Meet Lloyd Blankfein, the outsider.
The prominent investment bank CEO told attendees at a gay-advocacy leadership conference, “Out on The Street,” at Goldman’s headquarters yesterday that he understood what it was like to be on the outskirts.
“And I think that on a personal level I always felt a little bit outside, myself, in a lot of ways. . . . There’s a lot of people in a lot of circumstances that make somebody feel that way,” Blankfein told an auditorium of Wall Streeters.
“Even in the context of Goldman Sachs, I was a sales trader in an investment bank, I was a salesman in the context of trading. I was in a funny asset class — commodities — in a firm that’s more known for a securities kind of business,” he noted.
Goldman and Blankfein, after years of getting buffeted by claims that it was an uncaring, profits-first firm, have taken major steps recently to counter that negative image.
Those steps, including yesterday’s address, had Blankfein last year in an ad by the Human Rights Campaign endorsing gay marriages and his signing a letter with other business leaders in 2011, backing gay marriage.