Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill (; born March 16, 1933) is an American banker, financier, and philanthropist. He is a former chief executive and chairman of Citigroup, from 1998 to October 2003, and April 2006, respectively.
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Early life and education
Weill was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York City, to Polish Jewish immigrants, Etta (Kalika) and Max Weill. He attended P.S. 200 of the New York City Public Schools system for elementary school in his local neighborhood of Bensonhurst. He also attended Peekskill Military Academy in Peekskill, New York of Upstate New York, and then enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was active in the U.S. Air Force ROTC and Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. In 1955, Weill graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government from Cornell.
Weill's middle initial of "I" is not an abbreviation for anything. In 2002, he said:
My mother wanted to name me after somebody whose name started with an "I", but she couldn't think of a name she liked. So she gave me the initial with the idea that after I was 21 I could choose whatever middle name I wanted.
Career
In 1955, shortly after graduating from Cornell, Weill began his first job on Wall Street, as a runner for Bear Stearns. In 1956, he became a licensed broker at Bear Stearns. Rather than making phone calls or personal visits to solicit clients, Weill found he was far more comfortable sitting at his desk, poring through companies' financial statements and disclosures made to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For weeks his only client was his mother, Etta, until his later to be wife, Joan, persuaded an ex-boyfriend to open a brokerage account.
Building Shearson
While working at Bear Stearns, Weill was a neighbor of Arthur L. Carter who was working at Lehman Brothers. Together with Roger Berlind and Peter Potoma, they formed Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill in May 1960. In 1962 the firm became Carter, Berlind & Weill after the New York Stock Exchange brought disciplinary proceedings against Potoma.
In 1968, with the departure of Arthur Carter, the firm was renamed Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt (Marshall Cogan, Arthur Levitt), or CBWL jokingly referred to on Wall Street as "Corned Beef With Lettuce". Weill was the firm's chairman from 1965 to 1984, a period in which it completed over 15 acquisitions to become the country's second-largest securities brokerage firm. The company became CBWL-Hayden, Stone, Inc. in 1970; Hayden Stone, Inc. in 1972; Shearson Hayden Stone in 1974, when it merged with Shearson Hammill & Co.; and Shearson Loeb Rhoades in 1979, when it merged with Loeb, Rhoades, Hornblower & Co.
With capital totaling $250 million, Shearson Loeb Rhoades trailed only Merrill Lynch as the largest securities broker.
American Express
In 1981, Weill sold Shearson Loeb Rhoades to American Express for about $915 million in stock. In 1982, he founded the National Academy Foundation with the Academy of Finance to educate high school students. Weill began was president of American Express Co. in 1983 and as chairman and CEO of American Express's insurance subsidiary, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, in 1984. Weill was succeeded by his protégé, Peter A. Cohen, who became the youngest head of a Wall Street firm. While at American Express, Weill began grooming his newest protégé, Jamie Dimon, the future CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
Acquisitions
Weill resigned from American Express in August 1985 at age 52. After an attempt to become the CEO of BankAmerica Corp., he persuaded Minneapolis-based Control Data Corporation to spin off a troubled subsidiary, Commercial Credit, a consumer finance company. In 1986, Weill bought Commercial Credit for $7 million. After a period of layoffs and reorganization, the company completed a successful IPO.
In 1987, he acquired Gulf Insurance. The following year, in 1988, he paid $1.5 billion for Primerica, the parent company of Smith Barney and the A. L. Williams insurance company. In 1989, he acquired Drexel Burnham Lambert's retail brokerage outlets. In 1992, he paid $722 million to buy a 27% share of Travelers Insurance, which had gotten into trouble because of bad real estate investments.
In 1993, he reacquired his old Shearson brokerage (now Shearson Lehman) from American Express for $1.2 billion. By the end of the year, he had completely taken over Travelers Corp in a $4 billion stock deal and officially began calling his corporation Travelers Group Inc. In 1996 he added to his holdings, at a cost of $4 billion, the property and casualty operations of Aetna Life & Casualty. In September 1997 Weill acquired Salomon Inc., the parent company of Salomon Brothers Inc. for over $9 billion in stock.
