When auto executives learned last year that President Trump’s punishing tariffs on foreign car parts were set to cost their companies billions of dollars, they were rattled.
Eager to lessen the blow, they began calling and visiting Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in his spacious, wood-paneled office near the White House, where they negotiated, complained and cajoled in talks that stretched on for months.
Then, in October, there came a breakthrough: Mr. Lutnick and his aides informed the automakers that the administration would offer a credit on auto part tariffs for American-made cars, retroactive to when the levies began in May 2025, according to six industry executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
What happened next would leave them flabbergasted, with billions of dollars fewer than they had anticipated — and would drive home the sense that Mr. Lutnick, a 64-year-old billionaire, was a commerce secretary unlike any in recent memory.
In a freewheeling first year in office, Mr. Lutnick, one of President Trump’s most influential deputies, has used the power of the federal government in unorthodox and aggressive ways. Some of his tactics have been creative. Others were blunt-force. Still others were downright outlandish.
All of them were honed during decades at the helm of the Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, a period in which he amassed wealth and prominence and assumed leadership positions at a dizzying array of corporate entities, at least 818 in all.
Now, as Mr. Lutnick presides over a broad and important agenda, from planning the 2030 census to regulating technology flows to rivals like China, a close examination of those companies’ dealings offers lessons on how he has operated as commerce secretary.
Drawing on dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of records related to Mr. Lutnick’s career, the review shows him to be an intuitive deal maker with an appetite for risk and a willingness to walk up to ethical lines. It also reveals that he has acted as a steward of firms that have paid more than $50 million in penalties for money laundering, misleading disclosures and other offenses.
By turns charming and caustic, Mr. Lutnick as commerce secretary has kept negotiating partners off balance, pressuring foreign countries and American companies alike into making concessions while pushing legal boundaries in seeking new revenue for the government.
A Commerce Department spokesman said Mr. Lutnick “has delivered important wins for the American people,” including “bringing manufacturing back to the American soil” and securing investment commitments from Japan.
But his approach has sown uncertainty for the automakers and others, leaving officials at home and abroad to ask: What are these tactics all about? And where did they come from?
Loss and Profit
At Cantor, Mr. Lutnick came of age in the “rough and tumble” world of voice-trading treasury brokers — brash men shouting prices on trading floors, said Rupak Ghose, who worked at a competing financial firm.
“Howard was a hustler, an opportunist and someone who was willing to push the boundaries,” said Mr. Ghose, who now writes and advises on financial technology. “He’s an entrepreneur who will find a way to make some money somewhere, right?”
In an early example of his bare-knuckle tactics, Mr. Lutnick took control of his firm from an ailing Mr. Cantor while still in his 30s, a move that an adviser to Mr. Cantor’s wife described as a “palace coup.”
In the following years, Mr. Lutnick would lead Cantor through Sept. 11, 2001 — despite losing his younger brother and more than 600 other employees at the firm’s offices in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center — and on to enormous success, earning a reputation as a creative thinker with a penchant for pushing boundaries in pursuit of profit.
Along the way, many of his more than 800 corporate entities would explore new opportunities for Cantor, while others held valuable assets, including a 1950s Jaguar and at least five luxury homes.
Some of the Cantor ventures, like real estate and cryptocurrency, took off. Others, like a foray into the gambling business and an advertising-related investment alongside the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, did not.
Even amid the successes, Cantor and its affiliates were sometimes accused of breaking rules. Companies linked to the firm paid more than $50 million in law enforcement penalties for money laundering, misleading disclosures and other offenses, records show.
In another case, a jury awarded an inventor, Russ Slifer, $400,000 over a patent for a video game controller, after finding that a Cantor affiliate had violated its agreement to buy and license it. Cantor had agreed to generate a set amount of licensing fees, and then buy him out or return the patent if it did not, he said in court filings.
“Cantor decided that it wanted to create a third option; keep the patent and not pay me,” Mr. Slifer wrote in a 2018 LinkedIn post. He said in an interview that he never dealt with Mr. Lutnick personally.
In separate litigation, a trustee for a New York financial broker, Refco Group Ltd., said his firm had invested $8 million in Cantor gambling ventures through one of its affiliates but saw its investment decimated after Cantor transferred the affiliate’s assets to other companies. Some of Refco’s claims were dismissed, and the parties settled in 2019 for undisclosed terms. The trustee declined to comment.
