Jamie Dimon's college paper on Shearson mergers launched his banking career
As a Tufts student, Jamie Dimon wrote a paper on the mergers at Shearson, and his mother sent it to Sandy Weill. Weill hired him for a summer, later coaxed him away from Goldman Sachs with a promise of fun, and began a partnership that would build Citigroup and then end abruptly.
Born on March 13, 1956, in New York City and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, Dimon is a twin whose Greek immigrant grandfather changed the family name from Papademetriou; his father and grandfather were both stockbrokers at Shearson. After Tufts and two years as a consultant in Boston, he graduated from Harvard Business School in 1982 as a Baker Scholar, placing in the top 5 percent of his class.
He followed Weill out of American Express in 1985 to take over the consumer lender Commercial Credit, becoming its finance chief at 30. A string of deals culminated in Citigroup in 1998, but that November Weill asked him to resign at a weekend retreat, and accounts of the rift vary. In March 2000 Dimon became chief executive of Bank One, then the fifth largest bank in the country.
When JPMorgan Chase merged with Bank One in 2004 he became chief operating officer, then chief executive at the end of 2005 and chairman a year later. Acquisitions during his tenure made it the leading American bank by market value, among other measures. In 2012 he disclosed at least $2 billion in trading losses tied to a trader nicknamed the London Whale, admitting the strategy had been badly designed and badly supervised, and his pay that year was cut to $11.5 million.
He is one of the few bank bosses to become a billionaire, largely through his JPMorgan stake, and Forbes put his fortune at $3 billion in December 2025. His pay reached $43 million for 2025. He carries a sheet of paper everywhere listing tasks and reminders, which he crosses off methodically, and says he uses the OODA loop to weigh scenarios.
Source: Jamie Dimon
