Banker by day, DJ by night. At first it was just a hobby. Crazy about Barry Manilow, Bruce Springsteen and the Bee Gees, David M. Solomon spent his free time fiddling with his mixing decks like others play golf or squash. It is necessary to ease the tension of market fluctuations, economic crises, investor appetites… For the past few years, this 61-year-old New Yorker, bald and smiling, who has climbed the ladder to the top of Goldman Sachs, plays dance and electro records in parties and nightclubs in Manhattan, Miami or the Bahamas.

It amuses him, stimulates him and relaxes him. So why not ? Under the name DJ D Sol, he has released a few house singles and a dozen EDM remixes through his label Payback Records (linked to Atlantic Records), but all of his proceeds go to charity. In the halls of Goldman Sachs, if some eyebrows were raised at first, we were quickly amused by the activity of the powerful CEO.

At the same time, whoever took the reins of the bank in 2018 changed the culture of the bank, relaxing its strict dress rules, investing in IT, lowering the number of weekly working hours of the wolves of Wall Street, of 90 hours to 70 hours. Relax, he even appears in an episode of Billions, the brilliant series on high finance, playing the time of a scene himself…

Until then, for David Solomon, DJ and financier remained two separate activities. Except that in recent months, the line has become a little more blurred. Last year he remixed Whitney Houston’s hit “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”. However, it was Lawrence Mestel, a client of the bank who is also CEO of Primary Wave, a company managing the copyrights of Nirvana, John Lennon, Glenn Gould, Bob Marley or even… Whitney Houston, who helped obtain permission, intervening with the sister-in-law of the singer who died in 2012, her executor.

The catch: the remix is ??a hit. In fourth position on Billboard’s dance rankings, the track has accumulated several million streams. His DJ career exploded. On Spotify, David Solomon counts nearly 600,000 monthly listeners. He now plays in the biggest festivals in the world: Bottlerock, Coachella, Lollapalooza… And opened for The Chainsmokers at a charity concert in the Hamptons in the midst of a pandemic, causing a mini-scandal.

There, the teeth of his clients and colleagues begin to grind. How can the CEO of Goldman Sachs manage one of the world’s largest investment banks from the backstage of his gigs? Worse ! A suspicion arises: was there a conflict of interest to obtain the rights to Whitney Houston? Do not some of his employees help him juggle his “gigs” as a DJ and his duties at the head of Goldman, which pays him handsomely ($ 27.5 million in 2019)? The CEO must now explain the bank’s recent losses to its investors. He may soon have to find someone else to dance with…