Despite graduating fourth in his class, Dimon was not accepted by the college of his choice: Brown University. He went to his second choice, Tufts, where he majored in psychology and economics. The latter proved to be his passion. After writing a paper on Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, he was encouraged by his professor to send the paper to Friedman himself. The economist responded with an eight-page letter, critiquing Dimon’s critique. “He said something along the lines of, ‘Son, I really appreciate you sending this to me. While I agree with some of your points, you’re wrong about a, b, c, and d, and there’s some faulty logic here and there,’” recalls Dimon. “I was blown away by it. Partly as a result of that, I always try to reply when someone sends something to me. I can’t write an eight-page critique, but I try.”
It was another economics paper, though, that set the trajectory of the young man’s life. During his sophomore year, he wrote an analysis of the 1974 merger of Hayden Stone and Shearson Hammill in which he explored the savings one could achieve by combining an efficient company (Hayden Stone) with an inefficient one (Shearson Hammill). He knew of the transaction through his family, as his father was still working for Shearson Hammill at the time of the deal. Hayden Stone was the acquisition vehicle of one Sandy Weill, in the midst of what was the first of his two empire-building campaigns.
By this time, Jamie Dimon had actually met Sandy Weill; his parents had become close to the garrulous financier and his wife, Joan. Ted Dimon Sr., as impetuous as his son, had written Weill a memo at the time of the merger, laying out his demands if he were to stick around under the Weill regime. When the elder Dimon called Weill to ask what he thought of the memo, Weill said that he had no thoughts at all, that he’d thrown it out. He proposed that the two men get together for a drink at the private, exclusive Harmonie Club—a Jewish preserve—instead. When they met, Weill asked Dimon to repeat his “demands.” “I want this …,” began Dimon. “Yes,” replied Weill. “And I want that …,” continued Dimon. “No,” replied Weill. And so on.
Overall, Dimon Sr. liked what he heard. This was a man who offered no bullshit, who genuinely seemed to understand the broker’s concerns. He said he would allow Weill to “continue to process his trades.” Translation: there might be a company name on his business card, but Ted Dimon Sr. reported to no one. He ran his own business. (Later in his career, when Jamie had become his father’s superior, the son would confirm that Dimon Sr. still considered himself a free agent, that “he would never say I was his boss.”)
Before long, the Weills and Dimons were spending significant amounts of time together. They spent a few weekends together in East Hampton, and the Dimons joined the Weills at one or two seder dinners. The glue of the relationship was the wives, who had lunch between classes at the New School—Joan Weill was also taking courses in 1975—and through their friendship, Dimon and his siblings came to know Weill’s children, Marc and Jessica. (Friends in their teens, the three crossed paths again while working for Weill in the 1990s.)
Excited that her son had chosen a thesis topic that touched on both her family and her friends, Themis asked him if she could show the paper to Weill. “I have never seen the merger from this point of view,” Weill told her after reading it. He sent Dimon a note that read, “Terrific paper. Can I show it to people here?” The forthright student seized his opportunity. “Absolutely,” he replied. “Can I have a summer job?” Weill hired Jamie Dimon to work with the budgeting team in the company’s consumer business that summer.
Joining his parents at the Weill house on weekends, the young Dimon peppered Weill with questions about why the company was doing one thing or another. When Weill once bragged to the younger man that all its branches were profitable, Dimon told him he was wrong. “No, they’re not,” Dimon said. “Four of them are losing money.” Though somewhat taken aback by the young man’s cockiness, Weill liked him a lot and encouraged him to keep asking questions. He figured Dimon’s aggressive temperament would soften with age.
Dimon didn’t much enjoy Tufts, at first. In addition, too many students didn’t take school seriously enough for him. He considered it “camp without counselors.” During his freshman year, he applied to transfer to Princeton, but was turned down. Eventually, he made close friends at Tufts, and grew to love the place. His classmate Laurie Maglathlin (née Chabot) recalls that Dimon didn’t seem to have to study much—he was one of those irritating people who do really well without trying too hard.
