David Solomon

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.

You had the Russian invasion of Ukraine, big markdowns in asset prices.

It was a slower year for the firm.

The firm did just fine.

It made 10% on its equity capital in 2022, which is, you know, it's not, you know, it's not a blowout year, but it's not, you know, poor, poor performance.

But, you know, I think we had a little bit of internal agitation given the structural changes we were making.

and that created a lot of noise in the media.

The media gobbled it up, and it became very noisy.

We stuck to our knitting.