David Solomon will succeed Lloyd Blankfein as Goldman Sachs’ chief executive officer beginning on Oct. 1, 2018, the investment bank announced in a statement on Tuesday. Solomon will also take over as chairman once Blankfein retires at the end of this year.
So who is David Solomon? The 56-year-old was appointed as Goldman Sachs’ president and co-chief operating officer in 2016 and prior to that served as global co-head of the bank’s investment banking division starting in 2006.
Solomon’s roots in investment banking go much deeper than his time at Goldman Sachs, however.
After graduating from Hamilton College, the Hartsdale, New York-native began working at Irving Trust, a wholesale bank that was eventually acquired by Bank of New York. In 1986 he moved on to Drexel Burnham, a formidable Wall Street investment bank, where he worked as a paper salesman and later in junk bonds. It was Solomon’s latter work that eventually led him to join Bear Stearns, where he led the bank’s junk bonds division.
Although some of his contemporaries believed that he was on the leadership track at Bear, Solomon’s work with Jon Winkelried, the co-head of Goldman’s bond division in the late 1990s, led him to leave his job at Bear in 1999 for a partner position running Goldman’s leveraged finance team. From there, Solomon has done nothing but climb through the ranks.
Investment banking isn’t Solomon’s only love. He also moonlights as an electronic dance music D.J., under the stage name of D.J. D-Sol. Earlier this year, he dropped his first release, “Don’t Stop,” a remix of the Fleetwood Mac song of the same name. The song currently has over 1.2 million plays on Spotify.