Dimon excelled academically and graduated summa cum laude in 1978. A class photo shows a confident man, blithely unaware how silly he might look years later with his shaggy 1970s hairdo. Dimon applied to Harvard Business School and was admitted, but then he delayed entering, deciding he’d rather work for a bit first. Applying to about 15 companies—including consulting giants like McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group—he received just a single job offer, from a small outfit in Boston called Management Advisory and Consulting that had been found by professors from Harvard Business School. He spent the next two years there.
He remained as headstrong as he’d been all his life. When one partner demanded he work all weekend and deliver a finished project by 9:00 A.M. Monday, Dimon dutifully did as he was asked. Come Monday morning, however, the partner didn’t even show up to see the results. Dimon’s first instinct was to quit. Instead, he confronted the partner, who said he’d just wanted to make sure that the project was finished promptly. “But you ruined my weekend,” Dimon replied. “And because of that, I will never work on another project for you again.” When colleagues told him that he wasn’t allowed to make such unilateral decisions, Dimon was defiant. “Yes, I can,” he said. “And they can fire me if they want to.” (They didn’t.) In another instance, he refused to work on a project for a cigarette maker.
“I saw some things while I was there that were just astounding,” Dimon recalls. “I remember one client’s CFO being just downright dishonest. I also thought the bureaucracy of many places was over-the-top. The BS that happens at so many companies—I was blown away by it. I didn’t want to be a consultant, but I learned a lot there, including the idea of fundamental research. I had no idea that if you were working for a fishing rod company, you could go to the library and look at 24 fishing magazines. And that there were fishing mailing lists and that kind of thing. It opened my eyes to all of that.”
• • •
Among his brothers, Jamie was alone in pursuing business. Freed by their upper-middle-class upbringing to do exactly as they pleased, both Ted and Peter chose intellectual pursuits. Peter got a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago, and Ted Jr. became an educator and an expert in a mind-body discipline known as the Alexander technique. But Jamie never lost sight of his original goal: “success.”
The year that Jamie entered Harvard Business School (HBS), 1980, Wall Street was a wreck, and corporate America was stumbling after the cursed late-1970s period of stagflation. “Not many people were going into finance at the time,” recalls the HBS professor Jay O. Light. “In that sense, it was a special class, people who were truly interested in finance, and not just following the crowd.”
Dimon stood apart even among that group—which included the future hedge fund managers Seth Klarman and Steven Mandel; the future chairman and CEO of G.E., Jeffrey Immelt; and the future president of Comcast, Stephen Burke. Within weeks of arriving at school, Dimon showed his fearlessness. Discussing a case study about the financial operations of a cranberry co-op, he challenged a professor. Case studies, the bread and butter of education at HBS, involved a group approach to solving issues in highly complex business situations—usually taken from real life—for companies and their managers. “Imagine 80 or 90 people, most of them feeling insecure, that they were an admissions mistake of some sort,” recalls Burke. “And Jamie raises his hand and says, ‘You’ve made a mistake.’ Everyone froze. We all thought he was committing suicide. But Jamie walked up to the board and changed a few things, and the next thing
you know, the teacher said, ‘Oh my God, you’re right.’ It was a confidence with no fear.”
Jay Light noticed the same thing that Mike Ingrisani had at Browning—Dimon had a powerful independent streak, and often a different grasp of what a manager’s priorities should be in case studies. He bore down on fundamental issues such as expense strategy and risk management. One day, in a class discussion of various fixed income investments, Light challenged Dimon on the concept of investing in a long-term zero coupon bond that nevertheless had a 15 percent yield-to-maturity. (In other words, although the bond offered no annual interest payments, it was selling at a price that would offer a 15 percent annualized return at maturity.) Dimon launched a bomb into the middle of class: “If you don’t see the merits of investing in a 15 percent zero coupon bond, Professor Light, then you probably shouldn’t be teaching this class.”
