(Uskings) Top Greatest People in the United States history – P44 – Marcus Goldman (New Jersey): From “farmer’s son” to the founder of financial empire Goldman Sachs

Marcus Goldman was born Mark Goldmann on December 9, 1821 in Trappstadt, Bavaria, Germany. His family was Ashkenazi Jewish. His paternal grandfather was called Jonathan Marx until he changed his name to Goldmann when Jews were allowed to have surnames in 1811.

Goldman 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, his name was changed to Marcus Goldman by US immigration. In 1869, Goldman relocated to New York City and hung out a shingle on Pine Street in lower Manhattan, with the legend “Marcus Goldman & Co.”, setting himself up as a broker of IOUs.

From the 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. & W. Seligman & Co., with working capital of $6 million in 1869 (equivalent of $115 million in 2019), were already modern-day investment bankers immersed in underwriting and trading railroad bonds.

In 1882, Goldman invited his son-in-law Samuel to join him in the business and changed the firm’s name to M. Goldman and Sachs. Business boomed—soon the new firm was turning over $30 million worth of paper a year—and the firm’s capital was now $100,000 (equivalent of $2.6 million in 2019), all of it the senior partners’.

For almost fifty years after its inception, all of Goldman Sachs’s partners were members of intermarried families. In 1885, Goldman took his own son Henry and his son-in-law Ludwig Dreyfuss into the business as junior partners and the firm adopted its present name, Goldman Sachs & Co. In 1894, Henry Sachs entered the firm, and in 1896, the firm joined the New York Stock Exchange.

When Goldman retired, he left the firm in the hands of his son Henry Goldman and his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. Goldman died in Elberon, New Jersey, in the summer of 1904.

According to en.wikipedia