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Millennium hires one of Citadel’s longtime stockpickers

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Daniel Mazur’s near-decade-long run at $66 billion hedge fund Citadel is a lifetime in the cutthroat hedge fund world, but his time is finally up at Ken Griffin’s firm.

A person familiar with the move told Business Insider that Mazur, a stockpicker for Citadel’s Global Equities unit since the summer of 2016, is joining Izzy Englander’s Millennium as a senior portfolio manager.

Citadel and Millennium declined to comment.

A person close to Citadel told Business Insider the manager liquidated Mazur’s portfolio earlier this year and promoted two people under him — Brad Gemberling and Greg Fitter — to portfolio manager roles.

Mazur is based out of Chicago and spent close to 12 years at San Francisco-headquartered Harvest Capital Strategies before joining Citadel. He did not immediately respond to several requests for comment.

It’s unclear what Mazur’s deal from Millennium will pay him. The war for investing talent, particularly among the big four multistrategy firms, Millennium, Citadel, Point72, and Baylasny, has ramped up the costs across the industry.

PMs typically receive guaranteed payouts in their contracts, but if an individual a firm wants to cut instead resigns and joins another firm, they forfeit that compensation. Often, the firm that hires the PM will take into account the compensation forfeited and make the individual whole with a sign-on bonus or another form of payout.

Millennium, which has more than 6,600 employees and hundreds of investing teams, continues to add to its roster. The firm poached Goldman Sachs’ cohead of global equities, Erdit Hoxha, last month to join its Office of the CIO, which oversees its legions of trading teams.

Citadel’s Global Equities unit, run by Justin Lubell, lost two top talent recruiters last year: first, Alex Topkins, and then Laura Sterner. Sterner had only been at the firm for two months, Business Insider previously reported.

Still, the unit has brought on fresh investing talent this year, the person close to the Miami-based firm said. Global Equities poached Spencer Washburn, a former analyst at Millennium, to manage a book. His LinkedIn states he started in February in the firm’s New York offices as a portfolio manager.




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

Trump says he’s declassifying files about aliens and UFOs. That’s going to make some longtime betters on Polymarket very rich.

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President Donald Trump says he is directing federal agencies to declassify UFO files. For traders betting on aliens, that could mean a very earthly payday.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday night.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump took aim at former President Barack Obama, accusing him of improperly discussing classified material when speaking about extraterrestrial life on a recent podcast.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that Obama “gave classified information” and wasn’t “supposed to be doing that,” adding that he could get him “out of trouble” by declassifying the relevant files.

Obama said in a tongue-in-cheek exchange with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen last week that aliens are “real” and that they’re not “being kept” at Area 51. He later clarified in an Instagram post that there was no evidence during his presidency that aliens “have made contact with us.”

Aliens have always had a niche following. In prediction markets, aliens are tradable assets.

On the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket, guessing about aliens has become a high-volume betting category. Traders have poured millions of dollars into whether the US will confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life.

One of the platform’s largest markets asks whether the US will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. The market has drawn more than $4 million in trading volume as of Thursday.

Betting activity has also centered on whether a Trump administration would declassify UFO files before 2027, with odds climbing above 80% in December.

Polymarket users also placed bets on other extraterrestrial theories, including whether mysterious drones spotted over New Jersey were aliens.

If the files are released and contain anything definitive, longtime alien bettors may finally cash in.

Notable speculation about aliens and UFOs

In November 2024, unidentified drones were seen flying at night over New Jersey and other East Coast states.

The mysterious sightings unsettled residents and drew questions from local officials, fueling a wave of speculation about what — or who — was in the sky. Alien theories quickly gained traction.

At that time, Trump said the government “knows what is happening” but wasn’t sharing it.

“For some reason, they don’t want to comment. I think they’d be better off saying what it is. Our military knows, and our president knows, and for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense,” he said at Mar-a-Lago.

“Something strange is going on,” he added.

A Facebook group titled “New Jersey Mystery Drones — let’s solve it” has grown to more than 81,000 members as of writing. Users in the group continue to float the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement, alongside speculation about commercial or military craft.




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Bob Iger’s longtime billionaire nemesis, Nelson Peltz, is unimpressed with Disney’s new CEO

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Close to two years after losing a proxy fight to longtime Disney boss Bob Iger, billionaire investor Nelson Peltz is still a skeptic.

Activist investor and Trian Partners founder Nelson Peltz said at a Florida event on Tuesday that Disney picked Josh D’Amaro as its new CEO because “Iger needs a reason to stay on.”

By Peltz’s telling, D’Amaro’s lack of entertainment experience — he has run the parks and experiences side of the Mouse House since 2020 — will give Iger an excuse to stick around.

Peltz said to expect an announcement from Iger saying, “Josh doesn’t know anything about the movie business, the entertainment business; therefore, I’m going to stay on and guide him.”

“Poor Josh,” Peltz said, with a laugh.

D’Amaro’s appointment as CEO was approved by Disney’s board in a unanimous vote led by former Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who managed his own succession at the bank.

