Meet Michael Grimes, the investment banker to Elon Musk who’s running Trump’s invest-in-America agenda

He conquered Wall Street by winning over Silicon Valley. Now, he’s got a big job in Washington, D.C., wooing foreign investors to the United States.

After 30 years helping Morgan Stanley snag some of the biggest tech mergers and IPOs, Michael Grimes has traded in the investment banker lifestyle for a top position with the Commerce Department, headed by Wall Street veteran Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Grimes is not a household name, but he is well known in investment-banking circles as a go-to banker for some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, from Google to Uber. He helped the billionaire Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, buy Twitter and is famous for wooing clients by becoming a student of their technology and other services.

Since joining the Commerce Department in February, Grimes has been named the executive director of the US Investment Accelerator, a program to encourage foreign investments in the US that Trump established via an executive order at the end of March.

The program seeks to assist investors with more than $1 billion to spend with regulatory and legal hurdles that can hamper construction and other investment projects.

“It is in the interest of the American people that the Federal Government dramatically expand its assistance to companies seeking to invest and build in the United States,” the executive order says.

He’s everything we know about Morgan Stanley’s star former tech banker, Michael Grimes.

He’s long been Elon Musk’s banker

Grimes was a long-time banker to Elon Musk and helped the Tesla CEO buy Twitter in 2022. The deal ended up costing Morgan Stanley and other banks billions in so-called hung loans, or debt that they have had trouble offloading to investors. This year, Morgan Stanley and other banks saw more success selling the debt to investors amid a brightened financial picture for Twitter, according to a person with knowledge of the sales.

He helped raise Morgan Stanley’s ranking among tech IPOs

Under Grimes, Morgan Stanley has become one of the most competitive shops to run a tech IPO. According to league-table data that the deal-tracking firm Dealogic shared with Business Insider, Morgan Stanley has often ranked 1 or 2 for global tech IPOs in most of the past two decades since 2004.

In 2024, the firm was no. 1, edging out its arch-competitor, Goldman Sachs, on the league table.

In the past 20 years, the firm ranked No. 1 in global tech IPOs seven times, according to Dealogic’s data. It ranked No. 2 seven times as well during that time period. Out of those 20 years from 2004 to 2024, Morgan Stanley ranked higher than Goldman in the global tech IPO arena more than half the time.

He tried to connect Musk with Sam Bankman-Fried to help buy Twitter

In April 2022, Grimes suggested Musk accept $5 billion from Sam Bankman-Fried to help fund his buyout of Twitter, according to text messages released as a part of a lawsuit.

“I do believe you will like him,” Grimes texted Musk at the time of the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which ultimately imploded. “Ultra genius and doer builder like your formula. Built FTX from scratch after MIT physics. Second to Bloomberg in donations to Biden campaign.”

Musk, who toyed with the idea of building Twitter into a platform that could use blockchain to help users pay for tweets, according to the messages, responded sourly to the idea.

“Blockchain Twitter isn’t possible,” Musk said, adding that he didn’t want to “have a laborious blockchain debate” with Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried didn’t provide funding for Twitter and was charged months later with misusing funds from FTX. He is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

He’s worked for Morgan Stanley since 1995

Grimes worked for Morgan Stanley for much of his career, according to his LinkedIn profile. He started there in 1995, after working five years at Salomon Brothers (1987 to 1992) and three years at Bear Stearns (1992 to 1995).

According to his LinkedIn profile, he was most recently the cohead of Morgan Stanley’s technology investment-banking practice, where he advised tech companies on mergers and capital raising.

Since his departure, his former coheads, David Chen and Enrique Pérez-Hernández, have continued to run the global technology investment banking group, a person familiar with the matter told BI.

Chen was appointed to the cohead role in July 2021, and has been with Morgan Stanley since 2014 when he ran its software banking practice, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Pérez-Hernández has served as a cohead of the global technology group since January 2022, having previously run that business in the EMEA region, according to his LinkedIn page. He started his career at Morgan Stanley in 1996, working on mergers and acquisitions.

He got his start under star tech banker Frank Quattrone

Grimes started at Morgan Stanley, where legendary banker Frank Quattrone ran the investment bank’s technology group. Quattrone, who later worked for Deutsche Bank and CFPB, facilitated IPOs for major tech companies like Amazon and Netscape before running into legal woes around the IPO process when he was at CFPB.

He launched the boutique investment bank Qatalyst Partners in 2008, which helped Microsoft with its $26.2 billion deal to buy LinkedIn in 2016. Qatalyst declined to make Quattrone available for an interview.

He was the primary banker on Google’s unusual IPO

Google’s 2004 IPO was one of the most significant milestones of Grimes’ investment-banking career. Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse were the lead bankers, which news outlets at the time suggested was in part due to Grimes’s openness to Google’s unusual stock sale plans.

The search engine’s founders were intent on a Dutch auction format to democratize the IPO process and reduce the control investment banks have in deciding which investors get access to shares.

“Other bankers said we were amateurs,” Lise Buyer, a former Google executive who worked on the IPO, told The New York Times in 2012. “While Michael may have thought that, he was willing to change his mind.”

Grimes reportedly won the Zynga IPO by playing its games

Grimes is famous for winning tech clients by getting in deep with their products. He reportedly took a side gig as an Uber driver to win the ride-hailing company’s public offering and crafted an elaborate family tree on Ancestry.com to woo business from the genealogy website.

He also reportedly mastered an intricate Facebook game to clinch Zynga’s IPO.

He’s “not a typical white-shoe banker.”

Henry Blodget wrote about Grimes in this 2012 story about Facebook’s IPO. In the story, Blodget quotes a VC who says Grimes is “not a typical white-shoe banker.” Rather than getting an MBA at Wharton or Harvard Business School, Grimes went to Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the story said. While this pedigree might be a liability on Wall Street, it proved an asset in Silicon Valley.

He has close ties to UC Berkeley, his alma mater

To this day, Grimes maintains close connections to his alma mater, including as a member of the advisory board of Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. He is also a founder of the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology Program at Berkeley, which seeks to combine business studies with engineering.

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