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ket is poised to top out soon. “I don’t think realistically there’s a tre-
mendous amount of upside in the future,” says a recently departed
partner. “I don’t think it will ever be what it used to be.”
Neither Solomon nor his C-suite have explicitly professed an in-
tention to give paychecks a haircut. But the compensation pool they
earmarked for the first nine months of 2019 is 11% lower than it
was for that period last year, a steeper drop than the 7% decline in
revenue. Employees anticipate a flattening phenomenon: “$1 mil-
lion is the new $3 million,” says the former managing director,
adding that this year’s norm for pay for the so-called MD tier—one
rung below partner—may be closer to $750,000, including bonus.
That trend could be cause or effect—or both—of a recent exodus
of partners. About 10% of them have announced their departures
since Solomon took over, and more could leave by the end of the
year. The “thinning out,” as COO Waldron calls it, has created
an opening into which the firm is actively promoting a younger,
forward-thinking generation of executives. Solomon says his only
intention is “that young people get to move up, and people that have
been here for a while don’t stay too long.”
That’s made Solomon popular with the millennial and Gen Z
cohorts who now make up 75% of Goldman Sachs’s workforce—and
there’s a mood among them that Solomon is the change the bank
has been waiting for. At the same time, he aims to make the culmi-
nation of their Goldman Sachs career—the partnership—just that
much harder to attain, by paring partner ranks even further toward
400, from about 440 or so today. It also makes sense when you con-
sider that the partnership ranks grew by some 63% over Blankfein’s
tenure, even as revenue stagnated. Partnership remains the firm’s
holy grail, and the reason employees at lower levels have long been
willing to accept the “Goldman discount” compared with other Wall
Street salaries—in exchange for the chance to eventually make far
more. The message, Solomon says, is, “If you really succeed here, the
top of the pyramid is super-aspirational.”
The tradeoff is that for most, Goldman Sachs may have fewer
of the trappings of a haven for the elite. “I don’t want to make
Goldman Sachs more exclusive. In fact the opposite,” says Solo-
mon. “I’m trying to make it more open, more approachable, more
understood, more human. After all, many younger Goldmanites re-
member neither the boom times nor bailout days; to them, nothing
symbolizes the bank more than a selfie at the club with D-Sol.planned. The Apple Card rollout has also been
glitchy; New York regulators have opened an
investigation into whether Goldman’s credit
limit algorithm has a sexist bias, which the
bank denies. For all that, Marcus still doesn’t
have a mobile app—though people close to the
bank say it’s coming soon.
What it does have is scale—$55 billion in
deposits and $5 billion in loans, dwarfing
most fintech startups. “When you take risks,
you make mistakes, you lose money, things go
wrong,” Solomon says. “The only difference is
we don’t stand up there and trumpet publicly
in an amplifier, ‘Go fast and break things.’ ”
Solomon’s keen anticipation of “what pos-
sibly could go wrong” is a major reason he was
chosen to be CEO, says Bill George, a Harvard
Business School professor who retired this
year from Goldman’s board. “You know how
they talk about professional basketball players
having eyes in the back of their head? He had
that kind of peripheral vision.”
T
HERE WAS LONG a phrase inside
Goldman Sachs to describe
those most likely to ascend the
firm’s coveted partner track:
an economic killer. “It used to
be the only thing that mattered,” says an ex–
managing director. And en route to the top,
you ate what you killed: Bonuses were paid
virtually entirely according to the revenue you
made for the firm that year.
As Solomon seeks to spur the firm to work
more cooperatively, he and his leadership
team are recalibrating how Goldman pays
its people—by far the firm’s biggest expense,
accounting for about 35% of revenue this
year. And that means redefining who’s a
killer. Around holiday time, when this year’s
compensation discussions begin, a new rubric
will tie bonuses more to the company’s new
priorities, including three-year timeline goals,
diverse hiring, participating in the “One Gold-
man Sachs” spirit—and the overall returns
of the firm. The system effectively puts more
of employees’ compensation out of their own
control and potentially at risk—especially as
some grow more convinced that the bull mar-
With Goldman’spartner turnover, saysSolomon,“Young peopleget to move up, and peoplethat have been here for awhile don’t stay too long.”