Jamie Dimon was fired from Citigroup at 42. He says his youngest daughter asked if their family would have to sleep on the street
Jamie Dimon was fired from Citigroup at 42. He says his youngest daughter asked if their family would have to sleep on the street
Em NortonFri, September 18, 2026 at 11:05 AM UTC
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Jamie Dimon has an impressive net worth of $3.2 billion and is the CEO of the largest bank in the U.S. — JPMorgan Chase. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing to get to the position he is in today.
Back in 1998, when Dimon was 42 years old, he was asked to step down from his role as the president of Citigroup, despite the expectation that he would become CEO of the company under the tutelage of Sanford I. Weill and John S. Reed, Citigroup’s co-chief executives.
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While the exact reasoning for his firing has been debated over time, in an episode of the podcast Acquired, Dimon said that “they said they wanted to make a few changes [and] had three of them: ‘One, we want to make this person in charge of that.’ I said OK, well that didn’t make sense to me. The second one, they wanted to put someone in charge of the global investment bank which I was running, I thought it was another stupid decision. And the third they said ‘And we want you to resign.’”
The news of Dimon’s departure was met with shock on Wall Street — and in Dimon’s own home, it was met with fear.
When he returned home to share the news, one of his daughters asked, “Daddy, do we have to sleep on the streets?” and another asked, “Can I still go to college?”
Even at that moment, Dimon wasn’t worried that his family would go homeless or that his children would not be able to afford college. But how did he recover after this devastating blow?
Carving a new path
In the time after his firing from Citigroup, Dimon dabbled with different ideas of what his future career might be. He told Acquired he considered teaching, starting his own merchant bank and even retirement.
At one point, he even spoke to Jeff Bezos about running Amazon, but he wasn’t committed to joining the tech world. He also had other offers to run global investment banks, which he did not name.
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The offer that ended up striking a chord with Dimon was joining Bank One, which had just undergone a merger. At the time, it was valued at around $20 billion, while Citigroup was at $200 billion, Fortune reported.
Dimon ended up taking on the role of CEO of Bank One in 2000, and invested $60 million directly into Bank One’s stock when he took the job.
“I was going to go down with the ship or up with the ship,” he told Acquired.
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Career comeback
Dimon ended up leading the turnaround of Bank One until its merger with JPMorgan Chase in 2004. In 2002, its stock was trading at $42 per share, which was 15 times fiscal 2002 earnings, Forbes reported.
After the merger, Dimon became president and COO of JPMorgan Chase, and eventually secured his title as CEO in 2005.
In 2026, JPMorgan Chase is the the most profitable bank in the U.S. In July, it posted the highest quarterly profit by a U.S. bank ever at $21.2 billion.
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This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
Source: “AOL Money”
