James Gorman

James Gorman was born in Australia and educated at Melbourne University Law School before moving to the United States to study at Columbia Business School. He worked at McKinsey & Company and then at Merrill Lynch, where he ran the firm's global private client group. He joined Morgan Stanley in 2006 and was named Co-President and then CEO in 2010, succeeding John Mack. Morgan Stanley was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis when Gorman took over, having suffered significant losses in its trading books and relying on a government capital injection. Gorman's strategy was to reduce Morgan Stanley's dependence on volatile trading revenues and expand the more stable, recurring fee-based wealth management business. He executed this transformation through organic growth and significant acquisitions: the purchase of Citigroup's Smith Barney brokerage for $4.7 billion (completing the buyout in stages), the $13 billion acquisition of E*Trade in 2020, and the $7 billion acquisition of Eaton Vance in 2021. These deals transformed Morgan Stanley's wealth management arm into one of the world's largest, managing approximately $6 trillion in client assets — a tripling during his tenure. The strategy generated consistently high returns on equity and dramatically improved Morgan Stanley's valuation relative to its investment banking peers. Gorman stepped down as CEO in 2024, succeeded by Ted Pick.