Short answers, pulled from the story.
Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 by Marcus Goldman in New York City, in a one-room basement office next to a coal chute. His son-in-law Samuel Sachs joined in 1882, and the firm adopted its current name in 1885 when Henry Goldman and Ludwig Dreyfuss also joined.
Goldman Sachs went public in May 1999, pricing its shares at $53 each and selling 12.6% of the firm to outside investors. After the IPO, 221 former partners held 48.3% of the firm.
In September 2008, Goldman Sachs converted from an independent investment bank to a bank holding company, ending a business model that had existed for 75 years since Congress separated investment banks from deposit-taking lenders. The firm received a $10 billion preferred stock investment from the U.S. Treasury through TARP and repaid it in June 2009 with 23% interest.
The phrase "long-term greedy" is attributed to senior partner Gus Levy, who led the firm from 1969. It held that short-term losses were acceptable as long as the firm made money over a longer horizon, and partners reinforced this by reinvesting nearly all of their earnings back into the firm.
Global Alpha was founded in the mid-1990s with $10 million by Cliff Asness and Mark Carhart, using quantitative analysis and high-frequency trading. It reached more than $12 billion in assets under management at its peak in 2007, then declined to approximately $1 billion before Goldman Sachs shut it down in September 2011.
Goldman Sachs ranked 32nd on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue and 20th in the Forbes Global 2000 as of 2025. It is also classified as a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.