Goldman Sachs CEO Retires From DJing Due To Unwanted Attention
Here’s hoping you enjoyed DJ D-Sol’s set at last year’s Lollapalooza, since it’s likely to be the last of its kind for a while. There’s a very understandable reason for that. D-Sol, an EDM DJ in his early sixties, has a fairly prominent day job. D-Sol is better known as David Solomon, and he’s the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the massively powerful and widely despised investment bank. Apparently, some of Solomon’s colleagues think that his DJ career is inviting more scrutiny than they’d like.
David Solomon has been DJ’ing for more than 10 years, and he reportedly got interested in the art form when he helped broker a deal for a Las Vegas casino. But Solomon’s record-spinning side hustle seems like more than a hobby, since he’s played a number of big festivals. (He also DJ’ed during a mid-pandemic private Chainsmokers concert in the Hamptons, which was investigated by the New York Health Department.) According to The Financial Times, sources reports that Solomon “has decided to stop DJing at high-profile events following criticism that his hobby created a distraction from his work leading the Wall Street firm.”
Solomon has been Goldman’s chief executive since 2018, and the bank has reportedly fallen on hard times lately. This year’s second quarter marked Goldman’s lowest quarterly profit in three years, and Goldman employees are reportedly upset about “strategic mis-steps and lower pay.” Meanwhile, some investors “were uneasy about [Solomon’s] decision in 2019 to perform at Tomorrowland, a Belgian music festival known for heavy drug taking.”
In a statement to the Financial Times, Goldman spokesman Tony Fratto says, “This is not news. David hasn’t publicly DJ’ed an event in well over a year, which we have confirmed multiple times in the past… Music was not a distraction from David’s work. The media attention became a distraction.” You can read the full Financial Times report here.
If David Solomon was really about that rave life, he would simply walk away from Goldman Sachs and commit himself to the wheels of steel full-time.