He graduated in 1979 from Douglas College where he spent his first year playing trumpet in the school's music program before switching over to business and finance.
Giustra raised "billions of dollars and developing a loyal following of investors in mining ventures" while at the Vancouver Stock Exchange as broker.
[11] In the early 1980s, Giustra left Merrill Lynch to create a resources-financing group in Europe for the new firm Yorkton Securities.
Other successes included Affliction, Gods and Monsters, Dogma, Crash and the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which turned out to be the studio's highest-grossing film.
Giustra is a major shareholder of Thunderbird Entertainment, a pure play content production studio creating original programming in scripted, factual and animation that includes Atomic Cartoons and Great Pacific Television.
Based in Vancouver, with offices in Los Angeles, Toronto, Ottawa and London, Thunderbird partners with OTT platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime and traditional broadcasters like CBC and Discovery.
Thunderbird's animation company, Atomic Cartoons is producing Last Kids on Earth based on the New York Times best selling book series for Netflix and is in development on Eerie Elementary and Princesses Wear Pants adaptations as well.
Giustra is a major shareholder of Thunderbird Entertainment, a company focused on content and distribution in the television and film sector.
As President and later chairman and chief executive officer of Yorkton Securities in the 1990s, he grew the firm into a leading natural resource investment bank.
Giustra is frequently quoted regarding gold and currency markets in publications such as Globe and Mail, Kitco News, StockHouse.com, GoldEditor.com and his own blog FrankGiustra.com[citation needed] 2019 Order of Canada, C.M.
The Vancouver-based foundation supports initiatives focused on women and children, education, homelessness and refugee resettlement in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada.
Acceso, with support from Giustra, invested start-up capital, built from scratch, and manages agribusinesses in Colombia, El Salvador, and Haiti.
[26] On June 17, 2010, Giustra joined with Carlos Slim and President Clinton to create a $20 million fund to assist small businesses in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
In 2005, the foundation began supporting the International Crisis Group,[28] an independent organization working to prevent and resolve deadly conflict on five continents through analysis and high-level advocacy.
With the support of Giustra, who sits on the executive committee, and contributions that total $10 million, the International Crisis Group is a leading independent, non-partisan, source of analysis and advice to governments and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union, and World Bank on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict.