In a twist that’s equal parts jaw-dropping and eyebrow-raising, 16-year-old tech wunderkind Kairan Quazi has traded rocket science for quantitative finance – and Elon Musk claims he’s never even heard of him.
Yes, you read that right.
Quazi, the Bangladeshi-American prodigy who made global headlines in 2023 as the youngest engineer ever hired by SpaceX at just 14, has quietly exited the aerospace giant to join Citadel Securities, one of Wall Street’s most elite trading powerhouses. His new role? Quant developer in New York City – where algorithms move markets faster than rockets reach orbit.
And Musk’s response? A dismissive one-liner on X (formerly Twitter): “First time I’ve ever heard of him.”
Ouch.
Whether Musk was joking, misinformed, or simply downplaying a PR headache, the comment only adds to the intrigue surrounding Quazi, a teenager who’s already lived a lifetime of achievements while most of us were still figuring out GCSEs.
A childhood that skipped grades (and logic)
Kairan Quazi isn’t just bright – he’s off-the-charts brilliant. By the age of nine, he’d already left third grade behind to enrol in community college. At ten, he interned at Intel Labs. By eleven, he’d transferred to Santa Clara University, and graduated as its youngest alum in 172 years.
When SpaceX hired him in 2023, it wasn’t just a career move, it was a statement. “A rare company,” Quazi said then, “that doesn’t use age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”
But now, after helping design software for Starlink satellites, yes, the ones beaming internet from space, he’s swapping low Earth orbit for high-frequency trading floors.
The LinkedIn War that made him famous
Long before he coded for rockets, Quazi waged war on bureaucracy.
At 15, LinkedIn locked him out of his account for being under 16. Their reasoning? Age restrictions. His response? Pure fire.
“This is illogical, primitive nonsense.”
He didn’t hold back. Once reinstated, he posted a blistering critique of the traditional education system, calling it a “school factory” that rewards fear, prestige-chasing, and rote memorisation, not real learning.
“Tests don’t measure mastery,” he wrote. “They measure your ability to regurgitate.”
He even invoked ancient philosophers, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, to argue that today’s gatekeeping by age and privilege would horrify minds of old.
Now, he’s proving his point: merit, not milestones, should define opportunity.
Why Wall Street? Because it’s faster than AI
Despite offers from buzzy AI labs in Silicon Valley, places where young coders dream of changing the world with neural nets, Quazi chose Citadel Securities, a firm that handles nearly a third of all US retail stock trades and pulled in $10 billion last year.
Why?
Because in quant finance, results come fast.
“In AI research, you wait months or years to see impact,” Quazi told Business Insider.
“In quant finance? You see it in days.”
It’s a world where milliseconds matter, algorithms trade billions, and intellectual rigour meets instant feedback. For a mind like Quazi’s, hungry for challenge and real-world consequence, it’s the ultimate playground.
And let’s be honest: few 16-year-olds can say they’ve been recruited by Ken Griffin’s financial empire, a firm often described as the MIT of trading.
A full-circle moment in the city that raised his mum
This isn’t just a career shift, it’s personal.
Quazi’s mother once worked in mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street. She grew up in Astoria, Queens. Now, her son lives just a 10-minute walk from Citadel’s gleaming Park Avenue office, navigating the subway instead of being driven to work in Redmond, Washington.
“New York has a very special place in my heart,” he says.
Gone are the days of parental chauffeurs. He’s on his own now, in the city that never sleeps, building code that could move markets before breakfast.
A symbolic win in the war for talent
For Citadel Securities, landing Quazi isn’t just a recruitment win, it’s a statement. In a world where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Musk’s own xAI are hoovering up top young talent, snagging a former SpaceX engineer who once got banned by LinkedIn for being too young? That’s poetic justice.
It signals something powerful: Meritocracy still exists if you’re bold enough to build it.
And for Quazi? This is only the beginning.
At 16, he’s already graduated university, helped launch satellites, challenged tech giants, and chosen his own path, unapologetically.
Now, as he walks into that glass tower on Park Avenue, one thing’s clear: The future isn’t waiting for him. He’s already coding it.
Source: Fortune