James “Jamie” Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's CEO, is one of America's most powerful and outspoken bankers. Dimon's career in the brokerage business seemed preordained by his lineage. His grandfather, a Greek immigrant from Smyrna, was a broker and passed on his knowledge of the business to his son and partner, Theodore Dimon. Jamie Dimon's father and grandfather worked together for 19 years, and Dimon worked summers in their New York office. In 1978 Dimon graduated cum laude from Tufts University. He worked for the Management Analysis Center, a consulting firm in Boston, for several years and then enrolled in Harvard Business School. While a student at Harvard, Dimon interned at Goldman Sachs and was offered a job there after graduation in 1982. He declined, instead going to work for the mentor who would profoundly shape his career: Sandy Weill.
From 1982 to 1985 Weill and Dimon teamed up at American Express, where Dimon signed on as vice president and assistant to the president. Dimon's abilities to crunch numbers meshed well with Weill's people skills. When Weill was forced out of American Express, he made Dimon his second in command at the little-known consumer-lending outfit that he bought called Commercial Credit Company. That tiny firm was the beginning of what would eventually become Citigroup.
Dimon was a key member of the team that launched and defined Commercial Credit's strategy. He served as the company's chief financial officer and an executive vice president and then later as president. Through the course of Dimon's time at the firm, Commercial Credit was completely restructured and made numerous acquisitions and divestitures, substantially improving its profitability. The most significant transaction was the 1987 acquisition of Primerica Corporation, which included Smith Barney. Commercial Credit then assumed the Primerica name. In 1983 Primerica had acquired the Travelers Corporation (of which Smith Barney was a part), which had then been renamed Travelers Group. Between 1987 and 1994 the Travelers unit of Primerica touted compound annual growth of 21% in per-share earnings; an achievement that executives credited to Dimon's staunch financial discipline. In 1996 Dimon became the chairman and CEO of Travelers' Smith Barney subsidiary, at age 40 he was the youngest CEO of a major securities firm. His achievements included spearheading the firm's arrival on the Internet, making Smith Barney the only brokerage to tie into the widely used personal-finance software program Quicken, and pushing the company to become the first brokerage to offer no-load mutual funds to customers. As Dimon emerged from his mentor's shadow with the confidence to make his own decisions, tensions between the two began to surface.
In November 1997, with the merger of Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers, Dimon became cochairman and co-CEO of the combined firm. In 1998 Weill and Dimon engineered a $73 billion deal: Travelers Group, the brokerage and investment-banking and insurance giant they had created from humble beginnings purchased the retail market leader Citicorp to form Citigroup. Concurrently the tension between Dimon and Weill reached a boiling point when Dimon refused to appoint Weill's daughter, Jessica Bibliowicz, as chief of asset management at Travelers and as well to turn over Salomon's bond business to Weill's son, Marc. A $1.3 billion trading loss in Dimon's Salomon division further exacerbated the situation. On November 1, 1998, the man Dimon had once referred to as a second father asked him to resign.
On March 27, 2000, after an 18-month break from the financial-services industry, Dimon became the chairman and CEO of Bank One, the fifth-largest bank in the country. As he told Money magazine, he came to his decision after taking more than a year off: "I just took out that old white pad: Maybe I want to be an investor. Maybe I want to be a teacher. Maybe I want to write books. Maybe I want to stay home and be with my kids when they're growing up. I thought about all of that, and I was very open-minded about it, and what I came to is: My craft is financial services. Right or wrong, that's what I know, and I'm pretty good at it" (February 2002).
In his first year at Bank One, Dimon strengthened the management team and fortified the corporation's balance sheet, saving more than $1 billion through waste-reduction efforts. In January 2004 Dimon negotiated a deal to merge Bank One and J. P. Morgan Chase & Company of New York. Both banks needed each other in order to truly compete globally, and especially to keep up with Citigroup. The merged entity would be headquartered in New York but would base certain retail operations in offices in Chicago. The J. P. Morgan deal provided Dimon with the career opportunity of a lifetime and the chance to directly challenge his one-time mentor.
Of the big U.S. banks, Jamie Dimon's is the only one that didn't turn in a losing quarter during the financial crisis. In January 2011, the bank kicked off the banking industry’s earnings season with news that its profits surged 48% in 2010 amid signs that consumers and businesses had slowly regained their balance in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The bank posted a $17.37 billion profit in 2010, up from $11.73 billion a year earlier, as losses on troubled loans eased. Mr. Dimon has earned a reputation as a bold dealmaker who buys when others are selling, a strict risk manager who resisted the type of exotic businesses that felled others and a charismatic leader who charms lawmakers and credit traders alike. He has played as much defense as offense during the housing boom, which insulated JPMorgan more than most when the boom went bust. Then, when the bust became a full-blown financial crisis, Mr. Dimon went hunting for bargains, significantly expanding his position in investment and retail banking while others were shrinking. At age 54, Mr. Dimon has only begun trying to build the kind of global banking empire he initially set out to create with Mr. Weill at Citigroup. Over the last three years, he has plowed more than $10 billion into his main businesses. He recently announced plans to build up his corporate bank and make an aggressive push into Brazil, China and a dozen or so other emerging markets that were growing at a faster pace than developed economies. That would put him toe to toe with banks like Citigroup, HSBC and Standard Chartered, which have been in these markets for decades.