From Vanity Fair: “…A recent story in Fortune said Blankfein may step down as
early as summer, with Cohn replacing him; a March Wall Street Journal piece
said there had been discussions about Cohn becoming C.E.O., with Blankfein
remaining as chairman. While Blankfein can seem burned out, others say he would
never want to leave on anything but his own terms, and a Goldman spokesperson
denied the essence of the Journal story.
But the fact that such stories are appearing makes it look a
lot like someone well placed inside Goldman is gunning for Blankfein. The rumors about Cohn’s succeeding Blankfein are odd,
because, if what Goldman needs is a return to its old mores, Cohn is not seen
by most people as the guy who will lead it there. Like Blankfein, whose father
was a postal clerk, Cohn was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has
dyslexia so severe that he struggled to read until the eighth grade. “Years of
being told you were going to fail makes you say, ‘I’ll show you,’ ” he told me
back in 2004. After graduating from American University’s Kogod School of
Business in 1982, he talked his way into a trading job at COMEX, the
commodities exchange, and later joined Goldman’s commodity-trading business,
where Blankfein also worked. As rose Blankfein, so rose Cohn, and after
Blankfein became C.E.O., in 2006, Cohn was appointed co-chief operating officer
(along with Jon Winkelried, who left the firm during the financial crisis) and
was named to the board.
In Goldman circles, you’ll hear Cohn described as “Lloyd
squared” or “Lloyd on steroids.” If Blankfein is commercial, Cohn is more so,
and he lacks Blankfein’s disarming sense of humor. “Every day you are
competing, and every day you are playing to win,” he said in a 2009 speech at his
alma mater. In recent years, he has become something of the public face of the
firm, hosting a dinner at this year’s World Economic Forum, in Davos, and being
photographed with Gisele Bündchen in 2011 at the annual Robin Hood benefit
gala, which is the see-and-be-seen event of the New York financial world. Such
splashy publicity is unseemly to old-school Goldman types…..After Cohn, it’s
not clear who Blankfein’s successor might be….
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