Has Goldman Sachs already chosen its next CEO?

Late last year, John Waldron had a $500mn decision to make. Waldron, Goldman Sachs’ president and chief operating officer, had been approached by Apollo Global Management about a senior job offering life-changing money, even when set against the $30mn he earned the preceding year.

The investment firm was dangling a remuneration package that, over the course of a few years, would be worth several hundred million dollars and could even reach half a billion, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Waldron, 56, informed his boss David Solomon, 63. The two men had known each other for decades and risen in tandem to occupy the bank’s top two jobs. People who have worked with them describe their relationship as almost fraternal, with Solomon the protective elder brother.

It was no secret that Waldron hoped to succeed Solomon one day running Goldman. But privately, some who were aware of the talks with Apollo thought Waldron would be mad not to pursue such a lucrative opportunity, especially given Wall Street’s graveyard of unfulfilled CEO-hopefuls. 

Ultimately, Waldron stayed at Goldman and was rewarded with an $80mn five-year retention bonus — still a fraction of what he stood to earn at Apollo — along with a board seat and expanded personal use of the bank’s private plane. 

The moves appeared to confirm what many around Goldman have long suspected: that Solomon and the board have anointed Waldron as heir apparent at the 156-year-old Wall Street investment bank. 

“It’s John Waldron’s to lose in becoming the next CEO of Goldman Sachs, probably in the next five years,” says Wells Fargo banking analyst Mike Mayo. 

If Waldron does end up following Solomon as the second consecutive investment banker to lead the firm, it would break with decades of Goldman precedent. Traditionally, the role has passed back and forth to preserve the delicate balance between its trading and investment banking roots.

And while some in Goldman’s alumni network caution that the race may not be cut and dried, the fact that Solomon has been able to line up a close ally as his presumed successor underscores the extent to which he has reasserted control over the bank following a rocky period in 2023. 

Outwardly at least, such a telegraphed handover is in stark contrast to most other Wall Street succession battles — including in Goldman’s own recent history — where multiple candidates are typically known to be in contention for the top job. 

“This is not the horse race that they had [two years ago] at Morgan Stanley. This is not ‘who is going to follow Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan?’” says Mayo. “The real question is how they placate other top executives at Goldman Sachs since succession seems so clear.”

Interviews with more than 20 of his current and former colleagues, clients and other people familiar with Waldron’s career paint a picture of a well-liked client whisperer known for his relentless work ethic and ability to build bridges between the bank’s different businesses.

He has remained a close ally of Solomon while retaining the support of the bank’s 400-odd partners, despite both men’s involvement in the bank’s costly misadventure in consumer banking.

But there is a perception in some quarters that Waldron can be too much of a people pleaser to make the tough decisions required to run a bank like Goldman. He will have to show that he can thrive without Solomon, who has guided his career since even before he first recruited Waldron more than 20 years ago. 

“The world has never seen a John without David’s input,” said one person who has worked with both men. “None of us know what that is.”

Goldman declined to comment on the succession process. Apollo also declined to comment.

In a statement, Solomon said: “I’ve had the privilege of working with John for 33 years. He’s an extraordinary banker, business partner and executive — but more than anything, he’s been an extraordinary friend.”

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Waldron studied English and finance at Middlebury College, a liberal arts school in Vermont. He considered becoming a writer but changed his mind after a summer business programme at the University of Chicago. 

He started his career on Wall Street at the now defunct Bear Stearns a year later. The scrappy investment bank lacked Goldman’s prestige but Waldron learnt how to analyse balance sheets in the group’s leveraged finance arm. 

It was during his eight-year stint at Bear that he got to know Solomon, then working in high-yield bonds. The connection would become the most important of Waldron’s career. Solomon recruited Waldron to Goldman in 2000, after making the jump himself a year earlier.

Waldron rose with Solomon, over the years helping to run Goldman’s media and entertainment group, financial sponsors practice and client coverage business. He won deals with what some of his clients describe as a willingness to listen first and advise later.

