Jay Clayton

Walter Joseph Clayton III was born on July 11, 1966, at the McDonald Army Health Center at Fort Eustis in Newport News, Virginia. Clayton's father, Walter Clayton Jr., was a lieutenant in the United States Army who began serving a years-long tour of duty in the Vietnam War months after Clayton was born. The elder Clayton later became an executive at the Hershey Company. The Claytons resided variously in Philadelphia; Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; and near Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Clayton attended Nether Providence High School in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, where he was a goalie on its soccer team. In 1983, Wallingford-Swarthmore School District officials closed Nether Providence and its other high school, Swarthmore, to establish Strath Haven High School. Clayton graduated from Strath Haven in 1984. Clayton met his future wife, Gretchen Butler, at Nether Providence.

Clayton briefly attended Lafayette College, where he played on its men's soccer team, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in engineering in 1988. He then received a Thouron Award to study in the United Kingdom. He graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics. Clayton was briefly the captain of Cambridge's basketball team. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School with a Juris Doctor in 1993.

Clerkship and private practice (1993–2017)

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Clayton clerked for Judge Marvin Katz of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1995. Following his clerkship, Clayton worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, where he remained as late as 2017. Clayton served as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. At the firm, he was involved in mergers-and-acquisitions, market offerings, and regulatory proceedings. Amid the 2008 financial crisis, he handled Barclays's acquisition of Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase's acquisition of Bear Stearns. Clayton represented Goldman Sachs after Berkshire Hathaway purchased preferred stock in the firm in 2008. He oversaw the New York State Bar Association's report criticizing the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for "zealous" law enforcement in 2011. Clayton was involved in Alibaba Group's initial public offering in 2014 and the sale of the Atlanta Hawks in 2015.

Clayton's clients included Castleton Commodities International, Ally Financial, British Airways, Oaktree Capital Management, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, and Moelis & Company. In a filing to the Office of Government Ethics in March 2017, Clayton disclosed numerous firms that he had advised that had not been previously reported, including Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Volkswagen. He represented SoftBank; the Weinstein Company; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn; and William Erbey, the founder of Ocwen Financial Corporation. Clayton additionally represented Pershing Square Capital Management, Paul Tudor Jones, and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International. He worked on several deals for TeliaSonera, a Swedish telecommunications company that dealt business with Russia and Iran. In March 2017, his biography was removed from Sullivan & Cromwell's website.

Post-government work (2021–2024)

In February 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apollo Global Management had appointed Clayton as its board's lead independent director, a newly-formed position. The decision occurred as the firm was implementing an overhaul of its governance following allegations that its chief executive, Leon Black, had an extensive relationship with the financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Journal reported that Clayton would return to Sullivan & Cromwell as its senior policy adviser and counsel and that he would return to the University of Pennsylvania Law School as an adjunct professor. In May 2021, Clayton was a paid advisor to the hedge fund One River Digital Asset Management, and was serving as an advisor to the cryptocurrency firm Fireblocks by August.

In 2022, Clayton joined the board of directors of American Express. By 2023, Clayton had become an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In October 2023, Clayton told The New York Times that he was "evaluating his relationship" with the university after it was hesitant to refer to the October 7 attacks as terrorism. Clayton resigned from Apollo Global Management after being confirmed as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in April 2025.

Clayton is a registered independent. He donated to Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns. In 2015, Clayton donated to Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign.