JUST IN: Senate has confirmed Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary, 51 to 45.
Lutnick lost over 650 friends, family members & employees in the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001.
This is one of the most powerful stories you'll ever hear.
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Video Transcript AI Summary
I was on top of the world, running a successful company with all my friends, making a million a day, debt free. September 11th changed everything. My office was in the World Trade Center; 658 of my 960 New York employees, including my brother and best friend, were killed.
I felt responsible for my friends' families, but the company was losing money. We decided to rebuild, promising 25% of our profits to the families, and healthcare for ten years. The media attacked me, but my employees supported me.
We rebuilt the company, and I gave my $100 million aside to the families, and their bonuses, and then repaid my employees who donated portions of their salaries. Their generosity saved the company and stitched my soul back together. They own 30% of the company because they are superhuman.
Speaker 0: We're only hiring our friends. I own the company. I'm putting all my money into the company. The company's incredibly successful. It's killing it.
We are growing fast and furious. I'm hiring all the talent in the world. We're making a million a day. That's a lot. 2,000.
Well, I'm a super rich guy. I have the famous hundred million dollars set aside just in case. Like, super rich, super rich. And the rest of my money, just feed the beast. Feed the beast.
Golden goose. Feed the golden goose. Kenneth Fitzgerald has no debt. Howard Lutnick has no debt. Why make a lot of money?
Why would I need debt? Right? No debt. Rock star company winning in every way on the top of the World Trade Center have expanded, expanded, expanded. Hundred and first to the hundred and fifth was the World Trade Center.
Speaker 1: Right? September 11. I've hired all my friends. My brother works there.
Speaker 0: My best friend, Doug, works there. My roommate from college, his brother works there. My other best friend, his brother-in-law works there. And my other best friend, his brother-in-law works there. I turned 40 that summer.
So before then, it's February. I'm gonna turn 40 during the summer. I declare victory. I win in life. I'm making all the money in the world.
It's my company. I work with all my friends, and they work with all their friends. Everybody works with their friends.
Speaker 1: K? I win. I take each of
Speaker 0: my senior executives, six of them, out to dinner alone, each one alone. I get up from my table. I walk around the other side,
Speaker 1: and I kiss him.
Speaker 0: I tell him I love him. I said, but I win. So here's and I give him each, I don't know, $2,025,000,000 bucks worth of stock. I said, I win. So here's the way it's gonna go.
Every day my kids are out of school. I'm out. I'm gonna live my life with my kids. When they're in, I'm in.
Speaker 1: Same as
Speaker 0: I always am, but I'm just gonna be out way more often.
Speaker 1: You guys are great. Here's stock.
Speaker 0: I give them
Speaker 1: mine. K. That's April.
Speaker 0: I have my birthday party. That's summer. About 65 couples are my birthday party. So my fortieth birthday.
Speaker 1: So your fortieth birthday, a hundred and twenty people come?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. 20, hundred 30 people. It's a nice party, and and it's September 11. It's July.
July fourteenth is my birthday. And, three months later, 20 people at
Speaker 1: my party get killed. It's my friends.
Speaker 0: My brother gets killed, and my best friend Doug gets killed. All those people I listed before, they all get killed. We employ 50 sets of brothers, and we lose, you know, more than a dozen brothers. Meaning mom loses two two sons.
Speaker 1: I have I have one father who lost two daughters because they work together. And six hundred fifty eight people out of nine
Speaker 0: I have nine hundred and sixty in New York. Six hundred fifty eight people get killed. Six hundred fifty eight people get killed.
Speaker 1: Why not all 900?
Speaker 0: Whoever wasn't in the office. So every single person who was in the office gets killed. There's no way out. Mhmm. I am here because I'm taking that oldest boy who I held up, First day kindergarten.
Five years old. Mhmm. Kindergarten, new school. It's called Horace Mann. Ninetieth Street.
First day is September 12. My best friend, Doug, his son's first day. My first day is September 11. Tom, not there. His kid's first day,
Speaker 1: September 12. Mhmm.
Speaker 0: If I
Speaker 1: had
Speaker 0: gone to by the way, and he pushed me to
Speaker 1: try to go to that school called Riverdale, which,
Speaker 0: you know, great school. But I for whatever reason, I chose Horace Mann, and that choice saved my life because his school started the twelfth, so he was on in the eleventh. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And he and he got killed. He was planning to take the next day off. He had to
Speaker 0: take his kid to school. So I'm at the school, and those days when you took a picture Mhmm. When you developed the picture, it often had the time stamp in the lower right hand corner and, like, an LED display, like your LED clock. And I have a that picture is 08:46 of me and my boy, him wearing his, like, little backpack with his little hair right in front of the school. Right?
