52-year-old Managing Director (MD) Jonathan Kaye of Moelis & Co. didn’t have a good weekend. Whether or not he is the man in the social media video who punched a woman in the street during Brooklyn Pride on Friday night and was told, “You’re an asshole, you’re a horrible person,” he’s been referred to as such by the Daily Mail and the New York Post, while Bloomberg reports that Moelis is investigating what the company describes as a “serious incident” involving one of its employees, noting that the employee is referred to as Kaye in the social media post . So far it has been viewed nine million times.
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Kaye has deleted his LinkedIn profile. He did not respond to an attempt to email him at an address that matches Moelis & Co’s email format. and Moelis did not respond to our question. Moelis & Co. however, told Bloomberg: “We are taking this matter very seriously and are conducting an investigation.”
Kaye came to Moelis from Citi in 2013. He leads the boutique company’s global business services franchise. Last year he said on a podcast that he often mentors junior bankers and that empathy and good decision-making are crucial for success. Any position you hold in the financial world depends on your judgment, Kaye said. He added that as a banker, it is imperative to manage your reputation carefully and stay away from toxic people. Kaye is on the management committee of Moelis & Co. and his withdrawn LinkedIn profile shows that he is both a partner and a managing director.
Comments on social media in defense of the man in the video point out that his jacket is wet, indicating that there is more to the incident than is being presented. There is evidence that he feared acid being thrown at him, that he was reacting to anti-Semitism, or that the woman or women involved in the incident may have been transgender. An unverified post on Instagram account WallStreetGossip, quoting “people from his team,” claims Kaye was walking past a pro-Palestinian protest and was thrown to the ground because he was Jewish.
Others dispute that the blow is defensible. “We need to stop letting white men run away from this kind of violence because it teaches other white men that they can act this way too,” says someone on who delivered the blow was disproportionate. Another says Kaye is a “legend” at Moelis & Co.
In 2022, James Iannazzo, a Merrill Lynch financial advisor, was fired and accused of bigotry after he yelled at a smoothie shop employee who served his son a peanut butter smoothie, which led to his son being hospitalized with a severe allergic reaction. Iannazzo’s FINRA filing indicates the charges were dismissed and he now works for Aegis Capital Corporation in Westport.
In addition, Goldman Sachs bankers spoke to Business Insider about how competitive they all are. “We always want to win all the bake-offs or understand why we didn’t win,” Gene Sykes, co-chair of global mergers and acquisitions and technology, media and telecommunications banking, told BI. “We have an intense performance-based culture, which is competitive, but not against each other; it is competitive against other institutions,” he added.
If you’re a Goldman MD, this is a bit annoying. “The reality was that we wanted 100% market share, which is actually unachievable, but that was something you aimed for,” recalls a former Goldman executive. “It was quite a crazy way to live your life. I would wake up every morning and look at the newspaper in the beginning and in the later days I would check your phone to make sure no deal had happened that you didn’t And we felt the losses, the pain of the losses, much more than the wins.
Despite Sykes’s claim that competitiveness does not manifest itself internally, Dan Dees, Goldman’s global co-head of banking and markets, acknowledges that this could mean everyone wants to be on the bank’s management committees. “The organization has been formed over the last 30 years and has had great people who want to be there, and people who aren’t there but want to be there,” he said. “It’s the nature of the ambition of the place.” In March, Gonzalo Garcia, a natural resources banker and Goldman partner, resigned, apparently after being expelled from investment banking’s operating committee.
In the meantime…
High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund, has grown into a roughly $8 billion asset manager since launching in 2015, partly through the use of AI and algorithms. It has a new AI model, DeepSeek-V2, that can answer questions, write code and reason. (Financial times)
Bank of America plans to gradually add people in France. “Definitely more than a dozen” staff this year. (Bloomberg)
Barclays hired Christian Wagner from Morgan Stanley as head of investment banking for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. (Barclays)
Bank of America has hired technology banker Kempton Dunn from Perella Weinberg. (Bloomberg)
The Federal Court of Appeals has struck down U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules that require hedge funds and private equity firms to detail quarterly fees and expenses charged to investors. (Bloomberg)
Private mutual funds make a lot of money buying secondary investments, which they immediately increase regardless of how little they initially paid for them. The fund says they follow accounting rules. But what if the discounted prices on the secondary market are a more accurate measure of the true values of the investments? Then the asset values of stocks on the balance sheets of countless other investors could be inflated. (WSJ)
Since the arrival of John Williams in 2018, there has been an exodus of talent at the New York Fed. (Bloomberg)
Removing non-compete agreements will likely lead to more lawsuits as companies become more sensitive to people using secret information from competitors. (Bloomberg)
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