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A Man and His 'Hood
Then again, Blankfein is different. Born into modest circumstances in the South Bronx, he moved with his family to the East New York section of Brooklyn "in search of a better life," Blankfein says, when he was 3. The family lived in the Linden Houses, a complex of 19 buildings completed in 1957 that contained 1,590 apartments. After losing his job driving a truck, Blankfein's father took a night job sorting mail at the post office — "which in our neck of the woods was considered to be a very good job, because you couldn't lose it," Blankfein says. His mother worked as a receptionist at a burglar-alarm company — "one of the few growth industries in my neighborhood."
Young Blankfein thrived. He stayed out of trouble by not getting off the school bus when he saw things happening that made him uncomfortable. He studied hard. He was the valedictorian of his 1971 graduating class at the predominantly black Thomas Jefferson High School. At 16, he applied to Harvard, solely because Harvard had gone to the school to recruit. Using a combination of financial aid and scholarships, he graduated in 1975. Ben Bernanke was in his class. In the class-of-'75 yearbook, Bernanke was pictured near Blankfein, who was wearing a fashionable houndstooth blazer with groovy wide lapels. Blankfein then enrolled at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1978. "At some point, I can't say that I had a disadvantaged background," he says. "After a while, I kind of evolved into having an advantaged background." Following law school, he was hired at Donovan, Leisure as a corporate tax lawyer.
These early triumphs in the face of adversity understandably shaped his ambition and his worldview. "You can never forget that Lloyd came from a pretty significantly challenging environment," explains Robert Steel, Blankfein's former partner at Goldman and an Under Secretary for Paulson at Treasury. "That's at the root of Lloyd." Steel recalls that Blankfein shared stories about life at Thomas Jefferson High School. "You survive by either one of two things," Steel says Blankfein told him. "You were either a great athlete or funny and entertaining, and I decided to go with funny and entertaining."
Blankfein also developed some pretty bad habits. Once upon a time, he smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day. He was overweight. He often dressed inappropriately or ostentatiously. And he had a love of gambling in Las Vegas.
By 1981, Blankfein was on partner track at Donovan, but then he had what he calls a pre-midlife crisis and decided to make the switch, if he could, to investment banking. He applied for banking jobs at Dean Witter, Morgan Stanley and Goldman. He did not make the cut in Goldman's famously exhaustive recruitment process (or at the other two firms either). "It wasn't a nutty decision. I was a lawyer," he says. "I didn't have a finance background." Instead, in 1982 he landed a job as a gold salesman for J. Aron & Co., an obscure commodities firm that Goldman had purchased in November 1981 for about $100 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, when Blankfein told his then fiancée Laura — now his wife and the mother of their three children, one of whom is at Harvard — that he was leaving law for J. Aron, she cried, thinking that he was burning a high-paying career. (Ironically, Donovan, Leisure closed its doors a decade ago.)
Over time, Blankfein became a major part of J. Aron's success. But at first, he says, he was not very good at the job. "I had trouble with the language, with the speed and the pacing." Soon enough, though, he designed a lucrative $100 million trade — then the largest of its kind Goldman had ever handled — for a Muslim client to comply with the religion's rules against receiving interest payments. In 1984, Goldman partner and J. Aron chief Mark Winkelman put Blankfein in charge of a group of foreign-exchange salesmen and later in charge of all foreign-exchange business. Rubin, then on the firm's management committee and responsible for both risk arbitrage and J. Aron, had advised Winkelman against it. According to Charles Ellis' 2008 book about Goldman, The Partnership, Rubin told him, "We've never seen it work to put salespeople in charge of trading in other areas of the firm. Are you pretty sure of your analysis?"
Blankfein's career took off. He seemed to have a sixth sense about when to push traders to take more risk and when to take their collective feet off the accelerator. "It's not about hanging on to a predisposition," Blankfein told FORTUNE in March 2008. "The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong." Blankfein too was becoming a quick adjuster.