Gorman Gossip, Iger’s Post-Retirement, and the Biggest Digital Media Stories of 2021
Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon serving of exclusive insider reporting from across the Puck platform.
Then, below the fold, Brian Morrissey, the former president and editor in chief of Digiday Media, offers his most provocative observations on the biggest digital media stories of the year.
The C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley dishes on Goldman and succession, among other topics, over bespoke sushi. A few weeks ago, before the recent Omicron spike, James Gorman invited me to lunch, high atop Morgan Stanley’s headquarters, just north of Times Square in Manhattan, for a conversation about his firm, the markets, what’s worrying him these days and when he’ll name his successor. Gorman, the 63-year-old Aussie C.E.O. of the firm, had the sushi. I had a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp. He seemed in fine fettle, and chatty, after a long, challenging, and highly successful year.
Gorman and I have a little history together. We both graduated from Columbia Business School in the class of 1987, five months before Black Monday wiped out nearly 23 percent of the value on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Having been elected class speaker by my peers, I headed to GE Capital, to finance leveraged buyouts, and then to Lazard, Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, as an M&A banker. Gorman, for his part, joined McKinsey, where eventually he became a senior partner. It was an incredible accomplishment for a young man whose father had both grown up in the Outback and been homeschooled until he was a senior.
And, of course, it was only the start of his stratospheric ascent. One of Gorman’s most important clients at McKinsey was Merrill Lynch, the once independent investment bank that would eventually get sucked into Bank of America during the 2008 financial crisis. In 1999, Gorman left McKinsey for Merrill, in the newly created position of chief marketing officer and as a member of the firm’s management committee. (I had left Merrill by then.) Two years later, Gorman headed up Merrill’s brokerage business, known as the “Thundering Herd” on Wall Street. He was a big success at Merrill.
In February 2006, Gorman joined Morgan Stanley as president and chief operating officer of the bank’s wealth management business, its version of the Thundering Herd. In 2009, he advocated for, and then engineered, the two-step merger between Morgan Stanley’s wealth management business and the giant Smith Barney brokerage that was then part of Citigroup, which had been sent reeling during the financial crisis. Gorman bet that the kinds of recurring revenue that a wealth management business generates would be increasingly important on Wall Street, post Dodd-Frank, because risk-taking inside the Big Banks was going to be greatly curtailed. He was right. From there, Gorman was on a rocket ship to the top of the firm.
Gorman and I didn’t know each other at Columbia, or at all really, until he became the C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley, in January 2010…
FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT
Deal murmurs, M&A rumblings, and other insights into the media in-crowd’s inside conversation.
MATT BELLONI
Washington is awash with rumors that Manchin and the Democrats—the swamp’s version of Bennifer—are on the verge of a break-up.
JULIA IOFFE
Many of the hopes for a resurgent 2021 in the media business didn’t come to pass, but the year was hardly a disaster.
BRIAN MORRISSEY
A tale of the embattled Ozy founder, a turkey club sandwich, and a misadventure in crisis management.
WILLIAM D. COHAN |