Yahoo Finance Goldman's Blankfein joins the 3-comma club
The 3-comma club.
That’s the phrase used to describe a billionaire by off-the-wall tech investor Russ Hanneman on the HBO (TWX) comedy, Silicon Valley. In the show, Hanneman spends much of his time obsessing about keeping his membership card.
Well now, Goldman Sachs’ (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein is part of Hanneman’s group.
The Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index finds Blankfein’s net worth is at $1.1 billion, thanks to a surge in the company’s stock price, which is up about 9% so far this year. Bloomberg notes Blankfein is the largest individual owner of Goldman shares, with a value of half a billion dollars. The rest of his wealth comes from real estate and an investment portfolio boosted by cash bonuses and payouts from the firm’s private-equity funds.
Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task says although he has critics, Blankfein came by his money honestly.
“Lloyd Blankfein has gotten a lot of criticism in the last couple of years for doing ‘God’s work,’ and Goldman is the ‘vampire squid’ and all that bad stuff,” he notes. “But he’s the son of a postal worker. He did not grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth and he made it to the pinnacle of Wall Street society at Goldman Sachs through will, determination, skill and intelligence. That is a great American story for him as an individual.”
Bloomberg notes that Blankfein may be the last of his kind, since Goldman was the last of the big Wall Street firms to remain private. Yahoo Finance’s Lauren Lyster has noticed that.
“Typically, bankers don’t reach this billionaire status,” she explains. “It’s these private equity guys or hedge fund guys.”
But Task points out that while it’s true Blankfein has benefited from a quadrupling of Goldman’s stock price since its IPO, the Bloomberg data show that’s hardly the whole story.
“The fact that he was at Goldman before it went public at a senior position and then became the CEO and has stayed as the CEO of that company for a very long time is a big reason why he is a billionaire,” he explains. “But half of his wealth comes from other stuff.”
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Monica Mehta, Managing Principal at Seventh Capital, tells Yahoo Finance she finds it interesting the Blankfein news comes as we approach the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Dodd-Frank law, which was enacted after the financial crisis specifically to rein in the big banks.
“Aspects of Dodd-Frank in the name of consumer protection are actually making it difficult for people like small-business owners to get mortgages because it’s become tough for banks to lend off of W-2 income,” she adds. “But at the same time banks keep rolling along producing billionaires. So, a glass of Cristal to you, Lloyd Blankfein!”
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