Over the next 12 years, mentored by Winkelried, Solomon rose through the ranks, first as head of Goldman’s financing businesses, then as co-head of investment banking, and finally as co-chief operating officer alongside Harvey Schwartz. The initial betting inside Goldman was that the C.E.O. job was Schwartz’s to lose. (“It’s not like my ears were closed,” says Solomon. “I heard that, too.”) Blankfein, according to one former longtime executive at the firm, was impressed by Schwartz’s performance as chief financial officer. “Harvey was crushing it,” the executive says. He handled everything well—earnings calls, regulators, investor relations, the board. “Lloyd felt like, ‘Well, look at this guy.’”

Solomon is cut from a classic Goldman mold. Like many of the firm’s leaders before him, he’s an ambitious middle-class striver.

But over time, according to the executive, the “stress of the situation” began to weigh on Schwartz. He became “monomaniacal” and uncomfortable with “surrendering control.” Many inside the firm came to see him as “a control freak.” He is said to believe that some people at Goldman “conspired against” his candidacy. (Schwartz declined to comment, but a source familiar with his thinking called such characterizations “simply not accurate.”) Whatever his state of mind, Schwartz decided he needed to know whether it was going to be him or Solomon who would succeed Blankfein. He called the question with the board—only to discover that he didn’t have either Blankfein’s or the board’s support. “He did not handle the situation particularly well,” says a former Goldman partner who is close to Schwartz. “If Lloyd had another four or five years to go, it could have played out quite differently. Because Harvey is actually much better externally than people give him credit for.”

With no way forward, Schwartz decided to leave Goldman. Solomon says he wishes Schwartz had agreed to stay, but concedes he would have left the firm, too, had he been passed over for the top job. He declines to say whether he thinks he played the situation “smarter” than Schwartz. “My approach to it was very, very simple,” he says. “I was excited to be the co-president of Goldman Sachs. If the firm thought that I’d be the best guy to run the firm, I’d be excited to have the opportunity to do it. If the firm didn’t think I was the best guy to run the firm, I’d go to something else. It wasn’t defining me.”

Love it or hate it, Goldman Sachs has always displayed an uncanny knack for finding the right man at the right time to lead the firm. Sometimes the right man is a banker; sometimes the right man is a trader. The right man has never been a woman. First it was the indomitable investment banker Sidney Weinberg, who saved the firm after the stock-market crash in 1929. Then it was Gus Levy, who expanded Goldman’s banking franchise into trading—making a fortune for himself and his partners along the way. Then it was Robert Rubin (later a Treasury secretary), Steve Friedman (later a national economic adviser), Jon Corzine (later a governor and senator), and Hank Paulson (who rescued the firm twice—first as a rainmaker, then as Treasury secretary during the financial crash in 2008). Each of them found ways for Goldman to make more and more money, regardless of the prevailing market conditions.

But Solomon faces a challenge that no Goldman leader before him has been forced to confront. Ever since 2008, when the Federal Reserve took the unprecedented step of making Goldman a bank-holding company and giving it access to its short-term borrowing window following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Goldman has effectively been subjected to the same financial regulations as big commercial banks. And despite the recent loosening of banking rules under Trump, Solomon doesn’t see much regulatory relief on the horizon. “It’s evolving,” he says, “but it’s not going away.” So Solomon is planning to reposition Goldman in a way that his predecessors would have found not just unthinkable but downright distasteful: he’s moving the storied investment bank increasingly into commercial banking, offering cash management to its corporate clients and small loans to average Americans to help them pay off their credit-card debt.