Exclusive: Goldman CEO David Solomon on how his dad’s advice shaped his career

Forty-some years later, Solomon is running Goldman Sachs, and the same instinct his father gave him has become the frame through which he’s telling Goldman’s 2026 intern class to approach everything from career decisions to AI.

Solomon shared the habit—along with a candid assessment of where AI helps and where it can’t—during a recent town hall with the firm’s summer intern class, according to remarks shared exclusively with Fortune. The audience was selected from an applicant pool competitive enough to hold the acceptance rate below 1% for a third consecutive year, and arrived as Goldman posted record second-quarter results: net revenues of $20.34 billion and earnings per share of $20.98, up 92% year-over-year.

The legal pad test

Solomon’s method for big decisions isn’t complicated, but it’s deliberately uncomfortable. “I have an old habit that, when I make big decisions—of taking out a piece of paper, drawing a line down the middle, and putting things on both sides of the line,” he told the interns. The twist is what happens next: “Even when I quickly put things on the left side that are overwhelmingly obvious, I force myself to think more deeply about what things I might not be thinking about, that should force me to consider the other way.”

The habit, he said, traces directly to his father. “My dad had an incredible way of never telling me what to do, but always forcing me to really wrestle with things and think through issues,” he said. “If I was running down the road to turn left, he had a great ability to get me to pause and really think about why left was a better choice than right. He never said right was better—even when he thought so—he wanted me to spend more time thinking about right before I went left.”

The payoff isn’t necessarily a better decision every time. It’s more conviction in the one you make. “That gives you more confidence when you ultimately make the decision,” he said. “So go slow, force yourself to look at the other side, and you’ll know when you have big decisions.”

Patience as the strategy

The father’s instinct also runs through Solomon’s career advice, which amounted to a version of the same thing: Slow down before you turn. “Some of the most important decisions I made were saying no to things where the grass looked greener in the short term,” he said. “I stayed in places longer and that therefore opened up bigger opportunities than I would have imagined.”

Solomon spent nearly a decade at Bear Stearns before joining Goldman in 1999–reportedly after being turned down by the firm at least once earlier in his career—patience that eventually put him in the CEO seat two decades later. “Being patient and taking more time can open up a broader range of opportunities,” he told the group. “Try not to be in a hurry and enjoy the ride.”

Use the models, then argue with them

The father’s logic—look at the other side before you commit—maps, in Solomon’s telling, onto how he thinks about AI. He encouraged the interns to “really try to understand what these things do and don’t do. Where are they powerful? How do they help you? How do they make you smarter and better?” But the instruction that followed was about friction, not adoption: “Ask questions, challenge the conventional wisdom,” he said. “You have the ability to pick any topic and, in a much shorter period of time, get much smarter on it. But you have to challenge what the models give you.”

His own practice is to treat AI models as a sparring partner rather than an oracle, using them to stress-test his read on events rather than confirm it. “Go to one of these models and ask them to verify it for you. Is this going on? What are the implications? What would it take to change it?”

That skepticism is rooted in a specific view of what AI can’t do. “The technology has no ability to do what we do as human beings—to think about whether something makes sense,” he said. “There is a form of intelligence which is analyzing data, but there’s also a form of intelligence which is taking life experience and using it to think about or infer things that data wouldn’t.” It’s a more measured line than some of his other public comments on AI’s capabilities. He has said publicly AI can now draft roughly 95% of an S-1 IPO filing in minutes, a process that once took a six-person team weeks—and the contrast underscores his point: Technology accelerates the work; the judgment call at the end still belongs to a person.

That extends, he argued, to the core of what Goldman actually sells. “Across our business, a lot of the relationship is about clients wanting to talk to someone, be heard, be understood, and have an emotional connection. That’s not going away.”

Solomon’s thinking about AI capabilities has clearly shifted over the past year. At Italian Tech Week in Turin last October, Solomon said he was “not smart enough” to know whether AI is a bubble, but was certain of one thing: “It’s not different this time”— a lot of the capital being deployed now simply won’t deliver returns, no different from the dot-com run before it.

But Solomon has made his fullest case not in an interview, but in his own words. In a New York Times guest essay published in May, he conceded the premise before rebutting it: “Will A.I. disrupt the labor market? Absolutely.” He pointed to Goldman’s own research estimating AI could automate up to 25% of current U.S. working hours within a decade—concentrated in exactly the white-collar fields, accounting, banking, law, that make up his own client base—before laying out why he still isn’t worried: AI will free workers for more complex tasks, upgrade the jobs that remain rather than eliminate them, and create new roles overseeing the AI systems themselves.

Solomon has consistently advised interns to be philosophical. In 2025, he told Goldman’s class to “take the long view” and avoid rushing career decisions. This year, he tied it all the way back to his father, and gave it sharper edges. The legal pad, the patience, the argument with the AI model: All of it is, at bottom, the same instruction Jerry Solomon gave his son, now relayed to a room of 22-year-olds whose career decisions are just beginning. Go slow. Look at the other side. Don’t turn left until you know why.