Goldman Sachs lost more than $2 billion after “low drama” exec Greg Smith thrust himself into the global spotlight Wednesday with a very public resignation letter that scathingly denounced his employer. Click below to read the rest of the story.
In the trading hours after the op-ed began circulating, the firm’s shares dropped 3.4 percent, the third-biggest decline in the S&P, Bloomberg reports.
Smith’s take-that-(high-paid)-job-and-shove-it missive – published as an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times – blasted what he termed Goldman’s “toxic and destructive culture.”
The executive director said the storied investment bank is indifferent to the interests of clients, who high-level bosses referred to as “muppets.”
He said he attended meetings where the topic of how to help clients never came up.
“It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of those meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all,” Smith, 33, wrote in his caustic goodbye note, titled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.”
He said that in the last year, “I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets.'”
He added: “Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”
Smith, who had worked at Goldman for nearly 12 years and said his clients had a trillion dollars in assets, wrote: “I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.