Mr. Lutnick has also battled over money in his private life. He withheld about $500,000 in co-op maintenance on his penthouse at the Pierre, overlooking Central Park, after his unit was damaged in a storm. (A representative said he had done so on advice from his insurer; Mr. Lutnick eventually paid what he owed.)
And at his 40-acre estate in Bridgehampton on Long Island — with its orchard, mini golf course and copy of the “Love” sculpture on a lawn — Mr. Lutnick did not pay the final $1 million that Reis Contracting, a construction company, billed for work on the property, according to a 2024 lien filing. The parties said they were still negotiating.
Mr. Lutnick’s scrappy style and vision endeared him to Mr. Trump, who has also invested in real estate and gambling, paid fines to regulators and indulged in over-the-top luxury while haggling over bills. Both men have also formed connections with cryptocurrency operators who have been accused of wrongdoing.
But Mr. Lutnick’s ascent in the administration was as contentious as his rise in business had been. He jockeyed with Scott Bessent for the treasury secretary post but lost out.
And, although he divested his business interests in September, his past disputes trailed him until he took office.
After an air-conditioning hose snapped and caused flooding at one of his properties, a 25th-floor condo at the St. Regis Bal Harbour in Miami, Mr. Lutnick collected nearly $12 million in an insurance payment but ignored the building’s request to reimburse it for more than $145,000 in damage to common areas and elevators, court filings show.
At one point, Mr. Lutnick attempted to make a deal: He would pay for the damage if he was allowed to combine two vestibules outside his apartment into one, according to private emails reviewed by The New York Times. That deal was rejected, the emails show.
He still hadn’t paid by the time he was confirmed as commerce secretary early last year. The parties settled in November for an undisclosed sum.
Mr. Lutnick’s representative said he eventually got permission to combine the vestibules.
Rocky Relations
People who have worked closely with Mr. Lutnick in government describe him as a shrewd negotiator who eyes every contract for signs he could be ripped off.
But his insistence on such personal scrutiny has led to bottlenecks, and employees complain that some of the department’s functions have slowed to a crawl.
As the face of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on cars and steel, Mr. Lutnick has used his brash style to pressure companies and foreign countries.
But company executives and foreign officials have found him erratic, saying his aggressive style has made for rocky relations.
His harsh remarks about Europe, delivered in front of the king and queen of Belgium and other leaders, offended the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January, prompting her to walk out of a dinner.
“I thought that was just too much and just unnecessarily offensive,” she said later in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t think it was either polite nor appropriate. Full stop.”
More recently, he riled Canadian government officials during trade negotiations by saying publicly that “they suck.”
In July, Japanese officials emerged from talks with Mr. Lutnick believing they had a deal to cap their tariffs at 15 percent. But when the Trump administration announced its new rates later that month, some products, like Japanese beef, had tariffs above 40 percent.
The outcome prompted a backlash in Japan, and the Trump administration ultimately walked back the higher tariffs and refunded some money to Japanese firms.
Analysts have also questioned the big-dollar investments that Mr. Lutnick has claimed as part of a trade and investment deal with Japan. Japanese companies have promised to invest significantly more in the United States in energy and manufacturing projects, but the administration has sometimes boasted of investments companies would have made anyway.
During Mr. Trump’s visit to Tokyo in October, Japanese executives listened as a smiling Mr. Lutnick told the president they had almost reached a $550 billion commitment.
But some of the investments announced that day were ideas that Japan was broadly interested in, not concrete plans. And some senior Japanese executives said they first learned the details of their purported commitments that evening.
Kurt Tong, a former U.S. diplomat in Japan and managing partner at the Asia Group, said the idea of Japan investing $550 billion over the next three years was “aspirational,” noting that, since 1980, Japan’s total investment in the United States was $754 billion.
Mr. Lutnick has applied similar pressure on companies that formerly turned to the Commerce Department to help promote their business. He forced recipients of funding from the CHIPS program — $39 billion that Congress allocated for building computer chip factories — to renegotiate contracts signed under the Biden administration.
He halted payments to companies as he pushed them to agree to what he said were better terms, like investing more in the United States — or, in the case of Intel, giving the government some of its stock. Chip companies like Micron and TSMC have pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment to Mr. Lutnick, numbers tallied by his department show.
