Michael B. Greenwald is a senior advisor to the Atlantic Council’s president and chief executive officer and a nonresident senior fellow with the Council’s GeoEconomics Center. He is also a co-chair of the Atlantic Council’s Councilors Program. In addition, he is the global head of financial innovation and digital assets at Amazon Web Services. There, he heads up global executive relations for the company, pioneering thought-leadership on artificial intelligence for the Worldwide Public Sector Business. Greenwald focuses on working with the US government and international governments to incorporate cloud computing into their systems as well as drive responsible emerging-technology innovation and implementation within the public-sector market. 

In 2023, Greenwald was appointed by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to represent Amazon on the CFTC’s Technology Advisory Committee. He helps the CFTC carry out its mission of fostering open, transparent, competitive, and financially sound markets and examining the impact and implications of technological innovation in the financial services, derivatives, and commodity markets. He coauthored an Amazon publication titled, “The convergence of artificial intelligence and digital assets: A new dawn for financial infrastructure.” 

Prior to Amazon, he was a managing director of digital asset education and chief geopolitical risk officer for global asset management firm AlTi Global. He previously worked for the US Treasury Department for almost a decade. He served in senior policy and intelligence roles in Europe and Africa for two presidential administrations and three Treasury secretaries culminating with becoming the first US Treasury attaché to Qatar and Kuwait, acting as the principal financial diplomat to the banking sector in those nations. 

He is an adjunct associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a former adjunct professor at the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies; a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security; deputy director of the Trilateral Commission; member of the Bretton Woods Committee; and senior advisor to the Wharton Cypher Accelerator. He was a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center where he published over fifty articles. 

He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and has a Juris Doctor from Boston University School of Law, a master’s degree from Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, and a BA from George Washington University. Raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, he lives in Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife Nolan and served on the board of the Town of Palm Beach Investment Committee. He was honored by Palm Beach Illustrated as one of the city’s one hundred most influential business leaders in 2021.