The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. History & Founding Timeline

The 2016-2023 Marcus initiative — Goldman's attempt to compete in mass-market personal lending, savings, and card products — accumulated approximately $3-4 billion in cumulative pre-tax losses before the 2023 strategic retreat. The initiative fundamentally misread Goldman's competitive position in consumer banking: the firm's talent model (expensive MBAs and finance PhDs), cost structure, and institutional culture are optimized for high-complexity, high-margin transactions, not the operational scale and unit economics discipline that mass-market consumer banking requires. The Apple Card and GreenSky partnerships extended the consumer banking exposure without solving the fundamental business model incompatibility.

The Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation — a leveraged investment trust promoted aggressively to retail investors in 1929 — collapsed during the market crash, destroying investor capital and severely damaging the firm's reputation for a generation. This historical episode established the reputational risk consequences of promoting speculative investment products to retail investors — a lesson that the firm internalized for decades before partially forgetting in the 2007-2008 structured credit period.

Goldman Sachs agreed to pay approximately $5 billion in settlements in 2020 related to its role in raising $6.5 billion in bonds for Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, a significant portion of which was allegedly misappropriated through fraud. The scandal involved former Goldman bankers who were convicted or pled guilty to bribery and money laundering charges. The settlement — the largest in Goldman's history — generated regulatory scrutiny of the firm's compliance and risk management culture and raised questions about the due diligence standards applied in certain emerging market government transactions.