Elisha Wiesel

Businessman

Birthday June 6, 1972

Birth Sign Gemini

Age 51 years old

#52682 Most Popular

1972

Shlomo Elisha Wiesel (born June 6, 1972) is an American businessman and hedge fund manager.

Shlomo Elisha Wiesel was born in 1972.

He was named Shlomo Elisha, after his paternal grandfather, Shlomo, who died at age 50 after a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

At his bris, the rabbi said: "A name has returned."

His father, Elie Wiesel, was a Holocaust survivor, author, professor, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient of Hungarian Jewish and Romanian Jewish descent, whose hometown was Sighet, Romania.

His mother, Marion Erster Rose Wiesel, is a Holocaust survivor born in Vienna, Austria, of Austrian Jewish descent, who came to the United States shortly after World War II with her family, with the help of HIAS, then known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

She became a social justice activist and a translator.

His paternal grandmother and his aunt were killed in the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He was raised on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side in Manhattan in New York City, attending Modern Orthodox yeshiva Ramaz on the Upper East Side, and suburban New Jersey.

When he was six years old, Wiesel and his family lived in Israel for a few months.

His parents spoke French at home.

As a teenager, he moved from computer programming of computer games to electric guitar, interested in heavy metal bands such as Iron Maiden and Metallica, but also in the punk band The Ramones.

1994

Wiesel then attended Yale University, graduating with a B.S. in computer science in 1994.

At one point in his freshman year, he sported a purple mohawk haircut.

After graduating from Yale, he spent a few months doing basic military training in Israel.

Wiesel and his wife Lynn Bartner-Wiesel are parents to two children.

Wiesel joined the J. Aron commodities division of Goldman Sachs in 1994, after the head of J. Aron strats (the code-writers whose computer models and algorithms power the firm's trading desks) convinced him to give up his initial preference of working in the video game industry.

At the time, technology was in its earliest days in banking.

At Goldman he worked for Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, who ended up leading the firm.

One day Blankfein criticized him in the lobby of Goldman's headquarters as he arrived on rollerblades, saying: "I’m invested in that head, get a helmet!"

2002

He became a managing director in 2002, and a partner in 2004.

Wiesel later served as the chief risk officer of its securities division (which houses Goldman's technology-intensive trading business), and global head of its securities division desk strategists.

2017

In January 2017, when Wiesel was 44 years old, he succeeded R. Martin Chavez as Goldman's chief information officer, overseeing Engineering (the firm's Technology Division and global strategists groups).

Wiesel became the highest-ranked of 9,000 Goldman engineers, who accounted for 25% of the firm's total employees.

In July 2017, Institutional Investor named him # 10 in the "2017 Tech 40."

2019

He worked for Goldman Sachs for 25 years, serving as its chief information officer for three years, until 2019.

As of May 2023, Wiesel is co-running the Niche Plus multi-manager hedge fund, the first fund of ClearAlpha Technologies, where he is a Founding Partner.

He is also the chairman of Israeli fintech start-up vendor management firm entrio, and on the board of directors of FactSet.

He is the only child of Holocaust survivor, author, professor, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel.

In December 2019 Wiesel left Goldman Sachs after a 25-year career at the firm.

As he considered his next move, he said he was interested in the intersection of philanthropy and engineering, and was ready to move on from banking.

He was considering options that included traveling the world, computer games, and teaching, while intrigued by the health care company that Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon were building, and committed to spending more time working on matters relating to his father such as deciding on the disposition of his papers.

He volunteered on Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign, and reflected later that his was the balance Wiesel was looking for in the political spectrum — "people who understood the need for social justice, but also understood that ... the answer is not Marxism."

He also began an archive of his father's writings.

2020

In November 2020 Wiesel joined Israeli Tel Aviv-based fintech start-up vendor management firm entrio (formerly, The Floor), as chairman of its board of directors.

The firm entrio is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides software that helps banks better manage their IT operations and internal and external technology integration, making them more efficient, less costly, and less complex.

At entrio, Wiesel focuses on helping the firm expand and partner with more banks and investors.

In April 2023 the company announced that it had raised $7.5 million from Communitas Capital Partners, BNY Mellon, Vintage Investment Partners, and Alicorn Venture Partners.

In March 2023, financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider FactSet appointed Wiesel to its board of directors.

In May 2023, Wiesel and quantitative investment firm AQR Capital Management alumnus Brian Hurst launched and began co-running the Niche Plus multimanager hedge fund, the first fund of ClearAlpha Technologies', where he is a Founding Partner.