“I had a lot of faith in John,” says David Cote, the former chief executive of industrial company Honeywell, which remains a Goldman client. “When he was telling me something I could trust it. He wasn’t just thinking, how can I say this to get a transaction?”

In 2014, Waldron was appointed co-head of investment banking alongside Solomon, who had been one of the division’s leaders since 2006. Four years later, after Solomon succeeded Lloyd Blankfein as chief executive, he elevated Waldron to president and chief operating officer. 

The promotion immediately marked Waldron out as the most likely next chief executive of Goldman. Solomon and Blankfein had both been Goldman presidents themselves, though the likes of Gary Cohn, John Thain and John Thornton held the two positions but did not land the top job. 

Waldron has previously talked about delineating between his COO role, where he gets into the weeds of Goldman’s operations, and his president title, which comes into play with clients, governments and regulators. “They like the title of president,” he said on a 2019 podcast.

In 2020 he helped guide United Airlines to use its profitable loyalty programme to back a loan, in the first deal of its kind in the industry. “One of the things I like about John is he’s the most senior investment banker who is regularly out with clients,” says United chief executive Scott Kirby.

“I feel like when I talk to him, because he talks to so many people, I get more perspective and insight into what’s going on in the economy and around the globe,” he adds.

Waldron has been a troubleshooter for Solomon, dispatched to figure out details for internal projects like the growth of Goldman’s campuses in Dallas and Salt Lake City.

He has also been a proponent, along with Solomon, of expanding Goldman’s asset and wealth management business, a move welcomed by many investors. Some insiders talk of this business as providing the next phase of Goldman’s growth.  

Convincing senior employees to stay when they have offers to go elsewhere often falls to him, and he has also been heavily involved in bringing investment banking, trading and money management more closely together. Executives say this push has helped them do more business with Goldman’s biggest clients.

“He’s been the only one that hasn’t lived in a specific business the last six and a half years, he’s transcended all the divisions,” says Ashok Varadhan, Goldman’s co-head of global investment banking and markets. “He has had a lens into every single business unit for a sustained period of time.”

Under Solomon and Waldron, Goldman’s share price has risen about 130 per cent and its profits last year were almost 40 per cent higher than the year they took over.

Some former colleagues, though, say Waldron’s record had some misses. They point to the bank’s headcount, which rose from about 36,000 when Solomon and Waldron took over to a recent peak of around 48,000 through hires of engineers, investment employees and compliance personnel. Goldman implemented a painful round of job cuts in 2023. 

“These were necessary investments. The growth of our business far outpaced the growth of our headcount,” a Goldman spokesperson said.

The two men also pushed Goldman deeper into retail banking, a strategy which ended up costing the bank more than $3bn in pre-tax losses from 2020 until it reversed course in 2022. Solomon tasked Waldron with managing the pullback. 

“Waldron works very hard but not necessarily on the right stuff,” says one person who worked with him. 

There are also questions as to whether he can make unpopular decisions. “He does not have some of the harder edges David has,” says another former colleague. “The only question you have for him is, is he tough enough to run a big, complex organisation with lots of competing interests?”

Another black mark for Waldron and Solomon was a $3.9bn settlement reached with Malaysia over Goldman’s role in a corruption scandal at state investment company 1MDB. While the bank said Solomon and Waldon were not involved in or aware of any illicit activity, their pay was docked in 2020 for “institutional failure”. 

Some at Goldman view Waldron as the good cop to Solomon’s bad cop — an ironic contrast to the public perception of pre-CEO Solomon as someone who could charm employees. It remains an open question what type of leader Waldron would be without Solomon above him. 

A pivotal moment in Goldman’s recent history came in September 2023, as the cost of the bank’s foray into consumer banking became clearer.

Solomon had already been the focus of criticism in the media and among peers over the strategy. As the costs racked up and senior staff felt the impact on their pay and bonuses, dissatisfaction in the ranks rose.

