Nearly four decades ago, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel profiled three precocious members of the Boca Raton Community High School’s computer club. While their classmates were shooting hoops, the “disc-drive driven trio” were prepping for a problem-solving competition with other Palm Beach geeks later that month.
It is unclear what happened with Satish Vadapalli and Wayne Wong, who worked out the challenges with pen and paper before passing on solutions for their third member to bash into a computer. But the latter would go on to leave a major mark on the financial world.
Kenneth Cordele Griffin is today one of the world’s wealthiest people, with a fortune estimated at $26.5bn by Forbes. He is mostly known for running his $40bn Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel. But in reality, his lesser-known yet arguably more important computer-powered trading firm Citadel Securities is now the biggest key to his wealth — and mounting controversy.