Thornton joined
Goldman Sachs in 1980. In 2002, an escalating series of investigations and congressional hearings revealed that Goldman Sachs had "spun hot IPO shares to preferred clients", mostly CEOs, as "an inducement to win investment banking business" from those clients. Goldman Sachs collected $87 million in investment fees from Ford Motor Company between 1996 and 2002. A board ethics
whistleblower described Goldman's role in the bank's activities with Ford as being "the umpire and pitcher in the same game". Thornton remains a member of Ford's compensation, finance and nominating and governance committees and is the longest serving independent director of Ford. Thornton played a significant role in helping Ford survive the
COVID-19 recession. In 2005, Thornton became the founding chairman of the Nelson Mandela Legacy Trust in the United States. In December 2008, Thornton became a board member at
HSBC and stepped down in 2013. Thornton has also served on the boards of
Intel,
ICBC,
China Unicom,
IMG,
BSkyB,
DirecTV,
News Corp., and on the advisory board of
McKinsey. Thornton was appointed to the board of
Barrick Gold in May 2012 and became Executive Chairman of Barrick Gold In May 2017, the government of
Tanzania accused
Acacia Mining, a subsidiary of
Barrick Gold, of "under-reporting its gold exports by a factor of ten". The investigation revealed that
copper and
silver were also under-reported, and
sulfur,
iron,
iridium,
titanium and
zinc were present, but not accounted for. The Tanzanian government then imposed a ban on the export of
gold and copper concentrates. The accusation and ban halved Acacia's market value. In October 2017, Thornton met with
John Magufuli, then president of Tanzania, for six hours, emerging with a preliminary deal that included a $300 million payment for back taxes from Acacia to the Tanzanian government, as well as the Tanzanian government taking a 16% stake in Acacia's mines. Thornton reportedly did not tell Acacia the terms of the proposal until after the deal was announced, even though Acacia, not Barrick, would be responsible for the payment. Shortly after Thornton's deal with Magufuli was announced, Acacia's top executives – CEO Brad Gordon, CFO Andrew Wray and COO Mark Morcombe, under whose tenure relations with the Tanzanian government had deteriorated – resigned. The resolution allowed Acacia and Barrick to resume operations in Tanzania. In January 2020, Barrick formalized a joint venture with the Tanzanian government covering the
North Mata,
Bulyanhulu and
Buzwagi mines. On September 24, 2018, Barrick Gold The merger solidified Barrick's position as one of the world's largest gold mining companies, with proven and probable reserves of 78 million ounces of gold and dominant land positions in many of the world's major gold producing regions. Thornton led the all-stock, nil-premium merger, which earned the support of more than 95% of the shareholders of both companies. In February 2019, Barrick Gold announced a hostile $19 billion bid to acquire
Newmont Mining Corporation, an American company based in
Denver,
Colorado. Newmont's board unanimously rejected the offer, describing Barrick's "egocentric proposal" as "designed to transfer value from Newmont shareholders to Barrick's". Newmont CEO Gary Goldberg said, "[O]ne of the major factors that hindered Barrick's ability to create value in the past remains the same... John Thornton is still firmly in control." In August 2020,
Warren Buffett's
Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had purchased 20.9 million shares of Barrick Gold, a position valued at $563.5 million by the end of the second quarter of 2020. Just three months later in February 2021, Berkshire Hathaway sold its entire Barrick Gold stake. In 2023, Thornton joined
RedBird Capital Partners, an investment firm with over $10 billion in assets under management, as chairman. In the same year, Thornton was also appointed to the board of computer manufacturer
Lenovo, as an independent non-executive director. Thornton currently serves as Chair Emeritus of the
Brookings Institution and co-chair of the
Asia Society. In addition to these academic and research affiliations, Thornton has also authored forewords for three books, including "Social Ethics in a Changing China", "China in 2020" and "Democracy is a Good Thing". ==Interest in China==