Hey everyone, today we need to talk about what the most famous bank on Wall Street is quietly doing to New York City because the real story is buried underneath the headline.
Here’s the scene.
A boy grows up in the suburbs just north of the city.
His father works at a small publishing company.
His mother works in hearing care.
He scoops ice cream part-time in high school.
He goes off to a tiny college upstate and plays rugby.
When he graduates, he mails letters to 50 banks asking for a shot.
The most prestigious firm of them all sends back a rejection.
So he learns finance the unglamorous way, selling junk bonds through the wildest decade the market ever had.
15 years later, the firm that turned him down calls back and makes him a partner, one of the only outsiders in its history [music] ever hired straight in at that rank.
Two decades after that, he’s running the entire company.
46,000 employees, the biggest name in American banking.
And then the city where he won it all elected a mayor who ran on making his industry pay for everything.
A new tax on every millionaire in town and a corporate rate tied for the highest in the country.
That man is David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs.
And what his bank has been doing in response has city hall scrambling in ways nobody there will admit out loud.
But there’s one number buried in the mayor’s own tax plan that exposes how fragile this entire bet really is.
Maybe you’re nowhere near New York right now, thinking this doesn’t touch your life.
The same playbook is already moving.
Hit that subscribe button because we’re getting into the parts the news won’t touch.
Let’s get into it.
So, here’s what happened.
February 11th, 2026, Albany.
The new mayor of New York rides up to the state senate’s annual budget hearing, the ritual veterans call Tin Cup Day, when mayors come asking the state for money.
Zoron Mandani, the 34-year-old Democratic socialist who won city hall promising to tax the rich, didn’t bring a cup.
He brought a bill.
He asked lawmakers to approve a 2% income tax sir charge on every New Yorker earning over a million dollar a year and to raise the state’s top corporate rate from 7 and 1/4% to 11 12 tied with New Jersey for the highest in America.
By his own math, a million-doll household would hand over about $20,000 more every single year.
He told the Senate the city was placed on a ledge.
And none of this was a surprise.
He campaigned on it.
He once stood outside Ken Griffin’s Manhattan penthouse to pitch attacks on luxury second homes, calling out the hedge fund billionaire by name.
The message to the wealthiest people in New York could not have been clearer.
You are the plan.
But messages travel both ways.
And inside the bank with the most to lose, an answer to that demand had already been drawn up.
It even had a code name.
Before we go further, you need to know where David Solomon came from because the man deciding where Goldman’s future lives almost never got in the door.
Solomon was born in 1962 in Hartsdale, New York, and grew up near Scarsdale.
His father, Allan, was an executive at a small publishing company.
His mother supervised aologists.
David scooped ice cream at a BaskinRobins and spent summers as a camp counselor.
He went to Hamilton College, a small school in upstate New York, studied political science, and played rugby.
When he graduated in 1984, he wrote to roughly 50 Wall Street firms.
Goldman Sachs was one of about 45 that said, “No, thank you.
” By one account, an interviewer looked him over and said, “You’re really not Goldman Sachs material.
” So he started at Irving Trust, a commercial bank he later described as graduate school inside a bank.
In 1986, he jumped to Drexel Burnham, the most notorious bond shop of that era, selling commercial paper then junk bonds.
When Drexel imploded, he landed at Bear Sterns and ran its junk bond business.
Then in 1999, the firm that rejected him came calling and kept calling.
That summer, 2 months after Goldman went public, Solomon walked in as a partner.
By 2006, he co-ran the entire investment bank.
In October 2018, he became chief executive.
The kid with the rejection letter now holds the corner office, and he decides what happens next.
That’s the man the mayor decided to squeeze.
So, here’s what Goldman actually did.
Inside the firm, the plan is informally called Project Voyage.
Bloomberg described the message to managers as part request, part ultimatum.
Move from New York to Dallas or Salt Lake City or find the exit.
Now, in fairness to the timeline, Goldman didn’t invent this because of one mayor.
The firm set a $ 1.
3 billion cost cutting target back in 2020, and Voyage started rolling in late 2024.
But watch what happened once Mandani took office.
By late January, reports said Goldman was pulling its annual layoffs forward to spring, cutting 3 to 5% of its 46,500 people, aimed heavily at the vice president layer, with many of those seats backfilled in cheaper cities like Dallas.
By May, the relocate or leave orders were still going out.
And the destination is not some satellite office.
Goldman is finishing an 800,000 ft campus in Dallas.
Two wings, 14 stories, a price tag swollen past $700 million.
Built to hold more than 5,000 employees by the end of 2028, the largest campus in Goldman’s entire global portfolio.
Meanwhile, the New York headquarters holds about 7,800 people, and that number has flatlined.
Now, the mayor’s reaction.
The man who stood outside a billionaire’s penthouse demanding new taxes spent late May hosting David Solomon at Gracie Mansion to talk about keeping talent in New York.
The same day he sat down with Jaime Diamond, the JP Morgan boss.
He even reached out to Ken Griffin, the man he’d singled out by name.
When the money started walking, tax the rich turned into, “Please stay.
” Because Goldman isn’t the outlier here.
JP Morgan already employs 31,500 people in Texas, more than in all of New York.
In 2024, Texas passed New York in total finance jobs.
Katherine Wild, who runs the city’s top business group, looked at where her biggest taxpayers were heading and said, “That’s scary.
” So, why are the biggest names in American finance all running the same play? Run the math.
They’re running.
Under Mandani’s plan, the city’s top income tax rate jumps from about 3.
9% to 5.
9.
Stack that on state taxes and a top earner in New York faces a combined rate near 17% before Washington takes a dime, the highest in the country.
That same earners rate in Texas, zero.
