The music has stopped for the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, amid reports that the US investment bank’s board was concerned his DJing sideline would distract him from his main job.
Solomon has formally hung up his headphones on high-profile gigs and has not performed publicly in more than a year, the bank said.
Even before he became the bank’s boss in 2018, Solomon had been spinning electronic dance records for years under the moniker DJ D-Sol. He has performed in Manhattan, in tiki bars in the Bahamas and at the huge Lollapalooza festival.
The Financial Times reported that Solomon’s DJing caused unease among some Goldman board members. He DJed at an event in the Hamptons near New York in 2020 that was criticised for flouting social distancing rules during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A Goldman Sachs spokesperson, Tony Fratto, played down the move, saying: “David hasn’t publicly DJed an event in well over a year, which we have confirmed multiple times in the past.”
He added: “Music was not a distraction from David’s work. The media attention became a distraction.”
Solomon’s last big DJ performance was at Lollapalooza in July 2022.
He has also appeared in the US TV drama Billions, about a group of hedge fund executives in New York, where he touted Goldman’s Marcus savings account, which is named after the bank’s founder.
Arguably Solomon’s biggest musical achievement is his remix of the Whitney Houston hit I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me). Larry Mestel’s company Primary Wave Music, which controls the rights to songs from artists including Houston, is a Goldman client.
Solomon took a near-30% pay cut in 2022, after a turbulent year that resulted in one of the largest round of job cuts in Goldman’s history.
On Tuesday, the bank reported that net earnings fell by a third, year on year, in the last quarter. Goldman posted net earnings of $2.1bn (£1.7bn) for the three months to the end of September, down from $3.1bn in the same quarter a year ago.
