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\u2019s Sandy Weill and John Reed. <\/p>\n
The duo asked him to drive to the office, where they outlined structural changes to the team and ultimately asked Dimon to resign.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on the day in 1998 during a podcast appearance aired yesterday, Dimon remembered the conversation at first \u201cdidn\u2019t make sense to me.\u201d <\/p>\n
Speaking to Acquired,<\/a> the JPMorgan Chase CEO<\/a> explained: \u201cThey said they wanted to make a few changes [and] had three of them: \u2018One, we want to make this person in charge of that.\u2019 I said OK, well that didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd the third they said \u2018And we want you to resign.\u2019 I said OK, because at that moment I knew it was all arranged. The board had voted, the press release was written.\u201d <\/p>\n Returning home, Dimon told his wife and three young daughters\u2014aged 14, 12 and 10 at the time\u2014that he had been fired. <\/p>\n Their reactions varied, he said: \u201cThe younger one says: \u2018Daddy, do we have to sleep on the streets?\u2019 I said \u2018no, no, we\u2019re OK.\u2019 The middle one, who was always obsessed with college for some reason, said \u2018Can I still go to college?\u2019 I said yeah. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd the oldest one said: \u2018Great, since you don\u2019t need it, can I have your cell phone?’\u201d <\/p>\n Now the boss of America\u2019s largest bank<\/a>, Dimon said in the hours that followed the firing, his flat\u2014which he still owns nearly three decades later\u2014filled with about 50 senior managers from the bank to mark his departure. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was like being at your own wake,\u201d Dimon recalled. \u201cAnd there\u2019s one really tall guy who came in, a very good friend of mine, and my daughter looks up and says: \u2018Who are you?\u2019 and he says \u2018I work for your daddy.\u2019 And she said: \u2018Not anymore you don\u2019t.\u2019 <\/p>\n \u201cAnd that was it, I was OK. I tell people it was my net worth, not my self-worth, that was involved.\u201d<\/p>\n Road to JPMorgan<\/p>\n After leaving Citi, Dimon\u2014in his 40s at the time\u2014hunted around for his next challenge. <\/p>\n He famously met with Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos<\/a> about taking the position of president at the tech giant.<\/p>\n Ultimately, Dimon decided a leap into retail was a \u201cbridge too far\u201d but gained the billionaire as a friend to this day. Dimon also met with bosses at Home Depot\u2014who he \u201cloved\u201d\u2014but again didn\u2019t proceed with because it was so far out of his \u201chabitat\u201d. <\/p>\n Then an opportunity arose a few years later to lead struggling Bank One, based in Chicago. <\/p>\n \u201cI just thought this was a chance, if the family\u2019s willing to move,\u201d Dimon said. \u201cWe ended up loving Chicago, Chicago is a wonderful city in a lot of different ways, and life is what you make it. <\/p>\n \u201cI put half my money in [Bank One] stock at the time \u2026 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\u2019ll be what it is. I got to work literally the next day.\u201d <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n The Wall Street veteran<\/a>, now with an estimated net worth of $3 billion per Bloomberg<\/a>, wanted to show that as an \u201cout of town\u201d New York implant, he was still in \u201c100%, lock, stock and barrel,\u201d adding: \u201cThey also knew I was making decisions that I thought were right for the long-term health of the company, not for the short term.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a Sunday afternoon and Jamie Dimon was hosting a hundred potential candidates in his New York…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":69898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,49245,525,21279,16672,67,132,68,3642],"class_list":{"0":"post-69897","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-career-success","10":"tag-finance","11":"tag-jamie-dimon","12":"tag-jpmorgan-chase","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-wall-street"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114868633177697109","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}