Goldman’s then-lead independent director, Adebayo Ogunlesi, stepped in to deliver a public statement of the board’s support for Solomon that protected his position. 

“It’s the board that decides the CEO’s fate,” says one person who was at Goldman at the time. “The people had an uprising. The people lost because the board spoke.”

After that intervention, colleagues expected him to stay on as CEO for maybe three extra years. But Solomon was now indicating he might continue for as long as five more years.  

Jim Esposito, who was one of three co-heads of Goldman’s investment banking and trading business and was known to have ambitions to be chief executive, gave up waiting. He left in early 2024 and later joined Citadel Securities, a hedge fund that has become a refuge for senior Goldmanites looking for a lucrative exit. 

Other members of Goldman’s next generation, such as Gregg Lemkau, Stephen Scherr and Eric Lane, had already quit, and with the top job now potentially further from reach, the talk across Wall Street was that Waldron was also on the market. 

Apollo’s approach to Waldron came as the private capital group evolved into an increasingly global business, requiring executives with experience of leading large, complex finance operations — something Waldron held in spades overseeing the day-to-day operations of Wall Street’s pre-eminent investment bank. 

When Waldron informed Goldman of his talks with Apollo, the investment bank could hardly match the $500mn. Of Wall Street’s big bank CEOs, only Jamie Dimon has cumulative earnings worth anything like that — and it had taken the JPMorgan chief almost 20 years at the helm to earn them.

Waldron was instead given sweeteners like the $80mn five-year retention bonus — also awarded to Solomon — and the board seat. Importantly for Waldron, Solomon’s payout is not dependent on him being chief executive for all that time, potentially opening the door to an earlier handover of the chief executive responsibilities with Solomon becoming chair.

But succession processes on Wall Street are rarely clear cut. 

A decade ago, Goldman president Cohn was favourite to take over from CEO Blankfein. He waited so long that The New York Times dubbed him “the Prince Charles of Wall Street”. Eventually he gave up and took a job in the first Trump administration.   

Cohn’s departure for Washington at the end of 2016 meant Solomon was made co-president alongside Harvey Schwartz, a top trading executive. One employee who worked with both men at the time describes their relationship while co-presidents as “unsustainable” due to the pressure of the succession race. Schwartz left Goldman almost immediately after Solomon was elevated to the top job.

At Morgan Stanley, historically Goldman’s biggest rival, previous boss James Gorman announced that three top executives were in line to be his successor.  

Although this very public audition process could easily have backfired, the two defeated candidates have stayed on in the year since Ted Pick was named chief executive — helped by the $20mn retention packages Morgan Stanley put in place for them.

At UBS, which endured a messy changeover of chief executives following the Swiss bank’s rescue of its rival Credit Suisse, chair Colm Kelleher has held up Morgan Stanley’s “bloodless coup” as the model he hopes to follow next time around.

Some ex-Goldman partners say that the question of Solomon’s successor may not be totally settled. Marc Nachmann, 54, currently head of asset and wealth management and who has worked across all other major parts of Goldman’s business, is a dark horse for the job. Dan Dees and Varadhan, the co-heads of Goldman’s banking and markets division, are other internal candidates, they add.

Others suggest Solomon may be emboldened to lead the bank for longer after a run-up in its share price, maybe even skipping a generation in its leadership race. That would play into the hands of a roster of bankers and traders in their forties who were promoted to Goldman’s management committee at the start of 2025. 

Over the years there has been chatter inside Goldman that Waldron could also be prised from Wall Street by an offer to work in Washington, following a path trodden by Cohn, Hank Paulson and Steven Mnuchin.

A Republican, Waldron has warned in the past about excessive US borrowing and there was talk he would have been receptive to an offer in the Trump administration.

That door appears shut for the moment, though some believe Waldron could still pursue a career in politics once he has done the job that now seems well within his grasp.

Additional reporting by Antoine Gara in New York