Lloyd Blankfein
Born to a Jewish family in the Bronx, NYC as Lloyd Craig Blankfein on September 20th of 1954, Blankfein is the current chief executive and chairman of bank holding company Goldman Sachs, which specializes in security services, investment banking and management. He became CEO and chairman after former chief executive Hank Paulson was nominated as the company Secretary of the Treasury in May 2006.
Blankfein was raised in the Brooklyn Linden Houses, part of the New York City Housing Authority. He studied in the public schools of the New York City Department of Education and Thomas Jefferson High School, where he was honored as a valedictorian in 1971. At college, he attended Harvard and resided in Winthrop House. In 1975, he received his Bachelor’s degree along with fellow Winthrop House student Ben Bernanke, who is the current chairman of the United States Federal Reserve. Three years later, Blankfein got his Juris Doctorate degree from Harvard Law.
Lloyd Blankfein started out as a corporate tax lawyer for Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. Then in 1981, he worked in London as a precious metals salesman at J. Aron, which was Goldman Sach’s commodities trading arm.
Now, aside from being CEO and chairman of Goldman, he is the Rockefeller family’s New York Asia Society gala chairman. He is also a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, an organization aiming to alleviate poverty in NY, and the Weill Cornell Medical College.
In 2006, Blankfein was paid a sum of $53.4 million, making him one of the highest paid Wall Street executives. By 2007, as the chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group, he earned a total compensation of $53,965,418, including a base salary of $600,000, stocks granted totaling $15,542,756, a cash bonus of $26,985,474, and options granted of $10,453,031.
Apart from business, he was also a supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 elections, contributing at least $7000.