued its strong streak for the year, returning 1.8% in its flagship fund. The New York-based manager is up 17.2% for the year, a person close to the firm said. Ken Griffin's Citadel was also up 1.8% last month in its Wellington fund, while Izzy Englander's Millennium made 2.2%.

The billionaires' firms are up 13.2% and 12.5%, respectively, on the year. Bloomberg previously reported on the firms' November returns.

While multistrategy managers' returns were dwarfed by those of macro managers like Rokos and Discovery Capital that took big swings on Trump's victory, their biggest selling point — steadiness in turbulent markets — was proven true in November.

See below for more performance data. Additional firms will be added as their numbers are learned. The managers declined to comment or did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

• Donald Trump said he would impose 10% to 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and China.
• Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman was a trade negotiator for Trump during his first term.
• In his book, he sheds light on what it took to get Trump, Trudeau, and others to the negotiating table.

Donald Trump has retaken the White House, and hefty trade taxes are back on the table, including tariffs of up to 25% on goods imported from Canada and Mexico and up to 10% on products from China.

In an effort to gain insight into how Trump's tariff agenda might play out, Business Insider turned to Blackstone cofounder and CEO Steve Schwarzman, who served as a behind-the-scenes trade negotiator for the Trump White House during his first term. Schwarzman declined to comment for this article but described his experiences as a trade advisor during the first Trump White House in his 2019 book, "What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence," published by Simon & Schuster.

In the book, he said he was tapped as a trade negotiator because he the trust of members of Trump's inner circle and connections to foreign leaders like China's Xi Jinping. Indeed, Schwarzman traveled to China eight times on behalf of the Trump administration, he said.

He described his meetings with Xi and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to help them understand Trump's motivations, as well as his discussions with Trump on the dangers of taking on too many trade deals at once. He suggested a key to getting the various parties to the negotiating table, including Trump, involved stressing the political risks of not cutting a deal.

The billionaire businessman also described his experiences advising US Presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama. Schwarzman, a Republican, said he is open to helping any US president, regardless of party, if he thinks it will help his country.

"When you take up any challenge laid down in Washington, you can never be certain of the outcome," he said. "But whether you succeed or fail, if the goal is to help your country, it is almost always worth doing."

Schwarzman, who declined an official role with the first Trump White House, declined to comment on whether he has been asked to advise Trump in his second term in office.

Schwarzman's relationship with Trump has had its ups and downs. After his book was published, the billionaire businessman distanced himself from Trump following the capitol riots in 2020, issuing a statement condemning the rioters and supporting the results of the election that removed Trump from office. During the Republican primaries for the 2024 election, the Blackstone CEO issued a statement suggesting he would not support Trump before ultimately backing him during the general election.

Here are the top stories from Schwarzman's book about his years working as a business advisor to Donald Trump, as well as Presidents Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush. The excerpts below are pulled directly from his 2019 autobiography.

Schwarzman's connections in the White House and abroad helped him snag the role.

With the President's support, I became involved in trade talks between the United States and China, and the United States, Canada, and Mexico for a simple reason: I knew the people on all sides and they trusted me. Aside from the president, I have known Steve Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, for years. We have apartments in the same building in New York and are close, personal friends. I have known Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, for just as long. …

I had met then party secretary Xi Jinping, the current president of China, in 2007, and knew many of the members of the Standing Committee and the State Council. I met the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, in 2015, and he had endowed two Schwarzman Scholarships for students from Mexico. His finance minister, Luis Videgaray Caso, often called me or came by to talk whenever he was in New York. And on the Canadian side, I had known the foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, since she was a journalist for the Financial Times. She had covered Blackstone, and I had always found her to be smart and well intentioned.

Schwarzman warned Trump that his trade wars could backfire.

The president had fired trade salvos at China and Europe, and even within the White House, there was concern that the administration was taking on too much. At the president's request, I met with him to offer my advice on the situation. We met in the private quarters of the White House. When the president arrived, I told him that the way I saw it, the United States was now fighting a multifront trade war with Asia, Europe, and the Americas. America's flanks were exposed, and as important as America is, we are only 23 percent of the global economy; give the remaining 77 percent time, and they would figure out a way to band together and make us miserable.

