Citadel founder Ken Griffin used a conference appearance Tuesday to take direct aim at the economic vision behind President Trump's tariff agenda, telling the crowd at a Citadel Securities event that the administration's push to bring factory jobs back to American soil misreads what most Americans actually want to do for a living. "Most people don't want to live that dream," Griffin said, describing the reindustrialized-America pitch as out of step with how U.S. workers think about manufacturing jobs, particularly in sectors like apparel production.
Griffin went further on the tariffs themselves, calling the "America First" trade agenda a "disaster" and labeling it pro-inflation, a sharper break from the administration's framing than many of his fellow financial executives have been willing to make publicly. His core argument is less about tariffs raising consumer prices, a familiar critique, than about the labor assumptions underneath the policy: that there isn't a large pool of American workers waiting to take entry-level factory jobs even if trade barriers made domestic manufacturing more competitive.
The numbers behind the skepticism
The data Griffin's argument leans on shows an economy already near full employment, with the jobless rate at 4.2% and roughly 12.6 million Americans currently working in manufacturing. That sector made up about 7.4% of total U.S. employment in 2025, and projections point to a further slide to 7.2% by 2035, a trend line that runs opposite to the administration's stated ambitions. Moody's economist Mark Zandi has offered a related explanation for why reshored factory jobs are proving hard to fill: native-born unemployment has ticked up even as factory positions, historically filled by immigrant labor, go unfilled, because U.S.-born workers generally won't take those jobs without pay that's substantially higher than what employers can profitably offer.
Robots instead of reshoring
Griffin's own prescription leans toward automation rather than labor. In September, he announced a $3 billion donation to Carnegie Mellon University's Miami campus aimed at advancing robotics and automation technology, a bet that the next wave of American manufacturing competitiveness will come from machines rather than a reversal in how domestic workers feel about factory work. That view sits in tension with warnings from other tech figures about automation's downsides: Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has previously floated the idea of taxing robots specifically to slow the pace at which automation displaces human workers, with the proceeds funding retraining for people pushed out of their jobs. Griffin's comments suggest that, whatever the eventual answer, the debate inside corporate America is increasingly less about whether factory jobs return to the U.S. and more about who, or what, ends up working in them.