Citigroup
In April 1998, Travelers Group announced an agreement to undertake the $76 billion merger between Travelers and Citicorp, and the merger was completed on October 8, 1998. The possibility remained that the merger would run into problems connected with federal law. Ever since the passage of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932, during the presidential administration, of 31st President, Herbert Hoover (1874–1964, served 1929–1933), the fields of banking and insurance businesses had been kept separate. Both Weill and CEO / chairman predecessor John S. Reed (born 1939), bet that the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. would soon pass legislation overturning those regulations, which Weill, Reed and a number of businesspeople considered not in their interest.
To speed up the process, they recruited to the board of directors of the financial company former 38th President, Gerald R. Ford (1913–2006, served 1974–1977, a Republican) and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (born 1938, who served during the Democratic Bill Clinton presidential administration, 1993–2001) whom Weill was personally close to. With both Democrats and Republicans on their side, the law was taken down in less than two years. Many European countries, for instance, had already torn down the firewall between banking and insurance. During a two-to-five-year grace period allowed by law, Citigroup could conduct business in its merged form; should that period have elapsed without a change in the law, Citigroup would have had to spin off its insurance businesses. Weill's office holds a wood etching of him engraved with the words "The Shatterer of Glass–Steagall". Weill now denies that the congressional repeal of the 1932 Glass–Steagall Act played a role in the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, the worst economic downturn and financial collapse in American history since the infamous Great Depression of the 1930s.
In 1998, Weill was the recipient of FinancialWorld Magazine's CEO of the Year Award and received the same honor from ChiefExecutive Magazine in 2002.
In 2001, Weill became a Class A director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York of the United States Federal Reserve system. Class A directors are those elected by the Federal Reserve member regional banks. Also in 2001, Weill established several offshore enterprises, including one through which he owned his yacht. These entities were identified in the infamous Panama Papers scandal, a release in 2016 of secret financial documents dating back to the 1970s, of off-shore overseas / foreign money deposits and secret bank accounts of millions of dollars of wealthy Americans and others hiding them for federal / state income tax purposes.
Personal life
Weill married Joan H. Mosher on June 20, 1955. The couple now live on a 362 acres estate they purchased in 2010 in Sonoma, California.
He has two children. Jessica Bibliowicz worked in financial services under her father at firms such as Smith Barney and was CEO of National Financial Partners until its eventual acquisition. Marc Weill also worked in financial services companies run by his father, at one point as the CEO of Citigroup Investments until resigning in 2000 and becoming involved in venture capital.
Philanthropy
In 1997, Weill received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. His Golden Plate was presented by Awards Council member, retired U.S. Army General and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also later U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell (1937–2021).
Weill was a Cornell Trustee, his alma mater. In 1998, he endowed Cornell's medical school, now known as Weill Cornell Medicine, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City (separate from Cornel's main campus in Ithaca).[1] As chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Weill Cornell Medical College and an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University itself, Weill orchestrated a $400 million donation to Cornell, to which he and his wife personally contributed $250 million.
In June 2007, he endowed the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at his alma mater of Cornell University, on its campus in Ithaca, New York, housed in a new life science building named Weill Hall. On September 10, 2013, Joan and Sandy Weill and the Weill Family Foundation announced a $100 million gift to Weill Cornell. Weill is chairman of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College and the parallel Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, having joined the board in 1982 and becoming its chair in 1995. Weill stepped down as chairman of the Board of Overseers in 2014, and was succeeded by his daughter, Jessica M. Bibliowicz. Weill Cornell established the first American medical school overseas in Doha, the modernist capital city of the emirate State of Qatar in the Middle East / Persian Gulf region, in 2001. This was made possible through a special partnership between Weill Cornell and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. Weill Cornell's inaugural class in Qatar graduated in 2008.
Weill also is on the Board of Governors of Sidra. a 380-bed specialty teaching hospital was scheduled to open in 2014, also in the emirate State of Qatar in the Middle East / Persian Gulf. Sidra is supported by a $9 billion endowment from the Qatar Foundation. In addition, he is a Trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital; a Trustee of the Hospital for Special Surgery; and a member of the Executive Council of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center.
In May 2003, he received the Baruch Medal for Business and Civic Leadership, presented by Baruch College of the City University of New York system for his work in public education and his accomplishments in business.
