Elon Musk’s teen prodigy Kairan Quazi is ditching SpaceX for billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel

Success·Elon MuskElon Musk’s teen digy Kairan Quazi is ditching SpaceX for billionaire Ken Griffin’s CitadelBy Eva RoytburgBy Eva RoytburgFellow, NewsEva RoytburgFellow, NewsEva is a fellow on Fortune's news desk.SEE FULL BIO Quazi hasn't been shy his feelings on age being used to "gatekeep" opportunities

Shae Hammond/ MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty ImagesAt just 16 years old, Kairan Quazi has already gained accolades most engineers spend decades accumulating: graduated college, helped design software for SpaceX Starlink satellites, and turned down officers from Silicon Valley’s buzzy AI labs

Now, the digy is taking his next leap—not in Silicon Valley, but on Wall Street, where he’s joining Citadel Securities, a liquidity vider, as a quant developer

A defiant attitude Quazi’s path has been unconventional from the start

In 2023, he made headlines when Elon Musk’s SpaceX hired him at just 14 years old, a “rare company,” Quazi said at the time, that didn’t use his age as an “arbitrary and outdated xy for maturity and ability.” The same year, he sparred with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn after it locked him out of the platform for being under 16, blasting the decision as “illogical, primitive nonsense.” In fact, Quazi has never been shy critiquing the traditional system that held him back

Once LinkedIn allowed him back on to their platform, Quazi posted a slamming the conventional school system

The 16-year-old argued “tests are not used to measure mastery, but the ability to regurgitate,” and that the modern “school factory” rewards fear and prestige-chasing over learning. “Age, privilege, and unconscious (sometimes even conscious) biases are used to gatekeep opportunities,” he wrote, adding that philosophers Seneca the Younger and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius might have seen today’s education system as dangerous

Two years later, Quazi is channeling that same defiance into a different arena

He turned down offers from top AI startups and firms to join Citadel Securities this week in New York, citing the firm’s culture of meritocracy and instant back. “Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI re also vides, but with a much faster pace,” he told Insider

At Citadel, he said, he’ll be able to see the results of his work in “days, not months or years.” A win-win Citadel, for its part, has every reason to trumpet the win

Recruiting a digy who was once deemed too young for LinkedIn—but now works at the intersection of engineering and quantitative blem-solving—is a symbolic coup for Ken Griffin’s trading powerhouse

For Quazi, the move also closes a personal loop

His mother worked in mergers and acquisitions as an investment banker, giving him early exposure to finance

And on campus, he saw how coveted quant jobs had become for math and computer-science students. “It’s one of the most prestigious industries you could go into as a computer scientist or mathematician,” he told Insider

Now, he’s living that reality in New York City

Quazi has moved into an apartment just a 10-minute walk from Citadel’s Park Avenue office. “New York has a very special place in my heart,” he said, noting that his mom grew up in Astoria, Queens

Un his time at SpaceX, where his mother had to drive him to work in Redmond, Washington, Quazi’s commute is now his own: first on foot, and soon, by subway. “I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment,” he said. “Citadel Securities offered a similarly ambitious culture, but also a completely new domain, which is very exciting for me.” Jackie Scharnick, Citadel’s communications director, said Quazi would pass on an interview with Fortune so he could “focus on his second day of work.” Introducing the 2025 Fortune Global 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in the world

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