When Trump refused to meet with Canada's Justin Trudeau, Schwarzman stepped in to help.

Trade talks had once again stalled. The prime minister said Canada could not offer any more concessions and wanted to close out the talks. But the president refused a private meeting with the prime minister at the General Assembly. The White House had gone quiet. Prime Minister Trudeau thought a meeting with US CEOs might foster a better understanding of US business priorities and provide him with new ideas on how to progress negotiations. We held the meeting in my conference room at Blackstone.

Schwarzman urged Trudeau to do a trade deal with Trump.

I gave him my view on what it would take to successfully negotiate a deal and told him that the Americans wanted the Canadians to put their terms on paper. The prime minister said he was worried the Americans would leak them and use them against him. I told him that I did deals for a living and the moment had come for him to stop agonizing. If he refused to meet the US demands of a deal, Canada would almost certainly go into a recession, and no politician wins reelection in a recession. If he did a deal, at least he'd have a chance at political survival.

He urged Trump to make a deal with Trudeau.

Agreeing to a deal would show the rest of the world that the United States was serious about renegotiating trade deals, not just blowing them up. With the midterm elections approaching, it would also be useful to have a deal as proof of the president's campaign promises to voters, particularly in possible swing states in the Midwest.

He described a stressful 48 hours until there was a deal.

I told him [Trudeau] I was seeing the president that evening at 5:30 and that any deal needed to be signed by midnight on Sunday, which all parties understood.

The prime minister looked at me from the couch. He said it would be tough, but he would do it. When I met with the president that evening, he reaffirmed that in my discussions with the Canadians, I had accurately reflected terms that the United States would accept. I called the Canadians to let them know. It took another forty-eight hours of waiting and pleading from all sides before finally, at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, the Americans received the Canadians' written offer. Over the weekend, the details were worked out between the two countries, and on Monday, October 1, 2018, the president announced a revised NAFTA, the United States— Mexico— Canada Agreement, or USMCA.

Schwarzman also acted as a go-between for Trump and China's Xi Jinping.

At lunch, President Xi asked me to talk about newly elected President Trump and his views on China and how he had defeated Hillary Clinton. I explained to him the facts President Trump was dealing with, the economic dislocations suffered by many working and middle-class Americans because of globalization. A study by the Federal Reserve had found that nearly half the country was living paycheck to paycheck, unable to write an emergency check for $ 400. For the first time in American history, millions of people feared they would end up poorer than their parents. Among them were many of the president's voters in the Midwest. The trade deficit made China an easy target, and the strong criticism of China was only likely to get worse.

President Xi told me that if that were the case, he would be prepared to do a major economic reset with the United States. Given he knew that I spoke with the president on a wide variety of issues, including trade, he asked me to tell President Trump that we had spoken and to pass along what he had said. In front of the entire group, he also welcomed my participation on behalf of the administration in these talks, a sign of the trust I enjoyed with the Chinese.

As tensions grew, Schwarzman traveled to China 8 times for Trump.

In the meantime, the White House was ratcheting up its rhetoric, threatening higher tariffs and investigations into Chinese trade practices. China's concerns about a trade war began to grow. Given that the president trusted me, he asked that I continue to be involved by being candid with the Chinese as to the US position. I made eight trips to China in 2018 alone on behalf of the administration, trying to assure China's most senior officials that the president was not looking for a trade war.

Schwarzman guided Xi on how to cut a deal with Trump.

He should not assume the Americans would come to a meeting with President Xi prepared with a list of demands. I thought that President Xi should come with his own list, offer five or six substantive proposals, and control the meeting. If our president felt the proposals were compelling and significant enough, he would engage. It was as simple as that. This wasn't the Chinese way, Vice President Wang said, but he liked the idea. Both sides would have a chance to achieve their objectives. This was the way to a deal.

Schwarzman said no to the possibility of a formal role with the Trump White House.

