Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive officer, pushed back Friday against a Wall Street Journal article that said he is planning to step down as soon as the end of this year.
Blankfein said in a post on Twitter, “I feel like Huck Finn listening to his own eulogy,” 
The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter that it didn’t identify, said Blankfein, 63, could leave this year and the bank intended to replace him with one of its two co-presidents, David Solomon or Harvey Schwartz.
The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter that it didn’t identify, said Blankfein, 63, could leave this year and the bank intended to replace him with one of its two co-presidents, David Solomon or Harvey Schwartz.
Nowhere was the news met with more surprise than inside Goldman Sachs. Members of the management committee were stunned, according to people familiar with the matter. Blankfein, who steered the firm through the financial crisis, has yet to set a timetable for his departure or discuss his plans with senior colleagues, one of the people said.
It’s hardly a secret that Blankfein might move on in the near future. Solomon and Schwartz have been jockeying to succeed Blankfein for months.
Blankfein, the son of a postal worker who grew up in a Brooklyn housing project, has become a billionaire from his Goldman Sachs career. He rose through the firm’s trading business and took the top job in 2006 when Hank Paulson left to become Treasury secretary. Much of his work in recent years has been repairing the bank’s image after Congressional hearings and media scrutiny focusing on the firm’s role in the mortgage-bond bubble that helped bring about the financial crisis.