He was rejected for a job at Goldman Sachs out of college. Now he's poised to lead the Wall Street giant.

Goldman's board has discussed a plan for John Waldron, the firm's president, to succeed CEO David Solomon as soon as late 2027, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The move would cap a career built on a knack for dealmaking and forging relationships that has benefited the firm. It's far from the path he imagined as an English major who thought he would become a writer.

Waldron, 57, has long been viewed as the firm's likely next CEO. He was elevated to president and chief operating officer of the firm in 2018, after years of working closely with Solomon in Goldman's investment banking division.

Early last year, Goldman's board announced it was giving Waldron an $80 million retention bonus after learning he was in talks with Apollo Global Management and other investment firms, the Journal reported. Soon after, Waldron was also added to the board.

Waldron and Solomon have prioritized the "One Goldman Sachs" strategy that they rolled out at the start of Solomon's tenure. The effort is meant to incentivize Goldman's units to steer business to each other and has boosted revenue across the firm.

Waldron's pay in 2025 was $45 million, according to proxy filings-just short of Solomon's $47 million.

A spokesman for Goldman, Tony Fratto, said the board regularly discusses succession, but that there is no definitive timeline for it.

'I was more of an English kid'

A Cleveland native, Waldron moved to the East Coast at 15 when his father took a job in Philadelphia. He attended the Lawrenceville School, a private school in New Jersey, where he played varsity ice hockey and baseball and wrote for the student newspaper, according to the school's social media.

He went on to attend Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating with a major in English and minor in economics.

"I was more of an English kid than a finance kid," he said at a Brigham Young University event in 2023, according to an alumni magazine. "I thought I was going [to] be a writer."

It wasn't until he participated in a summer business program at the University of Chicago that he decided to pursue finance, with plans to spend a few years on Wall Street before moving on to an industrial or nonfinancial services company.

"It turned out that I fell in love with the work-but more importantly-with the people I got to work with," Waldron said.

He joined Bear Stearns out of college-after being rejected by Goldman.

"I didn't do well in the financial modeling test," Waldron said on Inside Blackstone, a podcast from the private-investment firm.

Waldron has said that starting his career at a smaller firm enabled him to take on bigger responsibilities and be more entrepreneurial. At Bear Stearns, he owned client relationships at a relatively young age, he said on Goldman's Exchanges podcast in 2019.

'I think you'd like coming here'

Bear Stearns is also where Waldron first worked with Solomon.

When Solomon joined Goldman in 1999, he said to Waldron: "I think you'd like coming here," Waldron recalled on the Exchanges podcast.

Waldron joined Goldman in 2000 and was named a partner two years later. He held leadership roles in leveraged finance and the financial sponsors group before being promoted to co-head of the investment banking division in 2014.

Waldron and his family live on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In the past, Waldron described how he has found balance in his life by getting home to have dinner with his children and putting the younger ones to bed before going out for a client dinner.

"So I'll have two dinners. I'll have a little bit of peanut butter and jelly and then I'll have ... I'll have a steak tartare later on," he said on the Exchanges podcast.

Asked on the Inside Blackstone podcast for a quote that speaks to him, Waldron said he was a "huge Eisenhower fan."

"His quote about leadership, as I remember it, is: 'It's the art of getting someone to do something you want them to do, because they want to do it,'" Waldron said. "And I feel like I spend a lot of time in my job trying to figure out how to do that."