Investors are “definitely in a moment where there’s more greed than there is fear,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said Tuesday in an appearance at the Economic Club of New York.
The comment came in the context of a massive fundraising wave connected to artificial intelligence firms in the market.
Two of the world’s leading AI model generators – OpenAI and Anthropic – are gearing up for potential trillion-dollar initial public offerings. And so is Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Meanwhile, tech firms, writ large, are circling investors to raise money for data centers and other infrastructure.
“There’s plenty of liquidity in the system if the world continues to remain as optimistic,” Solomon said. “When capital’s available – if you’re capital consumptive and it’s available – take the capital.”
To emphasize the point, he added, “The capital is available.”
Goldman, for sure, stands to gain millions of dollars in fees, collectively, from several of the deals. It locked down the lead underwriter position on SpaceX’s IPO. More recently, Goldman served as a placement agent and joint bookrunner on an $80 billion equity raise by Alphabet, which owns Google.
“This is the largest equity deal, largest follow-on equity deal that’s ever been done,” Solomon said, adding, “the stock’s trading quite well.”
Alphabet stock fell 1.3% during trading Tuesday, according to Yahoo Finance.
“This is the first actual concrete data point for bringing something of this scale, and it’s encouraging,” Solomon said.
Goldman holds a 29% market share of mergers-and-acquisitions advisory by value in 2026 so far, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“We have an almost $300 billion lead in the league table at this point in the year, which is our largest lead ever at this point in the year,” the bank’s president, John Waldron, said during a conference appearance last week. “Hope I didn’t just jinx that.”
Continued “greed” is not guaranteed, Solomon said. But strong performance in the AI sector could create an echo chamber in which net income from early projects could be funneled into future ventures.
Greed can “turn into fear very quickly, but that doesn’t mean it will,” Solomon said.
“Exuberance can go on for big periods of time,” he said. “There’s a good chance that we’re earlier in the cycle than later.”
