After earning a B.A. in urban affairs (1976) at Virginia Tech, Bannon joined the U.S. Navy, becoming an officer, serving on a destroyer, and receiving a post as a special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon. After leaving the navy in 1983, Bannon received a position in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, where he specialized in media and entertainment. After three-plus years with Goldman Sachs, he cofounded a financial firm, Bannon & Co., which focused on the entertainment industry. After Bannon & Co. was sold to Société Générale in 1998, Bannon continued to work in entertainment-related finance. In 2004 he began a career as a writer, director, and producer of conservative-slanted documentaries. In 2012 Bannon and Peter Schweizer founded the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit organization that mounted investigations of prominent politicians with the intention of exposing wrongdoing, and distributed the results of its investigations through mainstream publishers and other media outlets. That same year, Bannon assumed the role of executive chairman of Breitbart.com.