Jane Street Group’s journey to the top of Wall Street has been a lucrative ride for its workforce.
The firm doled out $9.38 billion in compensation last year — more than double the amount in 2024 — as the market maker vaulted past its biggest Wall Street rivals, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified citing private information.
Jane Street’s rise has been a boon for the employees and shareholders that have tagged along. On a per-employee basis, that equates to $2.68 million on average — almost seven times as much as rival Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The market-making firm has become a giant in a corner of finance, helping to facilitate trades in assets from stocks to corporate bonds and exchange-traded funds. The company pulled in about $39.6 billion in trading revenue last year — a haul that outranked Wall Street banks and market-making peers.Jane Street’s members’ equity — or the firepower the company uses to support its trading operations without having to tap outside capital — has swelled nearly 2,000% since 2016 to $45 billion, said the people.
That funding provides a steady foundation for the firm to use by capitalizing on market swings and piling into startups at early stages. It’s also helped Jane Street score big on bets on Anthropic PBC, the AI startup that’s received offers for a new funding round that would value the company at about $800 billion or more.
Jane Street also has more capacity it can tap thanks to loans, as well as bonds it issued in the public debt market in recent years.A representative for Jane Street declined to comment.
Founded in 2000, Jane Street got its start trading American depository receipts, and then expanded to exchange-traded funds on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. The firm continued to grow alongside the electronification of asset classes such as corporate bonds, which it can more rapidly buy and sell to help facilitate trading.
The market maker is known for recruiting mathematicians and puzzle aficionados to power its technology. Even Jane Street’s corporate structure is unconventional. While Rob Granieri is one of the last founders still at the firm, the company doesn’t have a chief executive officer or other formal top-down leadership structures. Instead, Jane Street is governed by a few dozen partners who hold equity stakes.
The firm has benefited in some ways because it’s not bound by the same rules that many of the big bank trading desks must follow. Wall Street has long viewed Washington’s matrix of banking regulations as overly complex and burdensome. JPMorgan Chase & Co. recently warned that new regulatory proposals would force the bank to hold onto $20 billion more of capital “for no good reason,” according to Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon.Jane Street also is able to plow some of its money into stakes in companies such as Anthropic. The firm is also in funding talks for cloud-computing startup Fluidstack Ltd. and recently invested an additional $1 billion in AI cloud services provider CoreWeave Inc.
Most bank trading desks and some market-making peers don’t count such long-term investments in their trading results. Goldman had a group making bets with its own balance sheet, but spun that business out of its trading unit a few years back.Jane Street has been able to maintain its lead despite facing controversy in recent years. In July, regulators in India accused the firm of manipulating markets while running what had once been one of its most lucrative trading strategies. Jane Street has denied those allegations.
The firm also urged a judge to throw out a separate lawsuit accusing it of trading on inside information ahead of the $40 billion crash of cryptocurrencies associated with Terraform Labs.
Despite those recent challenges, the firm keeps topping its previous records for revenue and outpacing peers. Jane Street’s 2025 trading haul beat Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, which set its own firm record with $12.2 billion of trading revenue last year.It’s set to expand even more. Jane Street recently placed an offer to lease a new London office that will double its footprint in the UK capital.