David Solomon, 61, heads one of the most powerful investment banks. He is also a successful DJ, headlining the biggest festivals.
By Anne-Sophie Jahn
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Banquier by day, DJ by night. At first it was just a hobby. Crazy about Barry Manilow, Bruce Springsteen and the Bee Gees, David M. Solomon spent his free time fiddling with his mixing decks like others play golf or squash. It is necessary to ease the tension of market fluctuations, economic crises, investor appetites… For the past few years, this 61-year-old New Yorker, bald and smiling, who has climbed the ladder to the top of Goldman Sachs, plays dance and electro records in parties and nightclubs in Manhattan, Miami or the Bahamas.
It amuses him, stimulates him and relaxes him. So why not ? Under the name of DJ D Sol, he released a few house singles and a dozen EDM remixes through his Payback Records label (linked to Atlantic Records), but all his profits are donated to charity. In the corridors of Goldman Sachs, if some eyebrows were frowned at the beginning, one was quickly amused by the activity of the powerful CEO.
At the same time, the man who took the reins of the bank in 2018 has changed the bank’s culture, relaxing its strict dress rules, investing in IT, lowering the number of weekly working hours for Wall Street wolves, 90 hours to 70 hours. Relax, he even appears in an episode of trillionthe brilliant series on high finance, playing the time of a scene its own role…
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A Whitney Houston remix that became a hit
Until then, for David Solomon, DJ and financier remained two separate activities. Except that in recent months, the line has become a little more blurred. Last year, he remixed Whitney Houston’s hit “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”. However, it is Lawrence Mestel, a client of the bank who is also CEO of Primary Wave, a company managing the copyrights of Nirvana, John Lennon, Glenn Gould, Bob Marley or even… Whitney Houston, who helped obtain permission, intervening with the sister-in-law of the singer who died in 2012, her executor.
The catch: the remix is a hit. In fourth position in the dance ranking of Billboard, the song has accumulated several million streams. His DJ career exploded. On Spotify, David Solomon counts nearly 600,000 monthly listeners. He now plays in the biggest festivals in the world: Bottlerock, Coachella, Lollapalooza… And opened for The Chainsmokers during a charity concert in the Hamptons in the midst of a pandemic, causing a mini-scandal.
There, the teeth of his clients and colleagues begin to grind. How can the CEO of Goldman Sachs manage one of the largest investment banks in the world from the backstage of his concerts? Worse ! A suspicion arises: was there a conflict of interest to obtain the rights to Whitney Houston? Do not some of his employees help him juggle between his “gigs” as a DJ and his duties at the head of Goldman, which pays him handsomely ($27.5 million in 2019) ? The CEO must now explain the bank’s recent losses to its investors. He may soon have to find someone else to dance with…