By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 19, 2025 ~
Jamie Dimon Sits in Front of Trading Monitor in his Office (Source: 60 Minutes Interview, November 10, 2019)
Something is seriously wrong in the House of Dimon – also known as JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States.
Barron’s, part of the Dow Jones Company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, has released an audio of the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, dropping F-bombs in a profanity-laced tirade during a Town Hall with his employees last Wednesday.
We carefully transcribed a portion of that audio. Dimon said this:
“We also had—and you know I’m right about this one—a lot of you on the f***ing Zoom and you were doing the following, okay: looking at your mail; sending texts to each other about what an a**hole the other person is, okay; not paying attention; not reading your stuff, you know. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness — it does. Okay.”
Apparently, in Jamie Dimon’s billionaire brain, projectile vomiting a stream of profanities at your employees during the workday is not rude – especially if you are making an average of 366 times their compensation.
Dimon continues:
“And when I found out that people were doing that—you don’t do that in my goddamn meetings. If you’re going to meet with me, you’ve got my attention, you’ve got my focus. I don’t bring my goddamn phone. I’m not sending texts to people. It simply doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision-making.
“And don’t give me this sh*t that work-from-home-Friday works. I call a lot of people on Friday, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get ahold of.”
Barron’s has delivered a great public service with this audio. It confirms what we have been telling our readers for the past 15 years: Jamie Dimon is not the great statesman of Wall Street. He’s a closet potty mouth running a very dangerous megabank.
One of the things that has Dimon so highly agitated is that he is getting pushback, in a very public way, about his mandate for workers to “RTO,” shorthand for Return to Office, and give up their hybrid work arrangements.
Workers have set up an online petition to lobby to keep hybrid or WFH (Work from Home) arrangements. They are also posting comments when they sign the petition, raising the possibility that JPMorgan’s internal secrets might spill out. As of this morning, 1,692 workers have signed the petition.
According to Reuters, Dimon dismissed the petition with this statement during the Town Hall: “I don’t care how many people sign that f**king petition.”
Causing more angst among JPMorgan Chase shareholders is the bank’s recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (see page 2 here), revealing that, for the second year in a row, Dimon and his family plan to sell one million shares of JPMorgan Chase stock. (It is not customary for a long-tenured Chairman and CEO of a company to dump large amounts of shares in the company he heads before he retires.)
Dimon and his family cashed out approximately $182.8 million in JPMorgan Chase stock last year. At the current stock price, this year’s haul could add approximately $279 million more to the family’s wealth, bringing the two-year cash out to close to half a billion dollars.
The same SEC filing also revealed that the Board of Directors had raised Dimon’s total compensation for 2024 to $39 million from $36 million the prior year. The Board called out the bank’s “fortress balance sheet,” its “fortress principles,” and Dimon’s “longstanding exemplary leadership of a premier financial services firm….”
Compare that assessment to the facts on the ground. Under Dimon’s “leadership,” JPMorgan Chase has racked up five felony counts and a rap sheet that resembles a mob operation. The U.S. Department of Justice, instead of reining in the recidivist crime wave, has doled out non-prosecution and deferred-prosecution agreements to the bank for crimes to which it admitted. The bank spent much of 2023 generating scandalous headlines for a decade of funneling tens of thousands of dollars per month, in hard cash, to the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein. (See JPMorgan’s Settlements Reach $365 Million Over Civil Claims It Banked Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking of Minors; Criminal Charges Could Lie Ahead.)
If you are scratching your head as to why the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase hasn’t sacked Dimon and why it chooses to live inside this delusion that the bank has “fortress principles,” you might want to read this.