I have that picture.
Speaker 1: And, and then I
Speaker 0: go up in the school, and then they tell me a plane hit the building. But I think it's like a Piper Cub or something. So I get in the car, and I drive. I tell my driver,
Speaker 1: you know, let's go
Speaker 0: to Fifth Avenue because that's the soonest place where you can see the tower. I mean, I've been working there my whole life, and I
Speaker 1: know,
Speaker 0: I know the building by heart. And, I I see just fire and smoke just pouring out of my tower, the one with the antenna on the top. So I'm in the top floors, and my driver starts crying. And then he starts crying hysterically. Let's just get there.
Let's just get there. We have to get there. We have to get there. He's a retired police officer, detective. So he uses his badge, and we get all the way to the building.
And I get out of my car and I go to the door, and it's a door on Church Street, you know, on this side. And and I'm grabbing people asking
Speaker 1: them what floor they're on.
Speaker 0: I just keep grabbing them. Because I know there's, like, 20 doors.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. And
Speaker 0: if I get one coming out of this door, then they're pouring out of all the doors. Mhmm. And, and I have everyone yelling out the floors. And people didn't have anybody standing around. They had no idea what to do, so they were all yelling out the floors.
And the highest floor I got to was 90 Second Floor. And then, and then I hear the loudest sound I've ever heard in my life. Now I haven't seen this. Remember, there's no video. There's no time.
I got a flip phone at the time. That's so, I start running. I'm dressed like this. Suit and tie, shoes on. I'm running my ass off.
Running as hard as I freaking can. From what? I don't know. I look over my shoulder. Tornadoes chasing me.
Remember that black cloud? You guys have seen the video? So I'm running I'm running all my might. Now I've I've gone from a sunny day in New York City
Speaker 1: Mhmm. With a blue sky to hearth film. I'm in a suit in a Hartfield, and
Speaker 0: we all know how the guy in the suit with the Hartfield works out. So it's not a pretty sight. So I'm running. The tornado's coming. I see it coming from the right.
So I dive under a car. And then whoosh, all black.
Speaker 1: The world's black. My eyes are open. It's black. I think to myself, I'm dead. Mhmm.
This is dead. I mean, it's black
Speaker 0: and silent. So I go like this. And I stab myself in the eyes.
Speaker 1: It hurts. So then I figure, okay, I'm not dead.
Speaker 0: I'm blind and deaf. I'm not blind and deaf, but I'm alive.
Speaker 1: So I get up, and of course
Speaker 0: I'm hiding under a car. And I slam my head, like, so hard, you know, and now I'm now I feel the blood like running down my face. So I like I climb out, and I stand
Speaker 1: up. And then I start to run. But of course, it's pitch black. So what do you think I run into?
Speaker 0: Parked car. Just hammer into some park I'm like running in the pitch black, and I just run into some parked car. So I I hit the right quarter panel, the things go flying over the hood, smash those. So now I'm like, now now I'm like, I get up for the ground. I'm like, I'm bleeding.
I'm limping. All seldom posed. Right? This is all just happened to me. And I'm walking in the darkness
Speaker 1: away from the World Trade Center. And so I just I just walk. And, and eventually, you know, the black turns to gray, and you
Speaker 0: can see it. It literally drops down. And and the event, of course, was the collapse of two World Trade Center. If one World Trade Center collapsed, I don't tell the story. If I run that way, I die.
If I run that way, I die. I just ran this way. My driver ran that way too, but I I didn't see him. I just found him. My half hour later, he he found me, and
Speaker 1: we walked up town till people were clean.
Speaker 0: And then so there's this line on a payphone, and, and this woman's talking on the phone. So I go up to the front of the line, and I you know, remember, I'm I'm I'm, like, covered like, it looks like I was flushed down some, chimney a bunch of times, plus I'm bleeding down my face and limping. I'm like I'm like a I am a horror movie, but now I'm like the character in the horror movie instead of so I just hang up the phone from her, and I take the cradle out of her hand. And she turns around at me
Speaker 1: and starts cursing at me. Then she looks at me and goes back sway, and I call my wife. It's been, like, two hours. I call her, and she hears my voice, and she makes this noise that I'll never forget. And
Speaker 0: because she said when she was watching on TV when the when the trade center collapsed, she knew I'd be in the building. She knew I'd be there. And so she said when that collapsed, she fell to the ground and she thought I died. And it was two hours. So when I called her, she made this noise, you know, because
Speaker 1: she she understood what it was that
Speaker 0: people died. And then then I told her everybody's dead. It was in the building. Because I I felt I was suffocating to death outside.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So I didn't buy this whole rescue recovery stuff for my people who are up a quarter mile.
