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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
YOU SEE THE CONFETTI before you see him: It swirls over the dance
floor as a parade arrives in his honor—leotard-clad servers bearing
a glow-in-the-dark bottle of Don Julio and a billboard that reads
“D SOL.” It’s then, at half past midnight, at the LIV nightclub in
the basement of Miami’s Fontainebleau hotel, that the chief execu-
tive of Goldman Sachs emerges, picks up a chunky pair of white
headphones, and steps behind the turntables and into his disc
jockey alter ego.
It’s the last Saturday in October, which means it’s Halloween in
South Beach, and the club has been made over into an apocalyptic
Area 51; the crowd has shown up in a mix of extraterrestrial outfits
along with devil horns, bunny ears, and Dracula capes. (When I ar-
rived, I’d given David Solomon’s name at the door, eliciting nothing
but a blank look from the bouncer. “D-Sol?” He nodded and opened
the velvet rope.) Solomon, brow furrowed, looks comparatively
sober in a black T-shirt, white pants, and pink Converse low-top
Chuck Taylors. Behind him in the DJ booth, a couple of women
appear to be dressed as the poo emoji, a costume they’ve acces-
sorized with rolls of toilet paper and a plunger. For the next hour,
Solomon will entertain the revelers, occasionally pumping his fist as
he mixes rock guitar riffs from Guns N’ Roses and the White Stripes
with 1990s hip-hop and wait-for-the-drop dance beats. You can
feel the bass pulse through your rib cage, punctuated by blasts from
cryogenic fog cannons and strobing lasers. Solomon bops along,
his hands on the knobs. Then he drops a Bingo Players ditty whose
lyrics consist primarily of the cheeky refrain, “Everybody wants to
know how little I care, how little I care.”
It’s hard not to interpret it as a droll retort to anyone who would
question whether the CEO of Wall Street’s most storied institu-
tion—who sipped tequila at the club until almost 3 a.m.—belongs
in such a hotspot while the rest of the Goldman Sachs board is pre-
sumably asleep. Solomon was outed as DJ D-Sol by the New York
Times in 2017, when he was still one of two copresidents gunning
for the top job at the firm. Known at the office as an über-profes-
sional, hard-charging manager with little patience for small talk,
Solomon was anxious that people would no longer take him seri-
ously—mistakenly equating the side gig with some sort of midlife
crisis. Some advisers told him to hang it up. “I thought for a min-
ute, Well, can I do this, can I not do this?” recalls Solomon, who
donates the proceeds from his gigs and Spotify
plays to drug-addiction-related philanthro-
pies. (He says the total he has raised is in the
six figures.) Those doubts soon dispersed,
especially after his boss at the time, then-CEO
Lloyd Blankfein, and others endorsed it. “You
know what, it’s who I am, and nobody would
tell me not to play golf,” Solomon says now.
“And why shouldn’t I—because I’m a CEO?”
Solomon’s irreverence, even disdain, for
The Way Things Have Always Been Done,
feather-ruffling and polarizing though it
may be for the bank’s old-timers, is also the
defining quality that has put him atop the
venerable Goldman Sachs. Shortly after his
first anniversary as CEO in October, the bank
celebrated its 150th birthday; it’s the oldest of
the big Wall Street banks to still operate un-
der its original name. At a billionaire- studded
cocktail party in New York to commemorate
the occasion, Solomon, with a shade of self-
deprecation, praised the firm’s tradition of
leaders who were “always, up to this point, the
right people at the right time.”
His time is shaping up to be one character-
ized by historic transformation, as Wall Street
undergoes an unprecedented technological
revolution—and Goldman, in the view of some
analysts, may undergo greater change than
any other big bank. It comes on the heels of
Blankfein’s dozen-year tenure, which started in
glory and ended in unprecedented uncertainty.
In the years leading up to the financial crisis,
Goldman Sachs made astronomical returns
on the back of high-risk trades—then reversed
some of those bets sooner than others did, rid-
ing out the crash on top of Wall Street. Gold-
man turned a profit in 2008, then racked up
record-high earnings in 2009. That rainmak-
ing afforded its leaders a certain leeway with
shareholders. So long as they delivered the re-
turns, investors tolerated their opaque financial
disclosures and lavish expenditures on pay and
perks. “They were really the kings and queens
of Wall Street, they did so well,” says Mike
Mayo, a bank analyst with Wells Fargo.
But the decade since has been a different
story. Financial regulation and the rise of elec-
tronic trading have dampened profits. Market-
making in assets like bonds and commodities,