It’s official. David Solomon will succeed Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as the Wall Street firm’s new CEO. The firm made the announcement on Tuesday, saying Solomon will become CEO and join the board on Oct. 1.
Solomon’s ascension to CEO was largely expected after he was named in March as the sole president of Goldman, following the departure of his co-president Harvey Schwartz. With the formal announcement, Solomon can now begin to make changes to his leadership team.
Blankfein will remain chairman through the end of the year, and then take the title of senior chairman after his retirement.
“David is the right person to lead Goldman Sachs,” Blankfein said in the firm’s statement. “He has demonstrated a proven ability to build and grow businesses, identified creative ways to enhance our culture and has put clients at the center of our strategy.”
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Blankfein, who once joked that he would die at his desk, was the longest-serving Wall Street CEO after JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon. Taking the reigns of Goldman in 2006, Blankfein, a former gold salesman, navigated the firm through the financial crisis and the subsequent fallout in which the firm was demonized and called the “vampire squid” of finance.
He later helped improve Goldman’s public image, serving as an elder statesman of sorts for the industry. Under Blankfein, Goldman has expanded away from its roots as a pure investment bank and into new areas such as its consumer banking business, Marcus.
Raised in a housing project in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, he attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School through financial aid.
Solomon cut his teeth as a banker at Bear Stearns before joining Goldman as a partner in 1999. He ran the bank’s leveraged finance unit and rose up the ranks of the the investment banking business with a reputation for being Goldman’s point man on many key client relationships, including those with 3M, Disney’s Bob Iger, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.
He’s also known for his work to address gender imbalance within Goldman’s workforce, and for spearheading a task force to try and retain junior bankers.
Solomon is also known for his unorthodox hobby: production of electronic dance music. Solomon, known as DJ D-Sol, recently released his first track, a dance remix of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit “Don’t Stop.”
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