Lloyd Blankfein in Business War

Blankfein was born in to a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York City. He is raised in Brooklyn’s Linden Houses, part of the New York City Housing Authority. His father was a clerk with the Postal Service in Manhattan.

He received primary and secondary education in the public schools of the New York City Department of Education, and was a valedictorian at Thomas Jefferson High School in 1971. Then, he attended Harvard University and earned his B.A in 1975, graduating with fellow Winthrop House student and future Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

In 1978, Blankfein received a J.D. from Harvard Law School. After that, Blankfein worked as a corporate tax lawyer for the law firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. In 1981, he joined Goldman’s commodities trading arm, J. Aron, as a precious metals salesman in their London office.

He is the Gala Chairman of the Rockefeller family’s Asia Society in New York. He serves on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization seeking to alleviate poverty in New York, as well as on the Board of Overseers at Weill Cornell Medical College.

In 1996, Blankfein earned a total of $53.4 million, and  making him one of the highest paid executives on Wall Street. His bonus allegedly reflected the performance of Goldman Sachs, which reported record net earnings of $9.5 billion. The compensation included a cash bonus of $27.3 million, with the rest paid in stock and options. While CEO of Goldman Sachs Group in 2007, Lloyd C. Blankfein earned a total compensation of $53,965,418, which included a base salary of $600,000, a cash bonus of $26,985,474, stocks granted of $15,542,756 and options granted of $10,453,031. He now resides in New York with his wife and children.

Blankfein has been named as the most outrageous CEO for the year 2009 by Forbes. Wall Street firms are taking multibillion-dollar write-offs. Titans of finance are losing their jobs before Lloyd Blankfein took over. Then, CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who took over last spring, gets credit for helping steer Goldman away from the most damaging investments.