Cantor Fitzgerald

Cantor Fitzgerald is a US investment bank and financial services firm headquartered in New York, with operations spanning fixed-income brokerage, prime brokerage, investment banking, and commercial real estate finance. It is best known outside finance for losing 658 of its roughly 960 New York employees in the 11 September 2001 attacks — the largest single corporate loss of any firm that day. Under CEO Howard Lutnick, the firm recovered through an aggressive rebuild and became a major player in US Treasury securities trading. Lutnick was appointed US Commerce Secretary in the Trump administration in January 2025, creating a direct line between Cantor Fitzgerald's executive suite and the White House.

Cantor Fitzgerald emerged as the largest disclosed donor to Fellowship PAC in the Q1 2026 FEC filing, contributing $10 million in January 2026 — a transfer between closely connected parties given that PAC finance director Mitchell Nobel sits in Cantor's executive structure. The $10 million contribution makes Cantor the institution underwriting Fellowship PAC's primary-intervention strategy, which by April 2026 included $1.75 million in IEs backing Ken Paxton against NRSC-preferred John Cornyn in the Texas Senate runoff.

With Lutnick at Commerce, Cantor Fitzgerald occupies an unusual position: a Wall Street bank whose principal is a sitting cabinet secretary, whose finance executive runs a crypto super PAC funded by the same bank, and whose PAC is actively opposing the Senate Republican establishment. The Paxton buy drew Republican leadership inquiries directed at Lutnick himself. The Cantor-Fellowship connection bridges traditional financial-market capital with the crypto sector's political ambitions in a way no other institution in the 2026 cycle does.