He had been tipped to be Mr Trump’s treasury secretary, a more senior role, but reportedly fell out of favour after pushing the president-elect too hard for the job.
As commerce secretary, he will be responsible for supporting American businesses at home and abroad.
In a statement announcing Mr Lutnick would be commerce secretary, Mr Trump said he would have “direct responsibility” for the US trade representative’s office to “lead our tariff and trade agenda”.
“In his role as co-chair of the Trump-Vance Transition Team, Howard has created the most sophisticated process and system to assist us in creating the greatest administration America has ever seen,” he added.
Mr Lutnick’s rise to the top of Washington politics after a successful career in the business world is testament to his remarkable resilience.
Born to a Jewish history professor and artist in Jericho, New York, Mr Lutnick experienced tragedy young, when his mother died of lymphoma while he was in his senior year of high school.
A year later, in his freshman year of a liberal arts degree at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, his father was also diagnosed with cancer. He died after a nurse accidentally administered him chemotherapy drugs at 100 times the intended dose.
The university’s dean offered him all four years of his education for free – a gesture he has never forgotten.
“They took a bet on me. Not a bet on me when I was Howard Lutnick, and I was a rock star. It was when I was 18 years old,” he told a university alumni event in 2015.
Now worth more than $1.5 billion, and one of the most successful men on Wall Street, Mr Lutnick has become the biggest donor in the school’s history.
He describes a liberal arts education as a “beautiful quest” to “educate the whole being,” and had given $65 million of his fortune to allow others to do the same.
Lutnick’s views on economy scrutinised
This week, the business world’s eyes will not be on the 63-year-old’s life story, but his views on the global economy.
“Me, Elon Musk and Trump are going to figure it out,” he told a podcaster in the days before Nov 5, when Mr Trump won a clean sweep across the nation to take back the White House.
He was referring to the federal deficit, which both Mr Trump and Mr Musk have pledged to tackle after they take office. Sceptics point out that the deficit increased rapidly during Mr Trump’s first term.
Mr Lutnick has also called for “balanced” tariffs, becoming a rare Wall Street backer of Mr Trump’s unorthodox idea to impose protectionist trade policy across the entire US economy, and on all trading partners.
He will be directly responsible for tariff policy at the Commerce Department, and is expected to feed into Mr Trump’s economic policy more broadly. Mr Trump’s treasury secretary is yet to be announced.
In the Trump-Lutnick telling of US economic history, the government’s tax-raising strategy has gone downhill since the 19th century, when almost all federal income was generated by tariffs.