David Solomon

We made some pivots or changes along the way, but we really have got the firm in a powerful position with $2

big businesses that are well positioned to win leaders in their space growing nicely.

And, you know, I feel quite optimistic about the prospects as we look ahead, but 2025 was a year where we, you could really see the progress very concretely from investments and decisions we've made over the last five, six, seven years.

I don't think the firm was ever doing so terribly.

The press and the media can be a powerful tool and a powerful amplifier of a small number of voices.

But fundamentally, the firm was a private partnership for 130 years, and it went public in 1999.

Because the capital markets were globalizing from 1999 through 2007, the firm was growing close to 20% on the top line.

And it really ran as a public company in that period exactly the same way

that it operated as a private partnership for 130 years.

The financial crisis changed everything.

It created a new regulatory structure, a new operating structure, reset the firm and forced the firm to double its capital base.

And the firm kind of came out of the financial crisis and really stuck to its knitting.

and chugged along through that decade, but really wasn't operating to grow.

And if you look at that decade after the financial crisis, the firm's revenues were pretty steady around 34 billion.

The earnings were pretty steady.

The capital, the balance sheet were all pretty steady.

And so we entered the end of the decade saying we really had to make some difficult changes to really take this enterprise and grow the enterprise.

And whenever you change a big enterprise, you know, there's going to be resistance.

People hate change.

And 2022 was kind of a tough period.