- An audio recording of an f-bomb-dropping Jamie Dimon is going viral.
- The JPMorgan CEO, however, is no stranger to salty language.
- Dimon made the comments at a JPMorgan town hall while discussing work-from-home
A viral audio recording of JPMorgan Chase’s CEO at a recent Town Hall meeting contained some salty language not commonly heard from titans of industry.
Jamie Dimon, however, is no stranger to the colorful and at times confrontational language used in this past week’s work-from-home debate with employees.
Last year, he slammed the private-equity industry for its recruiting tactics with comments that hushed the room, as Business Insider reported at the time. “I think that’s unethical. I don’t like it, and I may eliminate it regardless of what the private-equity guys say,” he said at a Q&A at Georgetown University.
He’s also no stranger to curse words, including the f-bomb. In 2012, New York magazine quoted him as saying, “It’s a free. F—-ing. Country,” in response to heated questioning about the financial crisis and a trading snafu that cost the bank billions of dollars.
He’s dropped colorful language in response to mundane topics, like succession planning.
“I think the most important strength is you’re trusted and respected by people, that you work your ass off, that you give a shit, that you know you don’t know everything,” he said during the company’s annual presentation for investors in 2023, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense.
Or when speaking about JPMorgan’s balance sheet.
“And the important part as a shareholder is I want to deal with that, acknowledge our mistakes, try to have a fortress-controlled balance sheet, try to stop stepping in dog shit, which we do every now and then,” he said during a 2015 earnings call.
Or the economy.
“When the shit hits the fan, and it will one day, we don’t know when, there will be a lot of stranded borrowers,” he said at a financial industry conference last year.
It’s a style that may be surprising to some but which has earned him a reputation in some circles as Wall Street’s straight-talking CEO.
“He’s somebody who’s direct,” Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, said about him in a 2011 Reuters article. “He’s not somebody who’ll sit in a meeting when someone says something he disagrees with quietly. He’ll get up, he’ll stand up and speak.”
Dimon’s f-bomb-dropping style came into full view this week when the financial publication Barron’s posted a short audio recording of him slamming work-from-home at an employee town hall in Columbus, Ohio. The video clocked some 1.7 million views as of Friday afternoon.
“And don’t give me this shit that work-from-home-Friday works,” Dimon told the crowd, according to the recording, a copy of which was obtained by BI. “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.”
As Business Insider reported in January, JPMorgan has called all its workers back to the office five days a week starting in March. The return-to-office mandate affects mostly back-office workers, including tech staffers, who were not already in the office Monday through Friday.
According to Reuters, the RTO mandate prompted one group of workers to launch an online petition, which Dimon addressed at the meeting, saying: “Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that f—-ing petition.”
