Ken Griffin has told a version of this story before. At Stanford Business School in May, the Citadel founder admitted that he’d recently gone home one Friday “actually fairly depressed” after realizing what AI could now do — a stunning reversal for an executive who’d dismissed the technology as “garbage” at Davos just months earlier.
What he didn’t say then was exactly what triggered it. Speaking with Goldman Sachs’s Raj Mahajan at the firm’s Apex Symposium on June 2 — audio Fortune has exclusive, embargoed access to — Griffin filled in the blanks.
The dinner story, inverted
The hedge fund billionaire has previously talked about having dinner at a table with a full roster of CEOs. At the Milken Institute conference, he described asking the table to share how AI was transforming their businesses and getting “six or seven extraordinary stories” back.
He offered a new twist on the tale to Mahajan, saying he was with a number of major CEOs at a dinner “about two years ago,” and his guests were effusive as to how AI was transforming their business.
