For a while, as long as money was made, it didnt matter if his bankers didn’t like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon personally. Now, that understanding is reaching a breaking point. jenwieczner reports:
, had openly slagged him at the bank’s annual strategy conference. “God, I wish he’d spend less time on the plane and more time making money,” Blankfein said to a group of about 15 partners at a hotel bar. Soon, theclaimed that Goldman’s board was “starting to reevaluate” its CEO. The gargantuan profits that had protected him were slipping away. The most recent quarter saw a year-over-year decline of more than 60 percent. Senior and arguably irreplaceable talent keeps heading for the exits.
“David’s not likable,” says a longtime colleague of Solomon’s — one of the more diplomatic comments I heard in talking to more than 30 of the CEO’s current and former executives, most of them partners. “He’s a prick,” says another. “Everybody thinks and says he’s a dick,” adds a third. “He’s a tough guy with a very short fuse”; “He dehumanizes you when he talks to you.”
Solomon went to work for firms like Bear Stearns and Drexel Burnham Lambert instead and distinguished himself in Las Vegas dealmaking, impressing billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and, eventually, Goldman Sachs. In 1999, the bank hired him as a partner — a side-door entry that Solomon’s longer-tenured colleagues never let him forget.
Solomon was known to call the partners he disagreed with “idiots” and even curse them out. His colleagues didn’t mind the language so much as how he made them feel: stupid, as if the only way they could possibly stand behind their opinion was if they were dunces who didn’t deserve to be at Goldman Sachs. “He would say something to the effect of, ‘Well, you’re just absolutely wrong about that,’ and he would just shut the debate,” says a former partner.
Solomon, who’d been quietly developing his DJ skills under the tutelage of the New York producer Liquid Todd, decided to perform in Montauk a month before taking office, spinning at Gurney’s for an audience of millennials paying thousands of dollars to sip rosé in cabanas. Thehad outed Solomon’s sideline a year earlier, and Blankfein was still deciding whether it was grounds for amusement or concern. “DJ-ing is not a social hobby,” Blankfein told a number of confidants.
“I really do think he believes he’s cool. But he’s not cool,” says a former employee. “The most fascinating thing about it is that what would make him cool is if he was liked internally. And if he actually leaned into his uncoolness, he’d be more likable.” Goldman also had a flagship venture with Apple to administer its first payment card, and Solomon saw it as a tantalizing new business, a chance to innovate in a market dominated by Chase’s surging Sapphire brand and American Express. For all of Goldman’s consumer products to be viable, he was adamant that Marcus needed to offer a checking account. That would be expensive: Goldman was a latecomer to retail banking and would essentially need to pay customers to bring their money in the door.
In the summer of 2021, Solomon moved his office from the 41st floor — an enclave of mahogany and portraiture with sweeping views of the Statue of Liberty — to the 12th, adjacent to Goldman’s Sky Lobby, the most trafficked area of the firm. Despite the new proximity, many workers found Solomon as remote as ever. This was another way in which the CEO still seemed like an interloper.
Some critics have suggested that perhaps Solomon was too distracted between DJ-ing and taking private planes to the Bahamas to kitesurf to see that Marcus had veered off course. But I think that narrative misses the point. Solomon is a workaholic, a CEO who never takes longer than three hours to respond to emails. It’s not that he wasn’t paying attention; it’s more likely that no one told him.
An even more revealing — and all but unnoticed — exchange happened a few days later. As chair of the board of trustees at his alma mater, Hamilton College, Solomon attended a networking event on campus in early March. Toward the end of the reception, a cluster of seniors approached Solomon with questions about the university’s energy investments. Three of them wrote a letter to the student newspaper, theabout what happened next.
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