Goldman Sachs: Lifestyles of the Subsidized and Anonymous
Happy Goldman Sachs Bonus Day! As we mentioned earlier, Goldman announced today that its 2009 bonuses will total $16 billion, spread (very unevenly) among its 32,500 employees. We thought we'd take a look at how they spend our money.
To recap: Goldman Sachs has taken in a total of $12 billion in profits since September 2008, during which time a) Goldman received a $13 billion pass-through taxpayer bailout via AIG, a $10 billion taxpayer loan via TARP (since repaid), and access to capital at .5% interest via the Federal Reserve; and b) more than 6 million jobs disappeared from the economy and food stamp usage shot up 20%.
Numbers like those are why the New York Police Department beefed up its presence in front of Goldman Sachs' headquarters today, for fear of a riot. We expressed our class rage by firing up the old real property databases to see how the actual human beings who actually spent the last year-and-a-half leveraging our actual tax dollars into multimillion bonuses have been living lately. We picked some of the people that ABC News says are most likely to get more than $10 million and up, as well as some of the firm's managing directors. The photos are either from Google Maps or county clerk web sites, and the ownership is based on the most recent records in available property databases.
John F.W. Rogers, Managing Director and Secretary to the Board of Directors
An old Washington, D.C., hand, Rogers lives in an $8.4 million home on Embassy Row. Here's the Google Street view:
And here's the living room, via an old real estate listing:
When he's not tending to his home's seven bedroom's and six full baths, Rogers is busy spending $250,000 to put up a statue of Ronald Reagan in the Capital Rotunda.
David B. Heller, Managing Director,
This is Heller's $7.2 million Hamptons getaway, one house away from the beach, with a tennis court and pool.
Marc Spilker, Co-Head of the Asset-Management Division
Spilker is on ABC News' list of the $10 million-plus club at Goldman. He famously lost Goldman a client after his neighbor at the Hamptons home pictured below—apparently undergoing some landscaping—got in a dispute after Spilker knocked down his garden hedges. That neighbor, Jim Chanos, happened to keep his money with Goldman, and pulled it after complaining to CEO Lloyd Blankfein about Spilker's rudeness.
No worries though, if Spilker feels awkward in his Hamptons neighborhood, he's always got his Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan or his condo in this Palm Beach tower on the ocean:
Edith W. Cooper, Managing Director
Cooper purchased this 10 bedroom, 11.5 bath mansion—with a pool, tennis court, and what appears to be some sort of Versailles-like sculpted lawn—in Greenwich, Conn., for $14.7 million in 2005.
Christopher A. Cole, Chairman of Investment Banking and Managing Director
Cole and family have a lot of room to play on at his Martha's Vineyard estate, purchased at a steal for $4.4 million in 2003.
Esta Stecher, Executive Vice President and General Counsel
Stecher can look out the back window of her $2.9 million mansion in Quogue, N.Y., near the Hamptons, and see the bay.
Edward Forst, Co-Head of Investment Management Division
Forst bought this $5.7 million, six-bedroom third home—he's also got places in Westchester and Colorado—in 2007.
There's much, much more of course, but that's just a sampling to remind you how the Goldman half lives.
Goldman has taken pains of late to beef up its charitable donations, save homeless kittens, and otherwise do anything possible to get people to hate them less except redistribute those bonuses back to the poor people who financed them. And as you can see from this chart, which tracks Goldman's favorability—"BrandIndex"—rating since November 2008 as determined by the research firm YouGov, Goldman's extended reverse Robin Hood operation has taken its toll. It hasn't been in positive territory since the collapse late last year. But oddly enough, the other line—its revenue during the same time period—seems to be doing just fine. So there's some consolation for all that hatred out there.
[Research and chart by Gawker intern Sergio Hernandez.]