WhereIsAtlas · Banking

Jamie Dimon

The bank executive who got thrown out of the family business — and came back to save Wall Street

Active — Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase — the bank that emerged from the 2008 crisis stronger than it entered it, largely because Dimon's Merity-first discipline forced him out of the family business at exactly the right moment.

Jamie Dimon rose to the top of American finance by a path that looks almost like a fable. A brash Harvard Business School prodigy who once told his professor he probably should not be teaching the class, he became the protege of Sandy Weill, the empire-builder who assembled Citigroup. Together they turned a failing credit company into a Wall Street powerhouse — and then, at the peak, Dimon was thrown out of his own triumph.

He was fired in 1998 after a battle with the boss's daughter and a boardroom rivalry that mirrored the darker impulses of the family business Dimon had helped build. But he refused to disappear. Banished to run a struggling Chicago bank, Bank One, he rebuilt it from the ground up with a famously unpretentious office — the 'Lava Lounge' — and then engineered its sale to JPMorgan, which handed him the keys to one of the great banks of the world.

When the 2008 financial crisis hit, Dimon's JPMorgan was the bank best prepared. He personally steered the frantic rescue of Bear Stearns and weathered the collapse of rivals that Dimon's discipline had steered clear of. Today he is, by any measure, the most respected banker of his generation — the man whose career was almost destroyed by refusing the dynastic shortcut, and who ended up outlasting every one of them.

Quick facts

Born
1956, New York
Harvard MBA
1982
Mentor
Sandy Weill (Citigroup)
Fired from Citigroup
1998
Turnaround
Bank One (Lava Lounge)
CEO of JPMorgan
2005
Bear Stearns rescue
March 2008

Sources

Related: ferdinand marcos · steve jobs