The firm’s culture has been compared to, variously, the Army, the KGB, the Mafia, Skull and Bones, a cult. It’s not just about attracting the best and brightest but transforming them into a giant, perfectly synchronized trading machine. Staffers tend to socialize together, reside in the same apartment buildings in Manhattan, have summer homes around the same ponds in the Hamptons, send their kids to the same private schools. Fitting in is of the utmost importance. Subtle social tics—a bow tie, a mustache, a colorful personality—can eliminate you from the club. “The cult of the individual, which I think has been a disadvantage to so many of the firm’s competitors, really doesn’t exist here,” says Lucas van Praag, the British-born communications director. “The more you have acceptance, the easier it is to be effective.” As another Wall Street veteran familiar with the firm’s mores puts it: “The god is Goldman. You subjugate yourself to that god, and in return we will make you a gazillionaire.” But the groupthink is only a social manifestation of the giant hive mind that really makes Goldman tick. Because it transacts deals both as a trading house for huge institutional investors and as a fee-based adviser to the companies being traded, the firm has become a huge repository for information, with a view into what everyone is doing. So if a big investor wants to buy into, say, the energy market, Goldman Sachs, by virtue of its knowledge of what other big investors are trading and what its corporate energy clients are doing (on Goldman’s own advice), can offer a highly accurate view of what’s likely to happen with the energy market. It can also do damned well on its own energy trades—in fact, before the market crashed, the firm made vast profits on “proprietary trading,” bets made on its own balance sheets.