Rubin was born on August 29, 1938 in New York City to a Jewish parents Sylvia (née Seiderman) and Alexander Rubin. He moved to Miami Beach, Florida, at an early age and graduated from Miami Beach High School. In 1960, Rubin graduated with an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Harvard College. He then attended Harvard Law School for three days before leaving to see the world. He later attended the London School of Economics and received an LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1964.

Rubin was an attorney at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City from 1964-1966 before joined Goldman Sachs in 1966 as an associate in the risk arbitrage department. He later ran their stock and bond trading departments and became co-chairman in 1990.

In the Center for Arts and Culture’s 2007 board of directors profile page, the profile of Judith O. Rubin read she is married to Robert Rubin and they have two grown sons together, James and Philip. James married a writer Gretchen Rubin in 1994. The Rubins were long time members of Temple Beth Sholom on Miami Beach.

Robert S. Strauss credited Rubin with making the system work. “He’s surely the only man or woman in America that I know who could make the NEC succeed,” Strauss said in 1994. “Anyone else would have been a disruptive force, and the council wouldn’t have worked.”

As Clinton’s two-term Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin sharply opposed any regulation of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and other so-called “derivative” financial instruments which—despite having already created havoc for companies such as Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings, and disastrous consequences in 1994 for Orange County, California with its $1.5 billion default and subsequent bankruptcy—were nevertheless becoming the chief engine of profitability for Rubin’s former employer Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. When Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, circulated a letter urging increased regulation of derivatives in line with a 1994 General Accounting Office report, Rubin took the unusual step (for a Secretary of the Treasury) of going public in June 1998 to denounce Born and her proposal, eventually urging that the CFTC be stripped of its regulatory authority.

In January 1995, one year after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and immediately after Rubin was sworn in as Secretary of Treasury, Mexico was suffering through a financial crisis that threatened to result in it defaulting on its foreign obligations. President Bill Clinton, with the advice of Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, provided $20 billion in US loan guarantees to the Mexican government through the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF).

In 1997 and 1998, Treasury Secretary Rubin, Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan worked with the International Monetary Fund and others to promote U.S. policy in response to financial crises in Russian, Asian, and Latin American financial markets. In its February 15, 1999, edition, Time Magazine dubbed the three policymakers “The Committee to Save the World.”

In 1997, Rubin and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan strongly opposed giving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversight of over-the-counter credit derivatives when this was proposed by Brooksley Born, the head of the CFTC. Rubin’s role was highlighted in a Public Broadcasting Service Frontline report, “The Warning”. Over-the-counter credit derivatives were eventually excluded from regulation by the CFTC by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. According to the Frontline documentary, they played a key role in the 2008 financial crisis.

In 1998, Rubin received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

Rubin was succeeded on July 1, 1999, as Treasury Secretary by his deputy, Lawrence Summers.

In 1999, affirming his career-long interest in markets, Rubin joined Citigroup as a board member and as a participant “in strategic managerial and operational matters of the Company, but […] no line responsibilities”. The Wall Street Journal called this mix of oversight and management responsibilities “murky”. In an interview with the Journal, Rubin said: “I think I’ve been a very constructive part of the Citigroup environment.” Separately, the Journal noted that Citigroup shareholders have suffered losses of more than 70 percent since Rubin joined the firm and that he encouraged changes that led the firm to the brink of collapse. In December 2008, investors filed a lawsuit contending that Citigroup executives, including Rubin, sold shares at inflated prices while concealing the firm’s risks. A Citigroup spokesman said the lawsuit was without merit. Earlier, Rubin had also come in for some criticism for his actions on Citigroup’s behalf during the 2001 collapse of energy giant Enron Corp., a major client of the bank. With the troubled Enron facing a credit ratings downgrade – a potentially disastrous development for the energy company’s investors, the company itself and ultimately, its lenders – Rubin called a ranking Treasury Department official, unsuccessfully seeking the Bush Administration’s help in forestalling the downgrade. Rubin later maintained that he had acted both as a Citigroup executive protecting his company’s position and as a former Treasury official concerned about the impact that Enron’s failure might have on the larger economy, brushing off the notion of any possible conflict of interest, and said that if faced with the same choice, he would do it again.

Rubin sparked controversy in 2001 when he contacted an acquaintance at the U.S. Treasury Department and asked if the department could convince bond-rating agencies not to downgrade the corporate debt of Enron, a debtor of Citigroup. The Treasury official refused. A subsequent congressional staff investigation cleared Rubin of having done anything illegal.

On July 1, 2002, Rubin became a member of Harvard Corporation, the executive governing board of Harvard University. This happened one year after he had received an honorary doctoral degree from the same university. He served as a member of the Harvard Corporation until June 2014.

In October 2007, Rubin met Iris Mack in line at an upscale grocery store. As Citigroup was collapsing, Rubin pursued Mack romantically for the next 14 months.

On January 9, 2009, Citigroup announced that Rubin had resigned as a senior adviser and would not seek re-election as a director of the corporation. Press reports noted that Rubin had drawn criticism for his role in the bank’s recent problems that drove it to seek U.S. Government assistance after he received significant personal compensation.

Upon Rubin’s retirement, Clinton called him the “greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton”. On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC’s This Week program, Clinton said Rubin was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives. Following the interview, Clinton’s assistant Doug Band reaffirmed those statements saying Clinton still wished he had pursued legislation to regulate derivatives while confirming that he still believed he had received excellent advice on the economy and the financial system from Rubin and others during his presidency.

Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers also steered through the 1999 repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act (1933), which had separated investment banking from the retail side. It allowed the banks to develop and sell the mortgage-backed instruments that became a principal factor in the financial collapse. In September 2011, the UK Independent Commission on Banking released a report in which it recommended a separation of investment and retail banking to prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis.

In January 2014, Secretary Rubin joined former Senator Olympia Snowe, former Education Secretary Donna Shalala, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Henry Cisneros, Gregory Page the Chair of Cargill, and Al Sommer, the Dean Emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health as members of the U.S. Climate Risk Committee. They oversaw the development of an analysis of the economic risks of climate change in the United States that was published on June 24, 2014.

In an address at the Climate Leadership Conference on March 4, 2015, Mr. Rubin spoke about the economic effects of climate change and the costs of inaction. Calling climate change “the existential threat of our age,” he called for the adoption of three proposals – revising estimates of the Gross Domestic Product to reflect climate change externalities, disclosure to investors by companies of the costs of carbon they emit that they might be required to absorb, and including in the U.S. government’s fiscal projections the future costs of dealing with climate change – to help catalyze a more active response to climate change risks. He first outlined the proposals in a Washington Post op-ed column titled “How Ignoring Climate Change Could Sink the U.S. Economy.”

In April 2016, he was one of eight former Treasury secretaries who called on the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union ahead of the June 2016 Referendum.

As of 2020, Rubin is actively engaged as a founder of The Hamilton Project, an economic policy think tank that produces research and proposals on how to create a growing economy that benefits more Americans. He is co-chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rubin also serves as chairman of the board of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a community development support organization. He serves as a trustee of Mount Sinai Health System and is a member of the Finance Committee of the Harvard Corporation. Additionally, Rubin serves as a senior counselor at Centerview Partners, an investment banking advisory firm based in New York City.