Brandon Lutnick recalled the family losses that shaped his childhood after the Sept. 11 attacks — including the deaths of his uncle and godfather — as Cantor Fitzgerald marked 25 years since 658 of its New York employees were killed.
“I don’t remember 9/11. I was three years old. What I remember is everything that came after,” Lutnick, now chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday.
His father, then CEO Howard Lutnick, survived because he was dropping off Brandon’s older brother Kyle for his first day of kindergarten instead of his usual routine heading straight to Cantor’s offices high in the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
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“My father was dropping off my brother Kyle on his first day of kindergarten,” Brandon Lutnick wrote.
“That is the reason he was not on the 105th floor of the North Tower.”
American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower below Cantor’s offices, killing 658 of the firm’s 960 New York employees.
Another 61 employees at Euro Brokers were also killed, Brandon Lutnick wrote.
Among the dead were Howard Lutnick’s brother Gary — Brandon’s uncle — as well as Brandon’s godfather, Doug Gardner.
“For most of my childhood, I understood 9/11 before I understood the words for it,” Brandon Lutnick wrote.
“There were names in our house before I knew whose they were.”
The attacks nearly wiped out Cantor, which occupied floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower and lost more than two-thirds of its New York workforce.
Brandon Lutnick said outsiders expected the firm to collapse in the aftermath, as it was losing $1 million a day.
Instead, his father pledged 25% of Cantor’s profits for five years and 10 years of health coverage to the families of employees who were killed.
The commitment eventually totaled $180 million, according to Brandon Lutnick.
Cantor also created a standing employment offer for the children of employees it lost, he said, adding that hundreds have since worked at the firm.
“It was not a strategy. It was our promise, and a lesson in what people can deliver to one another when the unthinkable happens,” Lutnick wrote.
Cantor managed to resume electronic trading within days of the attacks, aided by its eSpeed platform and operations outside the World Trade Center, including employees in London who helped service New York clients.
The firm eventually rebuilt and expanded well beyond its roots in government-bond brokerage, spinning out its voice-brokerage operations into BGC Partners in 2004 and becoming a Federal Reserve primary dealer in 2006.
Brandon Lutnick took over as chairman after his father left Cantor in 2025 to become President Trump’s commerce secretary.
In his anniversary message, the younger Lutnick warned that as the attacks pass from living memory into history, Americans risk losing sight of the people behind the staggering death toll.
“The danger of forgetting is not simply that we lose the details of one horrific day,” he wrote.
“It is that we lose what that day taught us.”
He also warned against allowing the victims to become fodder for political fights.
“We cannot let that revisionism turn the people killed that day into a partisan dispute,” Lutnick wrote.
“They were not symbols. They were not policy arguments. They were people.”
Cantor has continued to commemorate the attacks through an annual Charity Day, committing a full day’s revenue to charitable causes around the world in honor of the employees it lost, Brandon Lutnick said.
He said the responsibility for preserving the memory of Sept. 11 will increasingly fall to generations, like his own, that were too young to remember the day firsthand.
“There will come a day when no one is left who remembers seeing the towers standing that morning,” he wrote.
“That passage of time is inevitable. Forgetting is not.”
“I don’t remember September 11th,” Lutnick concluded. “I choose to remember what came after.”