In the summer of 2018, guests at a luxury Montauk hotel witnessed David Solomon’s first set as DJ D-Sol. A month later, Wall Street watched him make another debut — as the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Yet the newly anointed master of the universe couldn’t stay away from the decks. After DJ D-Sol opened for the Chainsmokers at a concert that violated social distancing rules during the pandemic, Solomon was rebuked by then New York governor Andrew Cuomo and forced to apologize to Goldman’s board. In 2022, he played a comeback set at the Chicago music festival Lollapalooza. And in 2023, he won the rights to remix Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” perhaps by leveraging his bank’s connections to the music industry’s top brass.

If the DJ D-Sol persona was intended to soften Solomon’s brash, irascible image, Wall Street wasn’t buying it. “Everyone in banking laughs about the D-Sol thing because they were all terrified of him for the last many, many, many years,” one trader told New York magazine. As long as Goldman made money, however, nobody cared too much about Solomon’s unusual hobbies and angry outbursts. That changed in 2022, after the firm lost billions on an ill-conceived foray into commercial banking, laid off thousands of employees, and cut its bonus pool.

With disgruntled bankers calling Solomon a “prick” in the press and former CEO Lloyd Blankfein implying that his successor was distracted by his beloved hobby, DJ D-Sol quit the nightlife circuit in 2023.