D’Amaro “demonstrated a strong vision for the company’s future and a deep understanding of what makes Disney unique in an ever-changing marketplace,” Gorman said in a statement, and the division he leads was more than 70% of the company’s operating income last quarter. Iger, meanwhile, called D’Amaro the “right person to become our next CEO.”

Iger will remain at the company in a senior advisor role until the end of the year. This is Iger’s second retirement from Disney. He previously tapped Bob Chapek, who’d also run Disney’s experiences business before becoming CEO in early 2020. Iger returned from retirement in 2022 after Chapek’s bumpy, tumultuous tenure.

Peltz waged a proxy battle with Disney to gain board seats in early 2024, while criticizing its streaming division’s losses, unstable stock, and uncertain succession plans. He sold his Disney shares after shareholders voted to support Iger.

Peltz said D’Amaro has his work cut out for him when he takes over on March 18.

“I hope he’s given the opportunity to do it,” Peltz said.




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Trump taps a longtime agency economist as the next Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner

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President Donald Trump’s monthslong and contentious search for a new commissioner to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics may be ending.

On a Truth Social post on Friday, Trump announced that he intends to nominate Brett Matsumoto, a longtime agency economist, to lead the BLS.

The BLS commissioner role has been vacant since August, when Trump fired Erika McEntarfer after the release of a jobs report showing weak employment growth. Trump alleged, without providing evidence, that the data had been politically manipulated. The allegation and removal have since undermined public trust in one of the federal government’s most closely watched statistical agencies, which is supposed to remain nonpartisan.

The agency has roughly 2,000 employees, and the commissioner is its only appointed position. The commissioner’s role carries a four-year term and requires Senate confirmation.

Before Matsumoto, the White House previously nominated EJ Antoni, a Heritage Foundation economist, for the job, but later withdrew the nomination after it became clear Antoni lacked sufficient support for Senate confirmation.

Who is Brett Matsumoto?

Matsumoto is a career economist with deep ties to the agency he would lead if confirmed.

Based on Matsumoto’s LinkedIn profile, he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Delaware before earning his doctorate in economics from the University of North Carolina in 2015. Since then, he has been working at the BLA as a supervisory research economist. Multiple academic papers under his name can be found covering issues such as consumer expenditure and inflation measurement. Over the past year, he has been on assignment at the Council of Economic Advisers.

Matsumoto is not very active on social media. A Facebook account under his name shows that his profile picture used to be a photo with Ivanka Trump back in August 2020. His most recent profile photo features him alongside a tabby cat.

In a post on Truth Social late Friday, Trump said he was confident Matsumoto had the expertise to “QUICKLY fix the long history of issues at the BLS on behalf of the American People.”

Several economists posted online that they believe Matsumoto could be the right choice.

Claudia Sahm, Chief Economist at New Century Advisors, posted on X that Matsumoto is an “excellent choice” for the commissioner position.

Skanda Amarnath, Executive Director of Employ America, echoed the sentiment on X and said that Matsumoto is “a very thoughtful person who understands the nuts and bolts of data measurement and estimation.”




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Meta hires longtime Apple design leader Alan Dye to run a new Reality Labs creative studio

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Meta has hired longtime Apple design leader Alan Dye to run a new creative studio inside its Reality Labs division, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a series of posts on Threads on Tuesday.

“Today we’re establishing a new creative studio in Reality Labs led by Alan Dye, who has spent nearly 20 years leading design at Apple,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, saying the group will help define “the next generation of our products and experiences.”

Zuckerberg said the studio will bring together “design, fashion, and technology” and that Meta wants to “treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered.”

The goal, he added, is to “elevate design within Meta” by assembling a team with “craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.”

Dye will work alongside several high-profile design leaders. He will report to Meta’s chief technology officer and Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth.

Dye is one of the most prominent figures in Apple’s modern design history. He has led Apple’s design studio since 2015 and has played a key role in shaping the company’s software and the look and feel of many of its devices, including the interfaces for products such as the Apple Watch, iPhone X, and Vision Pro headset.

Most recently, Dye was responsible for Liquid Glass, Apple’s new design across its devices that makes elements of the user interface look transparent.

His team has also worked on a slate of new smart home hardware, according to Bloomberg, which first reported his move to Meta.

Zuckerberg said that Dye will be joined by “another acclaimed design lead from Apple,” Billy Sorrentino, as well as Joshua To, who leads interface design across Reality Labs; industrial design lead Pete Bristol; and metaverse design and art teams led by Jason Rubin.

The CEO framed the move as part of Meta’s push into AI-powered devices such as smart glasses.

“We’re entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices will change how we connect with technology and each other,” Zuckerberg wrote.

While the potential is “enormous,” he said the new studio will focus on making every interaction “thoughtful, intuitive, and built to serve people.”

Earlier this year, Meta hired another Apple engineer, Ruoming Pang, to its new Superintelligence Labs organization. Pang led Apple’s AI models team.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. A Meta spokesperson pointed to Zuckerberg’s posts on Threads.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at pranavdixit@protonmail.com or Signal at 1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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