Goldman Sachs slashes CEO's pay
David M. Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, saw his 2022 pay slashed by nearly 30% following missteps that have weighed on the elite Wall Street bank's profits and performance.
Solomon took home $25 million last year, the bank said in a filing Friday, down from $35 million a year earlier.
Although that paycheck is still hefty compensation by most standards, Solomon has ceded his title as the highest-paid bank CEO to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whose pay for 2022 was $35 million.
The salary cut follows an ugly period for Goldman
and Solomon. The bank has admitted to billions in losses from its experiment in consumer banking and is retrenching from big plans to build checking accounts and other products for modest borrowers. Solomon's brusque style, meanwhile, has produced grumblings
inside the firm and contributed to a string of senior departures.
Earlier this month, the firm laid off 3,200 employees, the heaviest such job cuts since the financial crisis of 2008.
Goldman's board nodded to its disappointment in the filing Friday, saying Solomon's pay cut reflected “the firm's 2022 performance, both on an absolute basis and relative to peer results.”
The bank's CEO since 2018, Solomon's pay had been docked in 2020 after Goldman admitted criminal wrongdoing for abetting the looting of Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund.
Solomon's pay cut also puts him behind Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, who earned $32 million, and James Gorman of Morgan Stanley, who earned $31 million, according to filings. At Wall Street banks, the compensation of top executives can swing from year to year based on their company's performance.