The last, unfulfilled dream of Jamie Dimon
JAMIE DIMON is restless. The boss of JPMorgan Chase has just returned from a long July 4th holiday weekend with his large and growing family: his wife, three daughters, a gaggle of grandchildren. He has little patience for the faff that accompanies a filmed interview—the reason that he, his many handlers, a film crew, your correspondent and The Economist’s editor-in-chief have gathered at the New York headquarters of America’s biggest bank. Mr Dimon does not want to loiter in the hallway for his “walking-in” shot; nor is he going to wait to be properly miked up and seated in his chair before launching into conversation about public policy. “So should we do this?” he urges.
Doing things is the Dimon way. He is impatient, opportunistic, pragmatic: the type of person to just get on with it. He has always been this way, according to a biography by Duff McDonald. When Mr Dimon’s 12th-grade calculus teacher left, he taught himself. When Sandy Weill, a Wall Street veteran, complimented a college paper he had written about a merger Mr Weill put together, he asked him for a summer job. After business school he went to work for Mr Weill at American Express—turning down offers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—because he didn’t think he would be content just moving money around. He wanted to build something. “Jamie approached everything with total fury,” Alison Falls McElvery, who was Mr Weill’s assistant, told Mr McDonald. “Nothing was an idea that merely lingered. It was always 90 miles an hour.”
It is at this ferocious pace that Mr Dimon has achieved every dream he has put his mind to in the 40-odd years since. He spent more than a decade under the wing of Mr Weill, by then at the bank that would become Citigroup, which was created through endless deals he helped steer through. When their partnership blew up Mr Dimon was hired to run Bank One, then America’s fifth-largest bank. At the end of…
2023-07-11 08:04:54
Source from www.economist.com
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