It was a Sunday afternoon and Jamie Dimon was hosting a hundred potential candidates in his New York City flat when he was called into a meeting with Citigroup’s Sandy Weill and John Reed.
The duo asked him to drive to the office, where they outlined structural changes to the team and ultimately asked Dimon to resign.
Reflecting on the day in 1998 during a podcast appearance aired yesterday, Dimon remembered the conversation at first “didn’t make sense to me.”
Speaking to Acquired, the JPMorgan Chase CEO explained: “They said they wanted to make a few changes [and] had three of them: ‘One, we want to make this person in charge of that.’ I said OK, well that didn’t make sense to me. The second one, they wanted to put someone in charge of the global investment bank which I was running, I thought it was another stupid decision.
“And the third they said ‘And we want you to resign.’ I said OK, because at that moment I knew it was all arranged. The board had voted, the press release was written.”
Returning home, Dimon told his wife and three young daughters—aged 14, 12 and 10 at the time—that he had been fired.
Their reactions varied, he said: “The younger one says: ‘Daddy, do we have to sleep on the streets?’ I said ‘no, no, we’re OK.’ The middle one, who was always obsessed with college for some reason, said ‘Can I still go to college?’ I said yeah.
“And the oldest one said: ‘Great, since you don’t need it, can I have your cell phone?’”
Now the boss of America’s largest bank, Dimon said in the hours that followed the firing, his flat—which he still owns nearly three decades later—filled with about 50 senior managers from the bank to mark his departure.
“It was like being at your own wake,” Dimon recalled. “And there’s one really tall guy who came in, a very good friend of mine, and my daughter looks up and says: ‘Who are you?’ and he says ‘I work for your daddy.’ And she said: ‘Not anymore you don’t.’
“And that was it, I was OK. I tell people it was my net worth, not my self-worth, that was involved.”
Road to JPMorgan
After leaving Citi, Dimon—in his 40s at the time—hunted around for his next challenge.
He famously met with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos about taking the position of president at the tech giant.
Ultimately, Dimon decided a leap into retail was a “bridge too far” but gained the billionaire as a friend to this day. Dimon also met with bosses at Home Depot—who he “loved”—but again didn’t proceed with because it was so far out of his “habitat”.
Then an opportunity arose a few years later to lead struggling Bank One, based in Chicago.
“I just thought this was a chance, if the family’s willing to move,” Dimon said. “We ended up loving Chicago, Chicago is a wonderful city in a lot of different ways, and life is what you make it.
“I put half my money in [Bank One] stock at the time … I was going to be the captain of the ship, I was going to go down [or up] with the ship, I made it clear to everyone I was here permanently and it’ll be what it is. I got to work literally the next day.”
Dimon did indeed buy $60m worth of stock in the company he was about to lead, a calculated move to express his commitment to the institution to shareholders and the market.
The Wall Street veteran, now with an estimated net worth of $3 billion per Bloomberg, wanted to show that as an “out of town” New York implant, he was still in “100%, lock, stock and barrel,” adding: “They also knew I was making decisions that I thought were right for the long-term health of the company, not for the short term.”
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