Goldman Sachs flies home from San Francisco after a week of AI and earnings news

Goldman Sachs flew from San Francisco to Teterboro on May 13, arriving just before dawn after a 4-hour, 46-minute hop in its Gulfstream G280, tail N280WS. The trip follows a day in the Bay Area, where the firm maintains a major office and a steady client roster among technology and venture capital firms.

The same week, Goldman Sachs President John Waldron told CNBC that the bank is a “human assembly line” facing automation, per a Bloomberg report on May 12. The remarks came as the firm digests a first-quarter earnings beat — $17.55 per share, well above the $16.39 consensus, per American Banker — and as CEO David Solomon warns that the war in Iran could push up inflation. The San Francisco stop fits a pattern: the G280 flew from Teterboro to the Bay Area on May 11, and the firm’s long-range G650ER has made multiple trips to the West Coast in recent weeks.

Goldman Sachs has been shuttling executives between its New York headquarters and key financial hubs. The May 13 return to Teterboro, home base for the firm’s two-aircraft fleet, looks like a routine end to a working trip — but one set against a backdrop of record equities revenue, rising volatility, and a bank that is quietly rethinking how many humans it needs on the assembly line.