There was little time to talk, but he called again a week later, this time asking if I might consider joining his team. I thanked him and told him I was very happy with my life as it was; I didn't want to disrupt it. He told me he thought I'd say that, but also that he needed to hear directly from America's business leaders as he tried to accelerate the economy.

Schwarzman also advised George H.W. Bush, the 41st president and the father of his former classmate at Yale

In the early 1990s, I was invited to a dinner at the White House. I was between marriages so I took a date, a magazine writer from New York. During the party, I approached President George H. W. Bush, whom I had met years before when he visited his son George W. at Yale. We stepped aside and talked intently for ten minutes. When I walked back to my date, she asked what on earth we had been talking about. Simple, I told her: I had some ideas for him about the ailing US economy, his biggest problem at the time. World leaders are no different from anyone else. If you talk about what's on their mind and have something to offer, they will listen, Democrats, Republicans, princes, or prime ministers.

Although he was critical of President Obama, he stepped in to help with contentious budget negotiations.

"I could really use your help," said the president.

If Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement by January 1, they would trigger a set of automatic decreases in spending and increases in taxes embedded in previous budget agreements that would take the country over the so-called fiscal cliff.

"Are you saying you want to hire me to be your investment banker with no compensation?" I said. He laughed, gave me his private number, and said I could call any time of day or night— though preferably not after 11: 00 p.m. I admired him for reaching out to people outside Washington who might help break the logjam.

Schwarzman came back with a deal, but President Obama rejected it.

We got to what I thought was a fair offer from the Republican side— $1 trillion over ten years, $ 100 billion, or $ 10 billion a year, shy of the tax increases the Democrats wanted. The president wouldn't accept it. I pleaded with him. Ten billion a year was a rounding error in the federal government's $4 trillion annual budget. The Republicans had started these negotiations refusing to raise taxes at all, and now they were proposing $ 1 trillion of additional revenue by raising taxes, closing loopholes, and ending deductions. There was room here for a deal, but not much, and the window would likely slam shut if the Democrats continued to balk."

You might know about deal making, the president told me, but he knew politics— a fair point from a man fresh from winning his second presidential term. He did not want to start this second term spending precious political capital by pushing a deal he knew he couldn't get his own party to support.

• Citadel founder Ken Griffin said on Thursday that he's "open" to selling a stake in his hedge fund.
• Griffin had previously sold a minority stake in his market maker to VC funds Sequoia and Paradigm.
• He said he'd look for "a partner that feels like Sequoia."

BlackRock's potential investment into Izzy Englander's Millennium might have Citadel founder Ken Griffin thinking.

At the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Griffin complimented BlackRock founder Larry Fink for being a "legend in asset management" and said that if the tie-up eventually does go through, "it's a very interesting" one. The early-stage talks between BlackRock and multistrategy rival Millennium were reported by the Financial Times earlier this month.

Asked if he would consider such a move, the billionaire said he'd "be open to selling a minority stake," which Citadel, the $65 billion hedge fund that's become the most profitable firm in the industry's history, has never done.

"We take great pride in being a private partnership," he said, and believes the structure has helped the firm run smoothly for the more than 30 years it's been in existence.

Nearly every hedge fund is still owned by its founders and a select group of partners, even the older industry giants like Citadel, though Griffin may be looking to sell a stake at the peak. He said in a Bloomberg interview on Tuesday that the extreme growth that has added billions of assets to his fund and his peers' is not likely to continue.

In New York Thursday, he pointed out the benefits of selling a stake in his market maker Citadel Securities in 2022 to venture capital firms Sequoia and Paradigm for more than $1 billion. The investment valued the firm at $22 billion.

He said Sequoia in particular brought "real insights" into how to manage a rapidly growing company, noting the firm's past investments into Apple and Nvidia before the two companies were public.

Griffin said Sequoia has pushed Citadel Securities' leadership in the boardroom, making them a better company.

As for who he'd want as a minority stakeholder of Citadel, Griffin clearly has a type.

"We'd look for a partner that feels like Sequoia," he said.