W21st NYC's List: Jon Stewart

• Unlike other Wall Street firms, Goldman retained a partnership system when it became a publicly traded company in 1999.
• Goldman has almost 860 current and former partners, the documents show. In the last 12 years, they have cashed out more than $20 billion in Goldman shares and currently hold more than $10 billion in Goldman stock.
• The shares cannot be sold or transferred until January 2014. The award has already helped increase the partners’ stake in Goldman to 11.2 percent, from 8.7 percent. And as additional options vest, the partners’ control of the firm will most likely increase.
• Over all for the partnership, the stock sales amount to around $24 million on average for each partner since the 1999 initial public offering — a conservative estimate since the documents do not capture every sale by a Goldman partner, or shares sold as part of the public offering. Pay packages also include cash salaries and bonuses, and this analysis does not include the billions of dollars Goldman has paid in those categories.
• Goldman’s stock has returned nearly 175 percent since the close of its May 1999 initial public offering. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the same period has lost almost 2.9 percent. But the gains of Goldman employees from stock options since the financial collapse have been particularly striking.
• The number approved by Goldman’s board dwarfed not only the previous year’s grant of 3.5 million options, but also exceed the entire amount of options previously outstanding.

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