Howard Lutnick

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Howard Lutnick, secretary of commerce in Donald Trump’s second administration, spent much of his career building wealth on Wall Street.

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Howard Lutnick avoided death on 9/11 because he decided to take his five-year-old son to his first day of kindergarten. His younger brother and best friend were among the 658 employees of Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm he ran, who died that day, trapped in their offices on the 101st to 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Lutnick’s life has been marked by unspeakable tragedy, incredible wealth, and a fair share of controversy, including serving as secretary of commerce for Pres. Donald Trump and being a high-profile figure in the notorious Epstein files.

Lutnick was born to Solomon Lutnick, who taught history at Queens College, and Jane Lutnick, who was a sculptor and art teacher at Long Island University. He grew up in a Jewish family in Jericho on Long Island.

Within a two-year period in his teens, Lutnick lost both his parents. When he was 16 and in his senior year of high school, his mother died of lymphoma. Then when he was a freshman at Haverford College, his father died after accidentally being given an overdose of a chemotherapy drug. Haverford helped Lutnick get through the next few years by giving him a full scholarship, and a grateful Lutnick became the college’s biggest donor after making a fortune on Wall Street.

The double trauma helped cement the relationship among Lutnick, younger brother Gary, and elder sister Edie. But Lutnick felt abandoned by extended family members, including his grandparents, aunts, and uncles. “The way I describe it, you’re either in or you’re out,” he told New York Magazine in 2001. “What I learned in 1979, all my relatives—they stepped out. We learned to live without all of them. All of them. It was just the three of us. Gary and Edie and me.”

Lutnick joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1983 right out of college. His meteoric rise left him as president and CEO in 1991, when he was just 29. Even in the cutthroat world of Wall Street, Lutnick had a reputation for playing hardball. When his mentor and Cantor Fitzgerald cofounder Bernie Cantor was dying in 1996, he managed to wrestle control of the firm away from the Cantor family.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Lutnick was not in his office on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, because he took his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten. None of the 658 Cantor employees who went to the office that day survived. Of the 2,753 people who died in the New York attacks that day, a staggering 24 percent of them worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.

In the days after the attacks, Lutnick became one of the faces of the tragedy; he openly wept during an ABC News interview with Connie Chung as he described searching hospitals for his missing employees:

Here’s my list, here’s everybody I got. Find somebody on this list…I’d love to find my brother, but I’d love to find their brother, or their wife, or their husband.

Lutnick came under heavy criticism when, within days of the attack, he stopped paychecks for employees who had perished, a step he said was necessary to ensure the firm’s survival. However, less than two months after the tragedy, he authorized the payment of some $45 million in bonuses to the families. He subsequently set up the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which donated $180 million to the families of his firm’s employees.

“I went to 20 funerals a day for 35 days,” he told the BBC in 2006. “So there were times I couldn’t even go to my great friends’ funerals. One day, my best friend’s brother was being buried at the same exact time as my roommate from college’s brother. So my wife went to one, and I went to one.”

The financial devastation to the firm was profound: The company went from making $1 million a day to losing that much each day. Lutnick did what many of his Wall Street detractors considered impossible: He rebuilt the firm back bigger, with expanded stock and bond trading as well as investment banking. Twenty years after the September 11 attacks, Cantor Fitzgerald employed 12,000 people worldwide, 60 of whom were the children of Cantor employees who died that day.

The firm’s loss in the 9/11 attacks was later the subject of a 2012 documentary, Out of the Clear Blue Sky.

Lutnick, whose net worth is estimated to be between $2 billion and $4 billion, was, as recently as 2016, a key donor to at least some Democratic candidates, including U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

By the 2024 presidential election, however, Lutnick became a major fundraiser for Donald Trump. That August, he hosted an event at his house in the Hamptons on Long Island that raised $15 million for the campaign, part of the total $75 million he helped secure for Trump. Lutnick was also a major Trump surrogate on TV, endorsing the Republican candidate’s plans to cut taxes and impose tariffs on foreign goods. Lutnick knew Trump from the early 2000s and had once been on Trump’s TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice.

After the election, Lutnick served as the cochair of the Trump transition team and was a candidate to become treasury secretary before Trump announced that Lutnick would be nominated for commerce, saying in a statement, “He will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative.”

In his January 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, Lutnick couched Trump’s plans for tariffs as a matter of fairness, complaining that “our farmers, our ranchers, and our fishermen are treated with disrespect,” adding, “We need that disrespect to end. And I think tariffs are a way to create reciprocity, to be treated fairly, to be treated appropriately.” He also argued that tariffs would not cause inflation, a contention disputed by many economists.

The Senate confirmed him on a 51–45 vote in February 2025, putting him in charge of an agency that not only works to promote American business interests overseas, but also is in charge of the U.S. census, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and fisheries, among other responsibilities.

In late 2026, Lutnick found himself at the center of the scandal involving Nvidia and its chief executive Jensen Huang, who was accused of having an extramarital affair with a woman who has been identified as a Chinese spy. The woman, Alice Huang, was an executive at Megaspeed, a company that came under scrutiny from the State, Defense, and Treasury departments for possibly smuggling Nvidia’s AI chips into China. The Commerce Department regulates these kinds of business relationship and could have been placed Megaspeed on a list prohibiting the company for doing business with American firms. Lutnick’s failure to blacklist Megaspeed drew criticism from Republican members of Congress and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Jensen Huang resigned from his positions at Nvidia on November 12, 2026.

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Jeffrey Epstein’s New York City townhouse featured what was described as a spa or massage room.

U.S. Department of Justice

Lutnick and disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were neighbors in Manhattan starting in the 1990s. But in 2025, as the scandal surrounding Epstein and the Epstein files embroiled the Trump administration, Lutnick gave an interview describing a 2005 visit that he and his wife made to Epstein’s townhouse, where he saw a massage table prominently displayed. The visit and Epstein’s comments about the table left Lutnick so disconcerted that “my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he said.

But the Epstein files indicate that the two had at least some ongoing business dealings. During Senate testimony in 2026, Lutnick admitted that in 2012, four years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution, he, his wife, their four children, and their nannies had lunch with Epstein on his infamous Little St. James Island.

Lutnick said there was nothing “untoward” about the interaction, which he said lasted about an hour. But the fact that his statements about having no interactions with Epstein after 2005 were, by his own admission, untrue, led to calls—mostly from congressional Democrats—for him to step down. Trump expressed his continued support for Lutnick, who is one of the most prominent government officials to have appeared in the files.

In May 2026, Lutnick faced questioning by the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door session.