JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon snubbed Amazon's Jeff Bezos job offer. The real reason will surprise you

Time of India

a day ago

Sharing an interesting anecdote from the late 1999,
JPMorgan Chase
CEO
Jamie Dimon
spilled beans that Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos
offered him a job and he nearly left Wall Street behind to grab the offer. Dubbed the 'white knight of Wall Street', Jamie Dimon revealed he came close to taking a job in Big Tech, a route that meant he would have left the finance world behind and instead reported to Jeff Bezos.
But Dimon did not accept the offer, citing the significant personal and professional shift it would have entailed. Jamie Dimon began his career at American Express before moving to Commercial Credit as CFO.
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Jamie Dimon, at a recent podcast, revealed about his meeting with Jeff Bezos in Seattle. He mentioned that during that time Bezos was looking for a company president for its e-commerce platform — Amazon.
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When Jamie Dimon received a job offer from Jeff Bezos
Speaking on the Acquired podcast, Jamie Dimon revealed a moment he shared with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 1999 over a cup of coffee in Seattle. At that time, jeff Bezos was seeking a president for his fast-growing company, and they had a particularly consequential conversation.
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Dimon and Bezos quickly connected and have 'been friends ever since.' However, Dimon admitted that making the leap—not just to Seattle, but from finance to the tech world and leading Amazon full-time—was ultimately 'a bridge too far.' Dimon said he would have been stepping into a radically different industry and life, joking that it would have been like a 'When Harry Met Sally' scenario or an alternate universe: 'I'll never wear a suit again. I'm going to live in a houseboat.'
Joking about the lifestyle change, Dimon said he envisioned a life where he'd "never wear a suit again" and "live on a houseboat," but admitted that uprooting his young family and abandoning his career in finance felt like "just a bridge too far."
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Jamie Dimon declined the offer despite his friendship with Jeff Bezos. It is pertinent to note that at that time, Amazon was a much different proposition to the $2.4 trillion colossus it is today. The tech company's share price was less than a dollar and it had just a $5.5 billion market cap at the end of 2000. After the Amazon visit, Dimon said he 'got serious' and considered other positions.
After returning home, Dimon began focusing intently on his next move, entertaining offers from major global investment banks, insurance giant AIG through a call from Hank Greenberg, and even Home Depot—whose founders pitched him despite his candid admission that he had never set foot in one of their stores.
But what stuck was a headhunter's call about Bank One, which was valued around $20 billion, a far cry from the $200 billion scale of Citigroup. The Chicago-based lender was struggling to build business and Dimon sensed an opportunity. Despite a warning from analyst Mike Mayo that "even Hercules couldn't fix it", Dimon saw an opportunity to rebuild. He invested $60 million which was half of his net worth into One Bank stock on day one vowing to 'go down with the ship or up with the ship.'
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'I was going to go down with the ship or up with the ship,' he said, determined to demonstrate to shareholders and his new team that he was 'alock, stock, and barrel.' His decision to stay in banking led to his eventual rise as CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
He made his return to Wall Street in 2004 when Bank One merged with JPMorgan, and he emerged as one of the great stabilizers of the financial system during the 2008 financial crisis.