No state income tax at all.
And the squeeze goes past the tax line.
Median rent in New York runs over 7,700 a month.
In Dallas, under 1,500.
The average base salary Goldman Median rent in New York runs over 7,700 a month.
In Dallas, under 1,500.
The average base salary Goldman committed to at the Dallas campus is $90,000.
And in Texas, that buys a comfortable life.
In Manhattan, it buys a roommate and a long commute.
Now, picture yourself in a different seat.
You run a lunch counter in Battery Park City, two blocks from Goldman’s Tower.
You signed a Manhattan lease.
You pay city taxes, state taxes, permits, inspections, insurance.
Your margin lives on the morning rush from those elevators.
Every desk that moves to Dallas is a regular who never walks in again.
And you’re the small version of a much bigger problem because the securities industry alone supplies 20% of all of New York State’s tax revenue.
When those paychecks relocate, the bankers aren’t the ones who get hurt.
Everyone downstream of them is.
And here’s the irony in all of this.
Wall Street just posted record profits.
And the city counts a record 209,000 securities jobs.
City Hall points at those numbers as proof nothing is wrong.
But New York held a third of America’s securities jobs in 1990, and that share has been sliding ever since.
Records measure the past.
The growth is being built somewhere else.
Which brings us to the number.
Now we get to it.
The number from the start of this video, the one buried in the mayor’s own tax plan, 34,000.
When Mandani’s campaign released its revenue plan, it said the 2% millionaire searchcharge would raise $4 billion a year from about 34,000 households, roughly 1% of the city, carrying the entire promise at about $20,000 more a piece.
34,000 households wouldn’t even fill Yankee Stadium.
And those households are not bonus revenue sitting on top of a stable base.
They are the base.
New York State’s own tax data shows filers earning over a million dollars a year make up less than 1% of taxpayers and already pay 45% of all income tax collected in the state.
Nearly half the bill from a group small enough to fit in one ballpark, every one of them with the means to move.
Now connect that to Goldman.
A third-year vice president there can clear a million dollars in salary and bonus.
Vice presidents are exactly the layer Project Voyage is cutting and relocating.
Every desk that lands in Dallas takes a name off the list the mayor’s entire budget depends on.
And it gets worse.
New York’s grip was slipping before this mayor ever showed up.
The Citizens Budget Commission found the state’s share of America’s millionaires fell from 12.
7% in 2010 to 8.
7% in 2022.
Then on March 11th, Moody’s cut New York City’s credit outlook to negative.
the first negative action since the pandemic, citing sizable and persistent budget gaps and a structural imbalance.
The city’s own fiscal watchdog, comproller Mark Lavine, called it a sobering wake-up call and said the quiet part.
The city is spending more than it brings in with a whole of at least $5.
4 billion across this year and next and expenses outrunning revenue by 4.
5 billion.
the budget only balances by pulling nearly a billion dollars out of the rainy day fund.
And city hall’s response to the warning, they called it premature and pointed to $5 billion.
They hope Albany will send money the governor has never agreed to.
That’s not a budget, that’s a bet.
And the chips are 34,000 households with plane tickets.
So what are the people in charge actually doing while the foundation moves? 3 weeks after Moody’s flashed that warning, the mayor’s office posted a video.
his words.
My position, tax the rich.
Not one word of adjustment.
His allies circulated a think tank report calling millionaire flight a myth.
The same spring, his own administration was inviting bank CEOs to Gracie Mansion and asking them to stay.
And up in Albany, Governor Kathy Hokll keeps blocking the tax hikes his whole budget assumes, having put it plainly, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach.
” So, the plan can’t pass.
And the spending it was supposed to cover doesn’t stop.
And here’s where David Solomon fails, too.
In January 2025, Goldman’s board handed him an $80 million retention bonus on top of a raise to $39 million.
While Project Voyage was telling his own managers to move across the country or clear out their desks, the big proxy advisers told shareholders to vote it down with one writing that the award lacks rigorous preset performance criteria.
It squeaked through with the weakest support in about a decade.
And the man preaching cost discipline has never built a headquarters without taxpayers chipping in.
His New York tower went up after 9/11 with 1.
65 billion in taxexempt Liberty bonds.
His Dallas campus comes wrapped in $18 million of incentives from Dallas taxpayers.
The mayor squeezes the CEO pockets.
Working New Yorkers hold the bag either way.
And this is bigger than one city.
Citadel already moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami.
Bank of America is putting up a 30-story Dallas tower with more than 10,000 employees already in the metro.
Wells Fargo just opened a Texas campus built for 4,500.
Same playbook everywhere.
An expensive city bets the money can’t move, and the money quietly proves it can.
So, let’s bring it full circle.
We started with a kid from the suburbs who mailed 50 letters to Wall Street and got a rejection from the most famous firm on it.
He spent 15 years earning his way back, two more decades climbing to the top, and the corner office he fought his whole life for now sits in a city that treats his industry like a problem to be taxed rather than an engine to be kept.
Here’s the bottom line.
You cannot rest the budget of 8 12 million people on 34,000 households and then dare those households to leave.
When nearly half your income tax can walk out the door, you’d better give it a reason to stay.
and wherever you live, pull up your own city’s books because the same dependence is hiding in them, too.
So, I want to hear from you in the comments.
Is Goldman right to build its future in Dallas, or is New York simply too big to lose? If you work in finance, tell me what you’re seeing inside your own firm.
If this video connected the dots for you, hit that like button, subscribe for more deep dives into the stories that hit your wallet, and tap the bell so you don’t miss what’s coming.
40 years ago, Goldman Sachs sent David Solomon a rejection letter.
This year, New York City got one,
