Goldman Sachs has a large contingent stock award coming due for CEO David Solomon and other senior leaders, separate from their annual compensation. The award was created in 2021 to retain key executives and is tied to a five-year performance period that wrapped up this month.
According to the New York Post, president and chief operating officer John Waldron is set to receive just over $66 million under the same program, and the award group now includes roughly 20 added leaders at the bank, among them Dan Dees, Marc Nachmann and Ashok Varadhan. The Post reports Goldman's current management group runs 45 people deep, and the bank filed the special award program's rules with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Half of the bonus money was tied to Goldman hitting specific share-price targets, and the bank cleared those marks; the other half depended on Goldman's performance against six rival banks, a test the firm beat on nearly every count since late 2021, per the same report. One exception stood out: Bank of New York Mellon, led by Robin Vince, a former Goldman risk chief, ranked ahead of Goldman in that rival comparison, the Post noted.
Solomon's Pay Climbs as Goldman Stock Surges
The retention award lands on top of Solomon's already-growing annual compensation. Goldman's board approved $47 million in total pay for Solomon for fiscal year 2025, a 20.5% raise over his $39 million the prior year, according to Banking Dive. That 2025 package included $31.5 million in performance stock units and $10.1 million in cash. Goldman recorded $58.28 billion in net revenues and $17.18 billion in net earnings for fiscal 2025, the second-highest full-year total in the bank's history, driven by a 57% total shareholder return, Investing.com reported.
Solomon's $47 million annual figure already outpaced his closest rivals before the special award is even counted: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon earned $43 million and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser earned $42 million for the same year, per a comparison from The Guardian. Goldman shares were trading at about $902 in New York as of Thursday, roughly fourfold their level of about $225 when Solomon became CEO in October 2018, the Post reported, and the stock has climbed roughly 150% over the past five years.
The 2021 Retention Deal Behind the Payout
The program began in October 2021, when Goldman’s board granted Solomon performance-based stock with a target value of $30 million and Waldron a stock grant valued at $20 million, according to the Post. In January 2025, the bank added a separate $80 million retention package for the two executives, scheduled to pay out in 2030. Goldman said the awards were designed to enhance alignment with long-term shareholder value creation. Goldman spokesperson Jennifer Zuccarelli defended the payouts by pointing to a post-2008 financial-crisis precedent: Goldman gave stock options to hundreds of managers that ultimately paid out billions of dollars to partners.
Goldman is not the only bank spending big to keep its leadership in place. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon received an award valued at about $270 million, the Post reported. That comparison echoes an earlier controversy at JPMorgan: in 2021, the bank gave Dimon a one-time retention award of 1.5 million stock options valued at $52.6 million, and when it came up for a shareholder advisory vote in May 2022, only 31% of shareholders supported the bank's pay package, according to Banking Dive. Proxy advisory firms Glass Lewis and ISS had both recommended voting against that package at the time.
A Record Year for Wall Street Bonuses and Tax Revenue
The scale of Goldman's payout reflects a broader surge across the securities industry. Wall Street is on track for $90 billion in profits this year, an increase of nearly 40% from last year, according to state comptroller Tom DiNapoli as cited by the Post. That tracks with separate data from The Business Times showing securities firms generated $45.9 billion in pre-tax profits in just the first half of 2026, a 51.3% jump over the same period in 2025, powered by a 68% surge in underwriting revenues — numbers that exceeded initial forecasts by New York City officials, who had projected a drop in annual Wall Street profits. Much of that momentum traces to dealmaking: global mergers and acquisitions hit an all-time record of $2.8 trillion in the first half of 2026, fueled partly by corporate investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure, per The Daily Upside.
The securities industry contributed $26.3 billion in personal and business income taxes to New York State and $7.8 billion to New York City for fiscal 2025-2026, representing about 19% of the state's total tax revenue, as Hoodline reported in its earlier coverage of Mamdani's Wall Street meetings. The securities industry employed 198,200 people in New York in 2025, down slightly from 201,500 in 2024, which was a 30-year high, according to the New York State Comptroller. State comptroller projections estimate another 5,300 financial jobs will be added in 2026, according to The Business Times.
Wall Street Pay in Context
The New York State Comptroller estimated that the securities-industry bonus pool reached $49.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from the previous year, according to the New York State Office of the State Comptroller. For a broader workforce benchmark, the Equilar–Associated Press CEO Pay Study found that median S&P 500 employee compensation rose 4.7% to $89,744 in 2025.
Solomon, who joined Goldman in 1999 as a partner in the high-yield bond division and became COO in January 2017 before taking the CEO role in October 2018, has drawn public attention over the years for reasons beyond the balance sheet — including a stint moonlighting as a DJ under the name “DJ D-Sol” before stepping away from public sets about a year before October 2023, according to Wikipedia. Goldman is scheduled to release its third-quarter earnings next week, according to a company statement.
