Howard William Lutnick (born July 14, 1961) is an American businessman and government official who has served as the 41st United States secretary of commerce since 2025.
In 1983, Lutnick was hired at Cantor Fitzgerald under the mentorship of the firm's founder, B. Gerald Cantor. In 1990, Lutnick became president and chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald. After Cantor's declining health in 1995, Lutnick became involved in a contentious legal battle with Cantor's wife, Iris, over succession plans, filing suit in Delaware court claiming Cantor lacked sufficient mental capacity to make decisions. Following a settlement that gave Lutnick management control, he was appointed chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald after Cantor's death in 1996. He invested significantly in technology, establishing an electronic trading platform known as eSpeed. In the September 11 attacks, Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees, including Howard's brother, Gary. Lutnick's handling of the aftermath, including the immediate cessation of salaries to families of deceased employees, drew both praise for his efforts to rebuild the firm and criticism from victims' families.
After fundraising for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Lutnick was a fundraiser for Donald Trump's 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns and a vocal proponent of Trump's tariff proposals. In August 2024, he was named co-chair of Donald Trump's presidential transition team. President-elect Trump nominated Lutnick for Secretary of Commerce in November 2024. Following a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing in January 2025, he was confirmed by the Senate in February. As commerce secretary, he has advocated for tariffs and made controversial statements regarding Social Security payments. Time listed Lutnick as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2025.
Howard William Lutnick was born on July 14, 1961, on Long Island, New York. He was the second son of Solomon and Jane (née Lieberman) Lutnick. Solomon was a professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York, while Jane was a painter and sculptor who taught at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. Lutnick is of Jewish descent. He was raised in Jericho, New York, and attended Jericho High School. In February 1978, during Lutnick's junior year, Jane died of lymphoma. Lutnick attended Haverford College as a Division III tennis recruit. In Lutnick's first week of classes, Solomon died of a chemotherapy drug overdose; he was being treated for colon cancer that had metastasized to his lungs. Robert Stevens, the president of Haverford College, offered to waive his fees to the university. At Haverford, Lutnick became captain of the tennis team. He graduated in 1983 with a degree in economics.
After graduating, Lutnick worked at Noonan, Astley & Pierce as a broker for the United States dollar–Japanese yen exchange, where he met B. Gerald Cantor. In 1983, Cantor took Lutnick as his protégé and hired him at his eponymous firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, encouraged by Rod Fisher, a partner at the firm and Cantor's nephew. Within a year and a half, Lutnick had steadily ascended within the firm, becoming the chief executive of a division of Cantor Fitzgerald that managed the personal investments of Cantor and his associates. He brought additional clients, increasing its profitability to become one of Cantor Fitzgerald's most lucrative divisions. By December 1990, Lutnick was appointed Cantor's successor in the event of his death. In 1991, after a failed attempt by Cantor Fitzgerald's president to oust him, Lutnick became the firm's chief executive and president. The following year, Cantor restructured Cantor Fitzgerald to a partnership and implemented a succession plan, abandoning his previous effort to give the company to a charitable foundation.
In 1990, Cantor began undergoing kidney dialysis, and in December 1995, he was hospitalized in New York. Lutnick moved to implement a succession plan at Cantor Fitzgerald, allowing him to become a managing general partner at the firm. The lack of involvement of Cantor's family infuriated its members, including his wife, Iris Cantor, whose attorneys had argued with Lutnick's attorneys. In March 1996, Lutnick and his division, CF Group Management, filed a lawsuit in Delaware to enforce the plan, arguing that Cantor did not possess "sufficient mental capacity" to understand the legal documents he was signing. The New York Times noted that Lutnick had already lost the necessary support of the Cantors. The partners settled in May, allowing Lutnick to retain management control while the Cantors hold a limited partnership stake. In July, Cantor died. As chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick sought to broker deals with larger investment companies such as Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch.
Lutnick heralded technology at Cantor Fitzgerald. In September 1998, the firm began electronic trading for futures contracts on Treasury bonds and notes, developing eSpeed, an electronic trading platform, with an investment of US$250 million. eSpeed was released in March 1999. In addition, Lutnick diversified Cantor's investments, seeking to establish a brokering business in Europe—spending at least US$43 million since 1994—and a futures exchange known as Cantor Exchange, though it traded significantly fewer contracts than its competitors, including the Chicago Board of Trade. Businessman Michael Spencer noted that eSpeed had become a dominant market in Treasury securities trading, but had not achieved similar successes in other markets. By September 2001, eSpeed had created four dozen marketplaces, including TradeSpark, an exchange for natural gas and electricity. After the Enron scandal, TradeSpark received a surge in usage.
At the time of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald was headquartered in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The company occupied several floors just above where American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building. Of the 960 total employees who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in New York City, all 658 who were in the office on the day of the attacks died. Lutnick was scheduled to go into the office that day, but he had taken his son to kindergarten. His brother, Gary, did not survive. Cantor Fitzgerald's operations in London and New Jersey allowed eSpeed to continue trading. Lutnick's interviews with Connie Chung on ABC News were widely publicized and he became nationally recognized. Internally, however, he garnered criticism from families of employees at Cantor Fitzgerald for the company's refusal to continue paying any part of the salaries owed to employees who were ultimately killed in the attack. According to Lutnick, getting this authorized was beyond practical: banks would not endorse the continued payment of two-thirds of their employees, particularly when they were well-aware that said employees were deceased and no longer active employees of the company. However, the relief the company obtained by way of its freedom from those very salary obligations provided Cantor Fitzgerald with an indispensable safety net in the immediate, uncertain aftermath. The American Red Cross offered as much as US$30,000 to the families of the victims after Lutnick appealed to the organization's president and chief executive, Bernadine Healy. Lutnick attended twenty funerals a day for over a month. In October, Cantor Fitzgerald began distributing US$45 million to families. In February 2002, the firm announced it would divide US$4.9 million in profit to survivors.
A year after the attacks, Lutnick began negotiations to relocate Cantor Fitzgerald to Union Square, Manhattan, at 14th Street between Broadway and University Place, from the firm's temporary headquarters at 135 East 57th Street. He requested US$50 million for the initiative from the United States Congress and formed a working relationship with Florida representative Bill Young, the chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, but the final legislation signed by president George W. Bush did not explicitly mention Cantor Fitzgerald and was less than what Lutnick had requested at US$33 million. The deal later fell through, and Lutnick began considering 10 Hanover Square before moving into 110 East 59th Street, fulfilling his vow to never return to Lower Manhattan. By December 2002, Cantor Fitzgerald had 750 employees in New York. In August 2004, the firm established a partnership, BGC Partners, for its voice brokerage business. Lutnick was appointed the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald's fixed-income trading and sales business, succeeding Irvin Goldman, in October 2007.