Simon’s autobiography, published after his death in 2000, includes a section attributed to Salomon in which he says he was “dumb” to pick Gutfreund over Simon to succeed him: “Bill would have stood up to those people who were only interested in the immediate dollar. If I had hired Bill and told him he was the heir apparent, we’d still be a partnership and we’d be beating everybody’s brains out.”

Successor’s Fall

Gutfreund’s early success in growing the renamed Salomon Inc. led BusinessWeek to declare him “King of Wall Street” in a 1985 cover story. His reign ended with his departure in 1991, after the company admitted violating U.S. Treasury Department auction rules by placing orders for securities in the name of customers who hadn’t authorized them.

In a 1991 interview with the Associated Press, William Salomon expressed his displeasure at the direction of his former firm.

“In my time, the customer was God, and we would no more take advantage of him than we’d fly out the window,” he said, according to AP. “We always felt that if we did the right thing the profits would take care of themselves.”

Early Life

William Roger Salomon was born on April 2, 1914, in New York City. Four years earlier, his father, Percy, and Percy’s brothers, Arthur and Herbert, had left their father’s money- brokerage company to go into business themselves, taking their father’s clerk, Ben Levy, with them.

Their firm was Salomon Brothers & Hutzler, so named because they added broker Morton Hutzler, who had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Hutzler was dropped from the name in 1970.

In 1933, 19-year-old William joined the family firm, having graduated from the King School in Stamford, Connecticut. Rather than attend college, he wanted to enter the workforce so he could marry his high-school sweetheart, Virginia Foster. They were married from 1937 until her death in 2008, and had two children.

Salomon became a bond salesman and made partner in 1944, just before leaving for two years of military service. His last name notwithstanding, in the early 1950s he “seemed destined for a comfortable, respectable but not necessarily outstanding career at the firm,” Sobel wrote in his account of the firm’s history.