James “Longo” Long, who had come to Harvard after a stint at Hewlett-Packard in California, was dismayed by what he considered the lack of concrete “business” experience of many classmates who had worked in investment banking and consulting. “These people don’t know much, but they do know how to talk all the time,” he thought. He’d been told that half of the education at HBS was what one learned from other students, and this didn’t look as though it was going to be much. But Long took a liking to Dimon, who didn’t seem preoccupied with merely impressing others, and ended up in a study group with his new friend by the end of the year. “He was a straight shooter,” recalls Long. “It was fun to be friends with him, even though he could be a pretty serious guy.”
(Dimon did like to unwind. He, Burke, Long, and their classmate Peter Maglathlin formed what they called the Thursday Night Club, and usually went out and drank from 90-ounce “scorpion bowls”—a lethal concoction of fruit juice and rum. The club congregated at the Hong Kong on Harvard Square—affectionately referred to as “the Kong”—and hashed through the events of the previous week.)
At business school, Dimon was obsessed with self-improvement. On midterm exams in the first year, he performed extremely well in all but one class, the study of organizational behavior, in which he was only slightly better than average. Burke, though, had aced the midterm in organizational behavior. “It drove him crazy that he didn’t do well and I did,” recalls Burke. But Dimon then surprised him. He asked if he could read Burke’s “blue book”—the universal medium of college exams—so that he might understand why Burke had done better. No one had ever asked Burke why or how he had done well on an exam, but he nevertheless allowed Dimon to try to do just that. Come finals, Dimon was near the top of the class. “Part of his psyche is having a strong enough ego to be willing to say, ‘I want to know why you did better than me,’” says Burke. “To put himself out there like that.”
He also stood out for another reason. Business schools, by their nature, tend to be chock-full of Republicans. But Dimon was a Democrat, and an outspoken one at that. He was also prone to conversational tangents on the importance of ethics and the imperative of “doing the right thing,” topics that had yet to enter the lexicon of most of his business school peers.
(The independent Dimon even cultivated an outsider persona in nonacademic ways. He didn’t live in university housing, instead staying in an apartment a one-minute walk from campus. He also eschewed the traditional uniform of the B-school student—khakis and button-down shirts—and wore jeans and often a blue leather jacket. His classmates actually remember that of the 75 students in their year, Dimon was the absolute worst dresser.)
Every year, new students are told that half of their grade in each course with be based on class participation. The result: a room full of overanxious overachievers trying to interrupt one another, for fear of not being noticed by the professor. On the second day of class in his first year of business school, Dimon was speaking when another student began wildly waving a hand. Dimon turned toward the student and said, “Put your fucking hand down while I’m talking.” The student slumped down into his seat, and Dimon moved right on with what he was saying.
• • •
At the start of his second year, Dimon was vice president of the school’s finance club—an indication, if nothing else, of a man who read company financials in his spare time. Judy Kent, an exceedingly attractive and feisty HBS student from Bethesda, Maryland, who had graduated from Tulane and then worked at the management-consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, was one of four roommates of the club’s president. Early in the year, another of Kent’s roommates, Sue Zadek, had met Dimon at the wedding of his friends the Maglathlins and suggested that Kent check out the young man, as he was cute and charismatic. (It was a small world back then. Zadek attended the wedding with Steve Mandel, whom she later married. Also in attendance was Jeffrey Immelt.)
A driven young woman, in her own right, Kent had earned a master’s degree from Catholic University while working for Booz Allen, but she’d decided to attend Harvard for another leg up. The daughter of a real estate entrepreneur, she was the first in her family to go to college. (She claims to have been one of the classmates who watched Jeff Immelt at HBS and predicted that he would run General Electric one day.) After hearing of Dimon from Zadek, Kent grilled Laurie Maglathlin about the brash young student. Although Maglathlin was protective of her friend, she did give him a ringing endorsement.
