Terrific. Thank you.
Over 300,000 JPMorgan Chase employees work for tonight's speaker. At one point, one of those employees was his own father, Theodore.
Jamie's father was a son of Greek immigrants. He was a veteran Wall Street investor and adviser who, at one point through a series of mergers and acquisitions, worked at both Smith Barney and JPMorgan Chase at the same time as his son.
Theodore continued to go into the office as a broker up until the final months of his life.
Jamie grew up in the Jackson Heights area of New York, attended the Browning School, and went on to Tufts University where he studied psychology and economics. He then went to business school at Harvard where he graduated as a Baker Scholar, an honor given to the top students in the class.
But perhaps the most important education came after Harvard.
Rather than take a conventional path into banking, Jamie went to work for controversial visionary Sandy Weill, a decision that would shape the next several decades of his career. He followed Weill through a remarkable series of consolidations, helping build what eventually became Travelers and then Citigroup.
Along the way, Jamie became CFO and then president of Commercial Credit, president and COO of Travelers, and ultimately co-chairman and co-CEO of Salomon Smith Barney.
In 1998, after the creation of Citigroup, Jamie became president of the new company, but his tenure there would be short.
He and Weill parted ways and Jamie found himself by his early 40s outside the company he had helped build.
It became the turning point.
In 2000, Bank One, then headquartered right here in Chicago, brought Jamie in as chairman and CEO.
The bank was struggling.
It had issued a series of earnings warnings and Jamie was brought in to fix it. He cut costs, strengthened the balance sheet, rebuilt the management team, and restored the bank to profitability and growth. Under his leadership, the bank's $511 million loss in 2000 became $3.5 billion in record earnings by 2003.
In 2004, he engineered its merger with JPMorgan Chase. Jamie became president and chief operating officer of the combined company, then CEO in 2006 and chairman a year later.
For more than two decades, he has led what has become one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. He guided JPMorgan Chase through the financial crisis, the pandemic, and extraordinary changes in technology, markets, and geopolitics.
And he has remained unusually outspoken about the role business can play not only in creating wealth but in strengthening communities and expanding opportunity.
So tonight we have with us not simply the most influential banker of his generation, but a leader whose own life is a story of ambition, resilience, reinvention, and, as his father demonstrated, an extraordinary work ethic. Please join me in welcoming the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.
First, I'm thrilled to be back in Chicago. Before we start, I don't want to forget — my wife would be here, but my 38-year-old daughter is getting married for the first time on Saturday. So she's quite busy and she says hi to all of you, particularly Arne Duncan, the Bessers, and then one correction: my father did not work for me. He would — if he were here, he'd say I work for him. My job is to make his job work.
So, let me ask you, did you remember all of that about your life?
I repress a lot of it, but yeah, I do remember.
They always forget. I was fired that day.
Yeah, we cleaned it up a little.
So look, as we've been talking this evening and even as we were sitting at the table, people were constantly coming by and challenging your memory. Do you remember this? Do you remember that? You have an extraordinary memory. So I'm going to test your memory right off the bat as well. Is it actually true that at 14 years old, you researched and bought your very first stock?
Yes. Yes, that's true. Yeah. My dad was a stockbroker and I was interested in stocks. So I bought a stock — a couple of stocks back then. PEs were like five. It was 1974, and it's instructive about what happens in the market sometimes.
Did you make money off of it?
I made some on some and not some on others, and I did fine. Yeah.
Good. Good. I still make my own individual stock decisions, by the way.
So for you, even at that age, was it preordained in your own mind that you would follow your father in your father's footsteps?
Absolutely not. My parents — you know, as you said, my grandparents were Greek immigrants, didn't finish high school like a lot of immigrant families, like a lot of folks in this room. And you grew up with the value system, which is, you know, have a purpose in life. Purpose was you could be a teacher or a doctor or a caregiver or a business person. Never got pushed any which way. So my older brother is a physicist, a real physicist, went to, you know, IBM Labs, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Chicago. He got his PhD. I have a twin brother who is an educator. My oldest daughter is in the business, but my middle one is a reporter. My youngest one is a kind of psychologist. And when she got that degree, I said to her, 'We now have the same job.' As you know, managing people is a real pain in the ass sometimes.
But just treat everyone well, make the world a better place, have a purpose, work hard, do the best you can. And so those were more the values. My dad actually wanted to be a musician.
But he probably wouldn't have been able to marry my mother if he was a musician.
So, even with that said, though, did your parents — did your father, once he discovered that you had an interest in this, did he cultivate it or did he take a hands-off approach and back up and let you just...
He cultivated it. I read Graham and Dodd when I was — I'm a nerd. People don't think — they don't understand. I read everything. I was a nerd. I read — but he cultivated it because he would talk to me about it. But he also cultivated my brother being a physicist, and he cultivated us reading history and all those kinds of things. It wasn't unique to that. But yeah, and you want to try something humbling that people think they're very smart: take home an annual report, rip out the pages, so is the stock price. And he did this with me a couple of times and then say what you think it's worth. You know, a company you might understand. I know McDonald's is in the room and some others, say what do you — and you'll be shocked how wrong you are. And it is humbling about how you value something. And so, you know, it just — it's intellectually challenging, but, you know, financial services is challenging because everything that happens in the world every day affects your life and affects your companies and, you know, wherever you do business, wherever you buy, whatever you do, you know, it's an important thing to try to understand.
Well, there is no doubt that you are a New Yorker, and I mean that in the best possible way. I mean that's — I mean as a — that's a compliment, I think. But right below the surface, you're also a Chicagoan because you have spent a number of years in Chicago. And everyone in this room who has spent any time in Chicago or who's from Chicago can understand why you would want to come to the all-around greatest city in the world, Chicago.
So, but in this very room — in this very room, when I used to come here and — I remember the press asked me, 'Are you moving to Chicago?' Yes. 'Are your kids moving to Chicago?' Yes. 'Is your wife moving to Chicago?' Yes. 'Are the kids going to school here?' Yes. 'Are you really coming to Chicago?' And I said, 'If I died in Chicago and they sent my ashes back to New York, people in Chicago would say, We told you.' So, so I actually prefer Chicago to New York.
No, the family loved it here. We loved the hospitality and the restaurants. And when I first got here, the civic committee — you know, which people thought — Bank One hosted it. They thought I'd cancel it. You know, got tough and expensive, too much money. I thought it was fabulous that the city actually gets together, the CEOs and the hospitals and the schools, to try to talk about how you can better your city. So I actually thought that was great. And so I'm very pro-Chicago. New York is much more — first of all, it's much bigger. It's much more anonymous. It's much more — no, they don't really care who you are. But when I came to Chicago, wherever I went in Chicago, they'd say, 'What do you think of Chicago?' I go back to New York. Not one New Yorker in New York has ever said to me, 'What do you think of Chicago?'
How do you compare New York and Chicago?
They're just — they're just, you know, that chart that shows, you know, New York City and the rest of the world. That's how they are pretty much.
Well, I assure you these are 2,000 of your closest Chicago friends. So that will not get out. Don't worry about that one.
I forgot this is being broadcast.
Don't worry. So the attraction of Chicago is clear, but can you help us understand — at the time that you came to Chicago, it was a really critical period for you from a professional perspective. You had taken about a year and a half off of Citigroup. You had spent time with your family, but you were figuring out what you were going to do next. And as we mentioned, Bank One did have its challenges at that time. I think at least one analyst wrote that not even Hercules could fix Bank One at the time.
But you chose to come here. That is the job that you chose over others. And I assume you had opportunities even outside of the banking industry.
