By Nishant Kumar | Updated on Jun 12, 2026 at 06:55 PM
Ken Griffin’s Citadel has backed Benjamin Pass’s hedge fund Toms Capital Investment Management in a rare move to allocate cash to an external money manager.
The multistrategy investment firm has given about $500 million to New York-based Toms Capital, people with knowledge of the matter said, asking not to be identified because the details are private. Pass runs an event-driven equity long/short hedge fund and managed $2.8 billion at the end of last year, a regulatory filing showed.
Pass “joins a select group of high-performing external managers to whom we’ve committed capital over the years,” Rock Khanna, Citadel’s chief strategy and transformation officer, said in a statement.
Citadel’s reputation, scale and resources “made the opportunity particularly compelling for us,” Pass said in a separate statement.
Multistrategy funds such as Millennium Management and Qube Research and Technologies routinely farm out capital to external managers as one of the ways to deploy their soaring assets. This source of cash has become one of the most popular ways for aspiring managers to launch their hedge funds or grow their assets. However, Citadel has only occasionally given money to traders who are not its employees.
In 2019, the firm backed the launch of its former portfolio manager Jack Woodruff’s hedge fund Candlestick Capital and also gave money to Melvin Capital Management, which was created by Gabe Plotkin in 2014. Both of them have shut down.
Before founding Toms Capital in 2018, Pass was a portfolio manager at the Family Office where he oversaw their public markets strategy starting in 2013. Prior to that, he ran money for GLG Partners for more than seven years.