Some recently departed Goldman alumni have landed plum jobs in the past year. Former investment-banking head Gregg Lemkau runs Michael Dell’s MSD Partners. Former asset-management chief Eric Lane is now president at tech-investing behemoth Tiger Global. Ex-trading head Pablo Salame was elevated in November to help run $43 billion hedge-fund giant Citadel.
Tiger Global founder Chase Coleman and Citadel’s Ken Griffin routinely see their net worths surge by billions a year on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and their firms are bastions of wealth generation for other top executives.
Goldman’s leaders are keeping careful score. Solomon has personally quizzed some departing veterans on whether money was the main motivation for their decision to call time on their Goldman career.
When seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady bailed on his appearance at Goldman’s partner meeting in Miami last month, the schedule still promised a rare on-stage interview between Solomon and his predecessor, Lloyd Blankfein — two Goldman leaders whose tenures reflect different eras.
Blankfein became a billionaire during his time as CEO. It helped that he already was a senior executive in May 1999, when the firm ended its longtime partnership and went public, positioning a generation of managers for windfalls that swelled as the stock soared. Solomon arrived a few months after that market debut.
Less than a decade later, Blankfein rose to the top job at a moment of Wall Street ebullience, netting $68.5 million in his first full year as CEO in 2007.
Solomon, in contrast, was required to forgo $10 million from his 2020 pay as the board sought measures of accountability from Goldman’s leadership after the firm resolved a criminal probe into Malaysia’s 1MDB bribery scandal.
The SPAC business is one well the company could draw on to augment his pay.
These ventures — special purpose acquisition companies — raise money from the public to go hunting for acquisition targets. The big pull for SPAC managers is what’s known in the business as the “promote” — a compensation structure that typically lets founders acquire 20% of the venture’s shares at a steep discount. Stakes purchased for thousands of dollars can quickly soar into the millions.
Goldman operates an in-house SPAC business even as it advises outsiders on their own. The firm already has rolled out two SPACs and disclosed plans to create several more.