Walking through campus one afternoon, Kent and Zadek passed by the Pub, a snack bar for students. Zadek pointed Dimon out to her, and Kent was intrigued. “In the midst of pastel shirts, here was this guy wearing all black, and sunglasses,” she recalls. More interesting, though, was the fact that while he was participating in the conversation at his table, he seemed to be completely aware of everything else around him without being consumed by it. “He’s sphinxlike,” Kent thought to herself. Not long afterward, when Dimon called Kent’s apartment to speak to the president of the finance club, she shouted out that she’d like to speak to him after the club’s business had been concluded.
Handed the phone, Judy Kent asked Dimon if he played tennis. “Sure,” he replied. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll meet you tomorrow.” She remembers that although she played as hard as she could she failed to present Dimon with much of a challenge. He asked her afterward if she’d like to get a “malted.” She thought the terminology charming, and said yes, and the two went to the Pub for a drink. (He didn’t have any money, so Kent paid.) She walked him home, kissed him on the cheek, and resolved to see him again. “I was just so drawn to him,” she recalls. “It was instinctual.” A short time later, he asked her out for dinner (he paid this time), and the two were soon inseparable. He even dared to ride with her in her dented, rusty gold 1977 Cutlass. “She drove like a bat out of hell,” recalls their friend Peter Maglathlin.
(There is another, more straightforward version of the story of the meeting of Jamie and Judy, told by their classmate, future G.E. chairman Jeffrey Immelt. When one executive at JPMorgan Chase asked Im-melt about the dynamics in their long-ago Harvard section—specifically, how Jamie and Judy got together—he responded simply, “Judy was by far the best-looking, sexiest, and smartest girl in the class, and Jamie got to her first. That’s about it.”)
Judy was able to break through the young man’s uncompromising exterior and connect with someone who had surprisingly vast reserves of sentimentality. Dimon, for example, worshipped the family dog, Chippy, whom he’d brought to Boston with him. When Chippy later died, the twins (Ted Jr. lived in Boston at the time) decided to bury him at night on a hill he’d enjoyed running on. Taking Judy’s car, Dimon dressed his dog in a favorite rugby shirt and headed off into the night with his brother.
He remembers the experience to this day, in part because he caught a bad case of poison sumac that night, which broke out in sores during finals week. To help him write his exams without oozing all over the blue books, Judy Kent wrapped paper toweling around both of Dimon’s arms, securing it with masking tape. This was true love.
Near the
end of their second year, on a weekend at his parents’ country place, Dimon proposed and she accepted. Shortly afterward, on a trip to New York, Dimon surprised his father by asking if he would play a piece for him and Judy on his violin. “What did you say?” asked Ted Sr., unaccustomed to such requests from the least musically inclined of his three children. “I said, ‘Would you play a piece for us?’” Dimon replied. Ted Sr. did so, and when he put the violin down, Jamie Dimon told his parents that he and Judy were engaged.
Dimon and Kent graduated from HBS in 1982. Dimon was named a Baker Scholar, a distinction bestowed on the top 5 percent of each graduating class. The couple packed their bags and headed for New York City.
2. THE MENTOR
Fresh from Harvard Business School, Dimon could write his own ticket on Wall Street. In the spring of 1982, he had three job offers—from the investment banks Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley. He called Sandy Weill, then the chairman of the executive committee of American Express, to ask for advice, and Weill invited Dimon to his office for a chat. Dimon had worked at Goldman Sachs between his first and second years at business school, and that firm was ready to give him an opportunity very few people have ever refused: the chance to work at Wall Street’s most prestigious (and lucrative) partnership. As Stephen Burke puts it, 95 out of 100 of Dimon’s classmates would have taken the offer from Goldman. Dimon told Weill that he was close to a decision to do that very thing.
“What’s more important to you?” Weill asked Dimon. “Making the most money or continuing on the fastest learning curve?” At the time, Weill was in charge of all the treasury and financial functions at American Express, and contending with his own learning curve. He floated a fourth option to Dimon. “How would you like to come be my assistant and we can learn this thing together? We can learn a heck of a lot about how corporate America works and how a diversified financial services company works. You probably won’t make half of what you’d be making at Goldman, but that’s a far more concentrated and high-pressure job, and I don’t know what you’d be building.”
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