Goldman Sachs’ CEO Got Fooled By An Email Prankster (Look What He Had To Say)

Jun 13, 2017 | Bad Credit Loans, Bank Lending, Business Lending, Business Loans, Finance, Grow, Working Capital

Lloyd Blankfein got fooled? We should all feel better.

CREDIT: Getty Images

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek

Humans are mostly fools.

I thought, however, that bankers were immune from this.

They look down on us from their ivory suites and chuckle at our essential naïveté and ignorance.

It seems, though, that they might be at least slightly more like you and me than we might have imagined.

Take Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein. You’d think that nothing and no one could fool him.

Yet, as the New York Post reports, when he received an email from his company’s president and co-CEO, Harvey Schwarz, he readily entered into banter.

The slight problem, as it turned out, was the the email was the work of the person behind the Twitter account with the name EMAIL PRANKSTER.

“Just read that your; ‘how did infrastructure week go?’ Tweet won some award for most humorous tweet — Trump will be so pissed ;),” wrote Fake Harvey.

Blankfein happily replied about his trip to China. “I tweeted when landed in China how good their infrastructure was and that we had to catch up…seemed like a good way to bookend the trip,” he said.

Then Fake Harvey continued: “Absolute genius, Lloyd. You’ve never thought of heading for Vegas with a standup act?! You’d clean up. Although all the girls and gambling.. a man could get easily corrupted.”

“I’d settle for getting away with it,” replied Blankfein, with blessed insight into a banker’s mind.

Do bankers really talk to each other like this? It seems so. They also seem to be easily taken in by the prankster. Barclay’s CEO Jes Staley fell under his easy charm just last month.

You imagine, though, that Blankfein is a man of detail.

Yet Fake Harvey wrote to him: “Trump has no sense of humour [sic] anyway, he’s a relic of the old ways, drunk on power and a serious danger to America.”

You see that spelling of humor? Harvey Schwarz’s bio suggests he isn’t all that English. He is, indeed, from New Jersey.

It’s heartening, then, that we can all get taken in sometimes.

I find the idea of superhumans profoundly depressing. I find the idea of superhuman bankers unbearable.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.