Waldron was rejected by Goldman at hiring, joined Bear Stearns instead
Goldman Sachs’s board has discussed a plan for president John Waldron to succeed David Solomon as chief executive as soon as late 2027, The Wall Street Journal reported. Waldron, 57, has served as the bank’s president and chief operating officer since 2018 after years working alongside Solomon in Goldman’s investment banking division.
A Goldman spokesman, Tony Fratto, said the board regularly discusses succession but that there is no definitive timeline for it.
The reported succession plan follows an early 2025 retention package worth $80 million that the board awarded Waldron after learning he was in talks with Apollo Global Management and other investment firms about leaving the bank, the Journal reported. Waldron was added to Goldman’s board shortly afterward.
Waldron’s compensation in 2025 totaled $45 million, just short of Solomon’s $47 million, according to proxy filings reviewed by the Journal. Waldron has been viewed as the firm’s likely next CEO since his elevation to president and COO in 2018.
The path to the corner office is far from the career Waldron imagined as an English major at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he also minored in economics. “I was more of an English kid than a finance kid,” Waldron said at a Brigham Young University event in 2023, according to an alumni magazine. “I thought I was going [to] be a writer.”
Waldron said he did not turn to finance until he participated in a summer business program at the University of Chicago. After that experience, “It turned out that I fell in love with the work—but more importantly—with the people I got to work with,” Waldron said.
He joined Bear Stearns out of college, after being rejected by Goldman. On the Inside Blackstone podcast, Waldron recalled the rejection: “I didn’t do well in the financial modeling test.” At Bear Stearns, he said on Goldman’s Exchanges podcast in 2019, he was able to own client relationships at a relatively young age—a path he has said starting at a smaller firm enabled. Bear Stearns is also where Waldron first worked with Solomon.
When Solomon joined Goldman in 1999, he told Waldron: “I think you’d like coming here,” Waldron recalled on the Exchanges podcast. Waldron joined Goldman in 2000 and was named a partner two years later. He held leadership roles in leveraged finance and the financial sponsors group before being promoted to co-head of the investment banking division in 2014.
Waldron and Solomon have together prioritized a strategy dubbed “One Goldman Sachs,” rolled out at the start of Solomon’s tenure. The strategy is meant to incentivize Goldman’s units to steer business to one another and has boosted revenue across the firm, according to the Journal.
On the Exchanges podcast in 2019, Waldron described the daily routine he uses to balance family life with client demands: “So I’ll have two dinners. I’ll have a little bit of peanut butter and jelly and then I’ll have … I’ll have a steak tartare later on.”
Asked on the Inside Blackstone podcast for a quote that speaks to him, Waldron described himself as a “huge Eisenhower fan” and quoted the former president on leadership: “It’s the art of getting someone to do something you want them to do, because they want to do it.” Waldron added: “I feel like I spend a lot of time in my job trying to figure out how to do that.”
A Cleveland native, Waldron moved to the East Coast at 15 when his father took a job in Philadelphia. He attended the Lawrenceville School, a private school in New Jersey, where he played varsity ice hockey and baseball and wrote for the student newspaper, according to the school’s social media. Waldron and his family live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.