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- Citadel CEO Ken Griffin said it was “anti-American” for Trump to favor big companies with tariff relief.
- He said when the state gets involved, “picking winners and losers,” the US as a whole loses.
- Trump has offered tariff relief to companies like Apple that have pledged to invest heavily in the US.
Citadel’s CEO said it was “anti-American” for President Donald Trump to give big companies tariff relief.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire CEO and founder of the hedge fund, criticized Trump during a Thursday CNBC interview.
“Is that our country, that we’re going to favor the big and the connected? That’s not the American story,” Griffin said to CNBC.
“When the state becomes involved in picking winners and losers, there’s only one way this game ends: All of us lose,” he said.
His comments come after Trump said in August that he would impose a 100% tariff on the import of semiconductors, but companies that promised to invest in the US would be exempt from it.
In the same month, Apple announced that it would invest $100 billion in its US facilities, in addition to the $500 billion it pledged in February.
Trump also allowed American chip giants like Nvidia and AMD to sell some chips to China if they agreed to grant the US government a 15% cut of their China revenue.
“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,” Griffin said to CNBC.
Griffin has previously weighed in on the Trump administration’s economic policies.
In September, Griffin co-authored an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, in which he criticized Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence. Trump has been pressuring Fed chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates for months.
“Congress has a duty to oversee the Fed, and this oversight must be free of undue interference from the executive branch,” Griffin wrote in the opinion piece.
Representatives for Griffin at Citadel did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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