Jamie Dimon

Dimon was born on March 13, 1956, in New York City. He grew up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. He is one of three sons of Theodore and Themis (née Kalos) Dimon, who were both Greek by ancestry. His paternal grandfather was a Greek immigrant who had worked as a banker in Smyrna and Athens, and later changed the family name from Papademetriou to Dimon. Dimon has an older brother, Peter, and a fraternal twin brother, Ted. Both his father and grandfather were stockbrokers at Shearson.

Dimon attended secondary school at the Browning School, a private boys' prep school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He then studied economics and psychology at Tufts University, graduating in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude. At Tufts, he wrote a paper on Shearson's mergers, which his mother sent to Sandy Weill, who then hired Dimon to work at Shearson during a summer break, doing budgets.

After working as a management consultant at the Management Analysis Center in Boston from 1978 to 1980, Dimon enrolled at Harvard Business School. He worked at Goldman Sachs during the summer between his first and second years. Dimon graduated from Harvard in 1982 with an Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree, and received Baker Scholar honors for graduating in the top 5% of his class.

After receiving his MBA, Dimon was convinced by Sandy Weill to turn down offers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers to join Weill as an assistant at American Express. Although Weill could not offer the same amount of money as the investment banks, Weill promised Dimon that he would have "fun." Dimon's father, Theodore, was an executive vice president at American Express.

Commercial Credit and transition into Citigroup

Sandy Weill left American Express in 1985, and Dimon followed him. The two then took over Commercial Credit, a consumer finance company, from Control Data. At age 30, Dimon was appointed CFO, helping turn around the company.

In 1998, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, Dimon and Weill formed a large financial services conglomerate: Citigroup. But Dimon left Citigroup in November 1998, after Weill asked him to resign during a weekend executive retreat. Rumors at the time suggested that he and Weill had argued, in 1997, over Dimon's inaction to promote Weill's daughter, Jessica M. Bibliowicz, although that happened more than a year before Dimon's departure. At least one other account cites, as the real reason, a request by Dimon to be treated as an equal.

In 1983, Dimon married Judith Kent, whom he met at Harvard Business School. They have three daughters: Julia, Laura, and Kara Leigh. Julia and Kara attended Duke University; Laura is a Barnard College graduate, a freelance journalist, formerly at the New York Daily News, and currently a producer for ABC News.

Dimon was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014. He received eight weeks of radiation and chemotherapy ending in September 2014. In March 2020, at the age of 63, Dimon underwent emergency heart surgery to repair an acute aortic dissection. According to JP Morgan, Dimon recovered well from surgery, with Gordon Smith and Daniel Pinto running the bank until his return. In April 2020, Dimon returned to work in a remote capacity due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

From 1989 to 2009, Dimon donated primarily to the Democratic Party. In May 2012, he described himself as "barely a Democrat." After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, there was speculation that Dimon would become Secretary of the Treasury. Obama eventually named Timothy Geithner to the position. Following the acquisition of Washington Mutual by JPMorgan Chase, Obama commented on Dimon's handling of the real-estate crash, credit crisis and the banking collapse affecting corporations nationwide, including major financial institutions like Bank of America, Citibank and Wachovia, and said he did "a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio."

Dimon has had close ties to some people in the Obama White House, including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dimon was one of three CEOs—along with Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit—said by the Associated Press to have had liberal access to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Nonetheless, Dimon has often publicly disagreed with some of Obama's policies. During the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, JPMorgan Chase, under Dimon's leadership donated large sums of money to the Remain campaign, and Dimon personally campaigned with Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne against Brexit.

In December 2016, Dimon joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues. The forum dissolved after Trump's comments on the alt-right political violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. During Trump's presidency, Dimon supported his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, but condemned the Trump administration's immigration and trade policies. In a 2019 interview with 60 Minutes, Dimon claimed that the United States "is the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen" despite acknowledging issues such as income inequality and the China–United States trade war. Dimon also criticized the U.S. federal government response to the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump in a letter to shareholders which also criticized the state of education, health care and social safety nets in the United States.

During the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Dimon criticized the lack of a "strong centrist, pro-business, pro-free enterprise" candidate. In 2018 Dimon "thought about thinking about" starting his own presidential campaign, but decided that it would be too unpopular to succeed. During the 2020 United States presidential election, Dimon wrote a memorandum calling for candidates to respect the democratic process and a peaceful transition of power, writing "While strong opinions and tremendous passion characterized this U.S. election, it is the responsibility of each of us to respect the democratic process, and ultimately, the outcome." Dimon subsequently condemned the 2021 United States Capitol attack. In 2021, Trump complained that Dimon was "not a patriot" because of his company's business in China.

In May–June 2023, Dimon was encouraged by American billionaire and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to run in the 2024 United States presidential election, after the former expressed his interest in pursuing a public office sometime in the future. Dimon clarified that he has no plans to run for office at this time, and that he is happy with his current leading position in JPMorgan Chase, where he expects to stay for three and a half more years. However, in June 2025 Dimon said his retirement is still "several years away" and that he may stick around longer.

In November 2023, Dimon said he preferred Nikki Haley over Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In August 2024, Dimon published an op-ed column in The Washington Post, where he stated that the next president must "restore our faith in America." In the opinion piece, he endorsed neither Trump nor Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. However, in October 2024, The New York Times reported that Dimon was privately supporting Harris' 2024 campaign.

After Donald Trump took office as president again in January 2025, Dimon said he supported Trump's tariff policies. Dimon has previously said that the tariffs were a threat to the US economy. In March 2025, amid a worsening economic outlook due to Trump's tariff threats, Dimon said that tariffs contributed to uncertainty in the markets.

In October 2025, Dimon said the ongoing US government shutdown was a "bad idea", but downplayed its implications for the economy.