But four tech industry executives said they had counseled their colleagues against future meetings with the Commerce Department, for fear that Mr. Lutnick would exhort them to give the government equity in their companies or make other concessions.
Mr. Lutnick has also channeled chip funding allocated by Congress into what he has called the United States Investment Accelerator, an office staffed by former Wall Street executives that operates as a sort of strategic investment fund.
In some cases, the investments have generated concerns about conflicts of interest.
Last year, the Commerce Department took a stake in a minerals company that had also attracted investment by a firm run in part by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
It also did a $1.6 billion deal with a rare earth minerals company that simultaneously raised money through Cantor, Mr. Lutnick’s former firm, which his sons now help run. The companies and the administration have denied any favoritism.
Taking a Cut
As in the private sector, Mr. Lutnick has also looked to generate income in unorthodox ways, and not always successfully.
In December, he joined the president at the White House to kick off the “Trump Gold Card,” which would expedite immigration applications for foreign citizens who pay $1 million. “Why should we take people who are below average?” he said on CNBC.
(Mr. Lutnick said at a hearing on April 23 that just one applicant had been approved.)
Mr. Lutnick, a former inventor who filed for hundreds of patents during his business career, also took a keen interest in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which falls under his department.
He drew criticism for a proposal to take a cut of profits that academic institutions earn on patents that emerge from federal grants.
“You know what we get? Zero,” Mr. Lutnick told Axios in September. “I think if we fund it and they invent a patent, the United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit.”
Mr. Lutnick also helped fashion a legal loophole allowing the U.S. government to take a 25 percent cut of Nvidia’s A.I. chip sales to China, circumventing a congressional ban on taxing goods exported to other countries. But because of opposition to the idea from China, none of the chips have yet been sold.
At an April hearing, senators also expressed concern that Mr. Lutnick could use funding that Congress had appropriated to establish a nationwide broadband system for other purposes.
The Commerce Department overhauled previous plans for the broadband program and directed more business to Starlink, a satellite internet company operated by Elon Musk, who worked closely with Mr. Lutnick last year when Mr. Musk oversaw the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
A Commerce Department official said that the department had used a “tech-neutral approach” to deploy the money with the best mix of technology and saved U.S. taxpayers more than $20 billion “for the exact same outcome.”
Mr. Lutnick has also maintained a close relationship with the president, meeting up for ice cream and talking late at night on the phone.
But some of his disruptive maneuvers have caused friction with other cabinet officials, and the president has expressed frustration with actions by the commerce secretary that have benefited Mr. Lutnick’s family.
In a statement, a White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said Mr. Lutnick “has played an instrumental role in President Trump’s enormous success to put America First.”
Mr. Lutnick’s dealings with the automakers showed how his actions can ripple out to affect entire industries.
In October, after the lengthy talks about the tariffs, Mr. Lutnick and his deputies told the automakers they would get a credit retroactive to May, according to the six industry executives.
In an earnings call on Oct. 23, Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, thanked Mr. Trump and his team for the credit. The tariffs would still cost Ford $1 billion, but that was half as much as previously thought.
Then things changed. In late December, the automakers were told that the credit would start six months later than they had been told. Privately, executives said they were surprised and felt misled. But they were unwilling to speak out publicly against Mr. Lutnick because he still holds great sway over their business interests.
The sudden shift would cost the automakers hundreds of millions of dollars each — and much more in the case of Ford. Three executives said they believed the administration was hesitant to return such a large sum of money.
A representative for Mr. Lutnick said he had never promised that the credits would be retroactive.
“While not every call goes our way, we have greatly appreciated Secretary Lutnick’s willingness to listen to Ford as America’s top auto producer and find creative solutions to tough problems,” a Ford spokesman, Mark Truby, said.
On Feb. 10, Mr. Farley said on an earnings call that the “unexpected and late-year change” meant tariffs would cost Ford $2 billion last year — double the previous forecast.
He didn’t single out anyone for blame.
On Feb. 11, Mr. Farley and the chief executive of General Motors, Mary Barra, both turned up at Mr. Lutnick’s chateau-style mansion in Washington to mingle with him at a winter party.
Eric Lipton, River Akira Davis and Tyler Pager contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities.
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