Speaker 1: So yeah. Nobody survived. Nobody survived.
Speaker 0: So the only people who lived were either in the lobby. Mhmm. So think of my my my lawyer, my general counsel.
Speaker 1: He was in the elevator going up from one to
Speaker 0: 78 was like a speed elevator, big speed elevator, and then you switched and you had a sky lobby and you switched. So he's in the big elevator, plane hits the building. Elevators, don't collapse. They have, like, a mechanical arm that goes out like this and slows it down and rolls it down, and then the doors open. He goes running out of the elevator.
Fireball from the gas falling down, explodes through the lobby. Fireball goes across the front of the elevator. He's running out. Fireball runs out. Glass goes flying by.
He steps out, gets covered in blood. So think about it. He stepped out between the glass and the blood and gets splattered with blood. So I call my wife. I'm talking to my wife.
She says, Steven is alive, and he lives in the village. So I walk to the village. Wow. Okay. Well So I walk.
Speaker 1: I I go to his apartment. I ring I ring the bell.
Speaker 0: He answers his door. He's covered in blood. This is like three hours after the attack. He said, guy's covered in blood. So I grabbed my are you alright?
You alright? He goes, yeah. Yeah. I'm alright.
Speaker 1: Whose blood is it? He goes, I don't know. He's in his apartment. He could wash his face, but he's so in shock. He's he's just wandering around.
Speaker 0: And, and then there's the TV, and I look on
Speaker 1: the TV and I see the giant plane at the building for the first time. So,
Speaker 0: you know, that day I lost, I lost everybody in the office, 658 spectacular human beings, out of 960. And the only reason the other people didn't die is because they weren't at work yet. They were so if you think about it, on Wall Street, the show is on at about, you know, 07:15, seven thirty latest. So everybody who's a moneymaker is
Speaker 1: in. So who comes in, like, after 08:45?
Speaker 0: Finance department, compliance department, legal department. You know, all the support staff comes in later, but all the talent of revenue comes in when the show's on.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Right? So I lost everybody who made money
Speaker 1: in New York,
Speaker 0: and we were hub and spoke. You know? And the hub is obliterated from
Speaker 1: the face of the Earth. So the challenge of survival becomes
Speaker 0: infinite because everybody who's alive
Speaker 1: thinks they're still gonna get paid, and there is no revenue. It's gone. It's gone. So I
Speaker 0: try to figure out what to do. And remember, these 658 people, these are my colleagues, and they're my coworkers, but they're my friends. And they're everybody's friend. Everybody who survives, best friend, college roommate, brother-in-law, everybody had that relationship. It wasn't one big happy family.
Speaker 1: We were like,
Speaker 0: you know, and, so we've gotta take care of their families. We we we have to. But how? I I can't we have no money. We went from making a million a day to losing a million a day in like that.
Right? Because all these people are alive. You gotta pay them. You know, all the other offices around the world, you gotta pay them. You gotta pay rent everywhere else.
Speaker 1: You gotta pay them. What money? No money. So we come up with our plan. We'll try to rebuild the company, and we'll give 25% of our profits to the families.
But you came up with this plan just real quick. You came up with this plan
Speaker 0: that night. Right? Didn't you do a phone call
Speaker 1: with the employees that were remained that night? So I I don't I don't know. It was probably the twelfth
Speaker 0: at night, because I doubt I was capable of doing anything the eleventh at night, but I can't remember. We did a phone call with everybody at the firm, and we put it out on the news. If you work at Canavan's Children, call this number. Because, like, we have no HR department. I have no one's phone number.
I don't know. You know? But the women, they, you know, they went to their mother's house when their husband gets killed. You go to your mother's house, so I'm I'm never gonna find them. Mhmm.
I I get everyone on the phone and say, we have two choices. We can shut the firm down and go to our friends' funerals because there's gonna be 20 funerals a day every day for thirty five straight days. Like, thirty five straight days. Like, I couldn't even go to my friends' funerals because they would be literally my best friend from college's brother and my other best friend's brother-in-law were buried, had their funeral in different funeral homes, one in Westchester and one in Manhattan at the exact same second. So I went to one and my wife went to one.
