John L. Thornton is the Chairman at RedBird Capital Partners.
Prior to joining RedBird, John has had a legendary career on Wall Street spanning over four decades and most recently has served as the chairman of several corporate, public policy, and educational boards in the United States and China.
John was the Co-President of Goldman Sachs and prior to that served as (i) the Co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International, where he is largely credited for building Goldman Sachs’ business outside the United States, and in this capacity also served as (ii) the Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia.
After retiring from Goldman Sachs, John became the first non-Chinese full professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing since 1949, where today he is also the director of the Global Leadership Program for the university.
John currently sits on multiple boards and has a long history of corporate and philanthropic leadership. One of his strengths is his ongoing leadership in Asia. John is Co-Chair of the Asia Society, trustee of the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, and a member of the International Advisory Council of CIC, the Chinese sovereign wealth fund. He recently met with Xi Jinping as part of the US-China summit and CEO delegation in San Francisco.
John has also served on the Boards of HSBC, Intel, ICBC, China Unicom, IMG, BSkyB, DirecTV, and News Corp, and on the Advisory Board of General Atlantic. He currently serves on the Advisory Boards of McKinsey & Company and the Council on Foreign Relations.
John has been recognized by Institutional Investor Magazine as one of forty individuals who have had the greatest influence in shaping global financial markets over the past forty years.
He received an B.A. in history from Harvard College, a B.A./M.A. in jurisprudence from Oxford University, and an M.P.P.M. from the Yale School of Management.