Background
He was born in Trappstadt, Bavaria and immigrated to the United States in 1848. Goldman was born in Trappstadt, Bavaria, Germany, the son of Ella and Wolf Goldmann, a former schoolteacher and cattle dealer.
entrepreneur Financier private sector banker
He was born in Trappstadt, Bavaria and immigrated to the United States in 1848. Goldman was born in Trappstadt, Bavaria, Germany, the son of Ella and Wolf Goldmann, a former schoolteacher and cattle dealer.
His family was Ashkenazi Jewish. He immigrated to the United States from Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1848 during the first great wave of Jewish immigration to America, resulting from the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. Upon arriving in America, he worked as a peddler with a horse-drawn cart and later as a shopkeeper in Philadelphia.
From his earliest days of his business, Goldman was able to singlehandedly transact as much as $5 million worth of commercial paper a year.
Successful though he was, Goldman"s business was insignificant compared to that of the other Jewish-German bankers of the day. Concerns like J. & West. Seligman & Company, with working capital of $6 million in 1869 (equivalent of $107 million in 2015), were already modern-day investment bankers immersed in underwriting and trading railroad bonds.
Louisa"s older sister and Sam"s older brother had already married. Business boomed—by 1880 the new firm was turning over $30 million worth of paper a year—and the firm"s capital was now $100,000 (equivalent of $25 million in 2015), all of it the senior partner"son
In 1904, two of Sachs" sons, Arthur and Paul, joined the firm immediately after graduating from Harvard University.
Goldman died in summer 1904.
Foreign almost fifty years after its inception, all of Goldman Sachs"s partners were members of intermarried families.