I couldn't even go to my friend's funeral. Man, how horrible is that? So, you know, we we decided or we'll go back to work and we'll have to work harder than we've ever worked before in our lives, But we gotta do it to take care of their families. And so we decided we would give 25% of our profits to the families. We'd pay for their health care for ten years, and I promised them all it would be at least a hundred thousand of family.
Because if I didn't make enough profits in five years, I'll work for the rest of my life for it. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: And so we announced that, and a weird thing happens. The media, which had said lovely things about us, you
Speaker 0: know, trying to rebuild the company, trying to take care of the families, and they had the mass murder of 658 people who worked for us.
Speaker 1: They say because a a guy
Speaker 0: who looks like me can't be a human being, can't actually cry, can't actually be a person.
Speaker 1: Just you're not lying. So
Speaker 0: he must be lying. He's crying crocodile tears. The murder of my brother, my best friend, all all my surrounding people, and all the people I hired is insufficient to get a guy who wears a suit
Speaker 1: to cry. So I'm crying crocodile tears because I'm giving 25%
Speaker 0: of our profits. But, of course, there's never too many profits. So 25% of
Speaker 1: nothing is nothing. Bill O'Reilly every night, death threats, calling me names. Rosie O'Donnell, calling
Speaker 0: me names. Everybody's calling me names. All I did was have everyone around me get killed, and I tried to help them. But, you know, the media builds you up and then they whack you down. And so but we have a different
Speaker 1: idea. We have 25% of our payroll.
Speaker 0: All my employees who we hire, we say, look. We gotta take care of the families. So if I'm trying to hire you for $200, I can only pay a hundred and 50. But when it take $50, I'm gonna send it to the families. Every two weeks, we're gonna just send the money.
We're just gonna send the money. You know, I think we send it every month. We just send the money. And,
Speaker 1: we send the money. And then three or four people who we hired said yes. And the one out
Speaker 0: of four, they just didn't take the job. It was okay. Like, if that's not your gig,
Speaker 1: don't come. So everybody who comes, think about Lawson. They're giving 25% of their pay to someone they don't even know because I asked them to. I mean, they're this
Speaker 0: is this is a story of a miracle. I have another story. My, so we have a big we have a
Speaker 1: big memorial in Central Park.
Speaker 0: Rudy Giuliani comes comes on the backstage, comes up on the stage, and there's 5,000 people there. 658 people have husbands, wives, sons and daughters, friends, cousins, they don't. He walks out. He comes up to my ear. He goes, where the fuck are all these people?
Because he thought he was, like, going to some little you know? And, so we have this big memorial in my LA office, my most productive office in the hub and spoke. Right? LA. These guys make millions, and now the firm is destroyed.
They could easily go across the street, set up shop, work for anybody else. They pay them
Speaker 1: a fortune to come, and and I know they're gonna leave. So they said to me, we're gonna close the office. We're coming in for the memorial, and we need to see you. So we go to the memorial,
Speaker 0: and then they said they're gonna come over my apartment. And my my heart is exploding out of my chest because I know what's gonna happen. They're gonna come in, they're gonna tell me that they're leaving.
Speaker 1: And then the whole thing
Speaker 0: is gonna unravel, and I can't do any path. I walk into my living room. There's 12 of them. And them closing the offices is not a good thing right now. I'm not gonna look they come in, and they surround me, so we never leave it.
See, this is not this is not what people do. This is what superhuman people do. This is what heroes do. Stupid science. So they they stayed.
And I would it was on their shoulders we're able to rebuild the company, then we hired all these other people and we, we rebuilt the company. The press beat the crap out of us. When did it stop? The October. I take my hundred million.
Remember that hundred million just in case? Well, I got the hundred million just in case.
Speaker 1: I sent it to the families. Just give it away.
Speaker 0: I give it directly to them. I pay them their bonus for 2,001. Kenneth Fitzgerald's not gonna pay a bonus. There's no money. It's out of business.
It's destroyed, true. And so I send them the money that they would have made had they lived, and I send them my money.
Speaker 1: And then the media just stops because what what do you what do you do with someone who
Speaker 0: does what they say they're gonna do? That's, like, crazy. The guy actually says what he's gonna do after everybody's been murdered. What a shock. So they leave me alone.
