Morning Coffee: How Citi CEO Jane Fraser deals with sexism. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s impressive fans

As the saying goes, you tend not to find many easy-going people on the tops of tall mountains.   In banking, descriptions like “ruthless”, “aggressive” and “does not suffer fools gladly” are pretty ubiquitous to describe those who have risen to the top of one of the world’s most competitive industries. They’re even more commonly used to describe chief executives who have had to take the decisions necessary to manage the volatility of the market cycle, most of which involve giving unwelcome news to people with big egos.

But this sort of description is notoriously gendered; a male executive has to pretty much break a telephone or cause multiple nervous breakdowns before they get a reputation for being mean, while women are identified as “tough” if they register mild disagreement at a board meeting.  Jane Fraser of Citigroup is keen to set the record straight, saying “I’m not ruthless, but I am damn tough…Ruthless sounds like I’m being a real jerk and I think it’s stupid to be a jerk. You can be tough, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do that in a way that helps someone”.

💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥

It’s a distinction that has been litigated a few times in different contexts during her time as CEO of Citigroup, as the top management team includes people like Andy Sieg and Vis Raghavan who have sometimes been accused of being on the other side of the tough/ruthless distinction.  There are both external websites and internal investigations into whether a male executive behaved like “a real jerk” or worse to female colleagues.

Noticeably, to date Jane Fraser has stood by the business leaders, making the case that many of Citi’s business lines needed transformational leadership, and that you can’t make an omelette without occasionally breaking a few eggs. Apparently she was herself given the advice to “have big ears and a thick skin”, and she seems to regard it as a sensible way for others to deal with criticism and harsh words.  Even in cases of outright sexism, she says that “I find treating it with a smile and polite amusement is a far more effective tool than taking offence”.

This approach appears to have worked for Jane Fraser. She’s famously done better than most other Wall Street CEOs at building a relationship with President Trump, something which probably couldn’t have been done by someone who took offence easily.  And she can hand it out as well as take it – she’s known for elaborate pranks played on colleagues, including stealing an office chair and taking it on a global tour.

However, of course, something which works for a chief executive might not be appropriate for everyone else.  Just as King Charles allegedly believes that the whole world smells of fresh paint, the person in charge often sees a different side of bankers’ personalities than their subordinates.  You would have to be very brave indeed, or (more likely) extremely foolish to try to patronise Jane Fraser, after all.  And it’s a lot easier to laugh off unpleasant behaviour if you know that you’re the chief executive of Citigroup.

Elsewhere, Leopold Aschenbrenner, the manager of the Situational Awareness hedge fund, got married at the weekend.  That means that he may be the only groom in history to have regarded wedding planning as a pleasant relief from his everyday stress.

However, it’s interesting to see that the blow-up in SA’s equities portfolio doesn’t seem to have affected his friendships with a lot of very important investors.  Often, when a hedge fund suffers sharp losses and risk management problems, people who had previously been close begin to only talk through their lawyers.  But the wedding guests included Rob Granieri of Jane Street and former Tiger Global Management partner Feroz Dewan, both of whom are investors in Situational.

It’s actually quite unusual for Jane Street to allocate money to outside managers at all, but it seems that lots of people put an unusual degree of trust in Leopold Aschenbrenner.  His fund only reported quarterly to investors, rather than monthly, which is a privilege very rarely extended.  And this certainly wasn’t a matter of naivete; as well as Jane Street and Dewan, he was backed by Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital Partners and the founders of Stripe.

Apparently some of these people expressed “frustration” at Aschenbrenner’s strategy and communication, but they didn’t pull their money out and they don’t appear to have disowned him or lawyered up.  It’s nice to have people who believe in you. 

Meanwhile …

Leonard Aschenbrenner has not gone on honeymoon but has just invested $400m in a privately held company. (Bloomberg) 

Amy Lissauer, who built up the activist defence team at Bank of America, has gone to JP Morgan; the status of this hire can be seen by the fact it was announced in an all-hands memo from the co-heads of global banking. (FT)

It was never quite obvious how it might help to mitigate conflicts of interest to require a seven day waiting period before banks involved in an IPO could publish research on the stock.  Now the FCA is removing this restriction, so London investors will no longer have to wait a week for their Buy recommendations. (Financial News)

Matthew Welsford has gone from Deutsche Bank to Greenhill, where he will be head of chemicals investment banking in North America. (Bloomberg)

During routine testing, several frontier AI models reached out onto the internet and tried to trick people into including malicious code in their software, so that they could do better on benchmarking tests. (FT)

“Are you winning, son?”. According to a survey, 64% of young men who trade stocks daily feel like failures.  Interestingly, this figure is 40% for those who never trade, but lowest of all (30%) for those who do have a stock trading account, but who don’t trade every day. (Bloomberg)

However, the young men and women who trade lots and lots of stocks every day, as their job, won’t be feeling like failures this year.  After some great revenue figures, people are predicting that bonuses for equity sales & trading will be up 30%. (Financial News)

Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.