And then at the end of the year because now I'm paying the families once a month. I'm sending them money. The employees are, you know, we're gonna survive and the the business is, you know, surviving. Let's not overdo it. There's no profits, by the way.
Because if you think about it, you say, well, how are you gonna make a profit? The Financial Times, you know, the sort of the orange pinky newspaper names me the man of the year. Like, I don't know, Angela Merkel tip is another year, you know, like and then, The New York Times writes a multi thousand word apology to me, 01/03/2002. Basically, the man who did what he said he would do as if that's a high moral bar. You just do what you say you're gonna do.
So company survives.
Speaker 1: And then to end that story for you, so we do that for five years.
Speaker 0: We give the families a hundred and $80,000,000
Speaker 1: and pay for
Speaker 0: their health care for ten years. So now it's 02/2008. The financial crisis is going on, but but we avoid it. We understand it. I see it coming.
We avoid it, and and we're we're making real money. So one of our divisions is now strong enough to take and go public. It's called BGC. I named it after Bernie Cantor's initials. B Gerald Cantor, Bernard Gerald Cantor.
Still public. It's worth about 5,000,000,000 now. And it's strong enough to take it public. And so we do an IPO, but but a very different kind of IPO. So the pages and pages of selling shareholders.
So what I do is I take my shares, and I pay all the employees back who donated. Remember that employee who gave $50? And the next year, they got a raise. So they paid 55, and then they paid 16, and then they paid 65, and they paid 70. And they gave, I don't know, $300,000 over those five years to the families.
They don't even know them. How great is that person? How am I supposed to go on with my life and be a rich guy? When I have these people who gave so much. So I give them at the IPO, we sell about a hundred and $80,000,000 worth of shares, and I give them back all their money, which was not the deal.
They didn't expect it. And then I give them on top of that. So I sell my shares and give them the money, and then I give them all another hundred and $80,000,000 worth of shares. So they should have, I could say thank you. So they doubled their money.
So their generosity doubled their money,
Speaker 1: and, and I squared it with them.
Speaker 0: So I could go on with my life. I could become successful as I have become. And, but I'm square with my employees.
Speaker 1: And, okay. What's the turnover of the firm? Low.
Speaker 0: Lowest in the world. What percentage of the company do the employees own a BGC? 30%.
Speaker 1: Now they never sell. Mhmm.
Speaker 0: Why? And then I have it's twenty years later, but I have lots of new people. But the new people, like, they go out with the old people, and they, like, get the story of the company. And and so the company is owned. Who works for who?
Right. My employees own 30% of
Speaker 1: the public company. So I work
Speaker 0: for them. They work for me. So when I go and say, like, you know, I go on, like, I don't know, CNBC
Speaker 1: and I say, I've got
Speaker 0: the best employees. You know, people think, nah. He's just a CEO. It's like platitudes.
Speaker 1: No. I, Kenneth and Charlotte,
Speaker 0: we have the best employees because
Speaker 1: these
Speaker 0: are the greatest. See, they stitched my soul back together
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: On their shoulders with their money. They saved my life, and I am forever indebted to my employees because they are superhuman, spectacular.
Speaker 1: But so are you.
Speaker 0: Thank
Speaker 1: you. Right? It kind of in that entire story, it takes both sides.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I don't tell that story too often. It doesn't really it's kinda it's kinda my,
Speaker 1: But, like, if you if
Speaker 0: you think twenty three years later, I'm not gonna cry. I'm in a beast. But I'm not supposed to cry.
Speaker 1: What you have to do what you have to do is come up with a hundred million dollar idea this week, and you'll be okay. The, the no. But I do think that there is in these stories, you know, one of the interesting things about leadership is, like, it is in service to other people. And so you took care of employees and employees took care of you, and it kinda nets out positive. And so you get loyalty in both directions because you're just as loyal to them as they are to you.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So that's you know, so I have we have two public companies, and the employees own 30% of both because one spun off with the other.
Speaker 1: So all my
Speaker 0: employees, they own it. They it's cool. It's it's why I'm religiously in favor of your employees owning your company.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. Because it
Speaker 0: you know, I love the idea of I'm the boss, and you own the company. So who works for who? Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 1: Think about it.
Speaker 0: Let's say, I screw all the employees. We're gonna pay you all less, and all your stock goes up, and you get the same exact amount of money back in the afternoon. How dumb could you be? Mhmm. Right?
You're so aligned
Speaker 1: that you all work together.
Speaker 0: It's it's how it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be. Mhmm.
